Duplicate the image using Ctrl (PC) or Cmd (Mac) plus “J”. The first thing we need to do is select the part of the image we want to change. On this particular image that’s fairly simple. Other backgrounds may be more difficult. There are many tutorials out there, and on TipSquirrel.com, that can show you different ways to do this. For this background we’re just going to use the Quick Selection Tool (Photoshop CS5). On your duplicated layer just “paint” in the background to select it. No holding any buttons down or anything (unless you want to paint a part of the selection out, of course, then you hold the Alt or Opt key down…). Easy breezy!

Next we need to mask the area. When the area you want is selected, go to the bottom of the layers panel and chose the Add Vector Mask icon, the gray rectangle with the white circle inside. By default the mask will be white in the selected area and black in the unselected area. You want this to be the reverse; to invert, simple use keyboard shortcut Cmd or Ctrl plus “I” (for Invert).  Make sure you have the mask itself selected when you invert.

Now go back to the original layer. For this next bit you can either use this layer or duplicate it again. I prefer to duplicate it because the next process will change it and I want the original to compare the result. That’s just me. If you’re like me, use keyboard shortcut Ctrl or Cmd “J”, now.

With the layer (orig. or duplicate) selected, go to the bottom of the layers panel and select the Add a New Fill or Adjustment Layer icon (the half white, half black circle), then choose a Hue / Saturation adjustment. In the Hue / Saturation dialog, move the Hue slider around to find the color you want to replace the original. Don’t worry too much about the brightness of the color; concentrate more on a color that looks good with the image.

To calm the brightness down, you can move the Saturation slider a bit to the left. You can also adjust the lightness or darkness of the background with the Lightness slider, if you wish.

Now we need to go back to the original mask and clean things up a bit. Select the brush tool and make sure the foreground color is set to white. The first thing we’ll do is take care of the areas that are now green (or whatever color you changed the background to) and shouldn’t be, the necklace that didn’t get masked out in the first place, for instance. Adjust the brush size to fit the area as you go along using the open and close bracket keys. Zoom in close and go around all the edges of the selected area to make sure that the new color isn’t creeping in where it doesn’t belong.

The next step is to invert the foreground color to black and paint in all the areas where the original background color, in this case that lovely pink, is all painted out.

Now for a word about fringe; you need to pay particular attention to the area around the selection that isn’t super obvious but critical, just the same, to the result of your background change. Nothing screams “Fake!” as much as badly done edges!  Be particularly careful around light edges, in this case the skin. If you get sloppy you’ll get green where you don’t want it. In the dark areas, like the hat or t-shirt, you can be a bit less stringent.  In fact, I want you to go over the edge into the shirt a bit! There’s a color cast from the pink background reflecting on the shirt, so when you see that, go over it with the brush.

To fix that bit of untidiness we just made, we’re going to soften the mask a bit. With the mask selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Move the slider up or down enough to soften the edges without blowing out the areas of the mask around the lighter (skin) areas.

The area where we painted green in the shirt is still very obvious. To make it less so, bring up your color picker by double clicking on the foreground color and choose something around 25% gray.

Paint in those obvious green areas in the shirt with the gray. Soften the edges, if you like, by selecting the blur tool from the tool panel and painting over the area.

Take some time to zoom in and catch all those areas where the wrong color has bled or fringed and you’ll have a background color change no one will ever realize was different at all!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This month I thought it would be fun to cover a Photoshop plugin that I discovered this summer, which has quickly become one of my favorites. Topaz BW Effects (from [More...]  Creating a Rubber Stamp Brush Preset in Photoshop Elements. By David Asch

In this tutorial we’ll firstly be creating the effect of a slightly worn out rubber stamp. Once we’ve created our stamp, we’ll be converting it to a brush preset that[More...] Scaling 3D Materials in Photoshop CS5 Extended  By Michael HoffmanIf you’ve created a 3D object with complex materials, you may have been disappointed with the appearance and shape of the features on your 3D object. In today’s video, learn [More...] Shadow and Highlights with Adobe Camera Raw  By Richard HarringtonIn this follow-up to last week’s video, Rich Harrington teaches us how to fix clipped shadows, overblown highlights, and soft detail when working with photos shot under low lift conditions. 24 November 2011 : Advanced Black and White in Photoshop (No Comments) By Richard HalesThis month’s tutorial is going to be an in-depth look at a black & white photograph that was used in one of my tutorials on black & white conversion earlier this year. [More...]  Photoshop 3D Materials Fun By Michael HoffmanAdobe Photoshop CS5 Extended has a wonderfully capable 3D environment. It isn’t high powered like some advanced 3D modeling software, but the capabilities are really good, and the learning curve [More...] Mastering Adobe Camera Raw By Richard Harrington

In this made for TipSquirrel.com video, Rich Harrington explores the power of Adobe Camera Raw. Here Rich has a real world example to work though with amazing outcomes. Receding Background By Janine Smith

This is a great image taken from my current scanning project. There’s not much wrong with it at all, maybe a tiny speck or spot here and there and the color isn’t really to my taste, but the composition and overall condition are wonderful![More...] Quicker Collections in Lightroom  By Michael Hoffman

You may have used Quick Collections in Lightroom to create temporary sets of photos to organize your work. Here’s a tip to show you how to extend the Quick Collection [More...] Vintage Effect in Adobe Camera RAW By Gavin Hoey

Vintage photo effects are all the rage in photography at the moment. Often they created in mobile apps or in Photoshop, but in this tutorial I’m going to show you[More...] Creating coloured backdrops in Lightroom  By Scot Baston

One of the things about Lightroom that I love is that even though it is the little brother to the mighty Photoshop, it is still has a few tricks up [More...] Photoshop’s Image Size Resampling Options  By Michael HoffmanWhen you resize images in Photoshop, you are adding or deleting pixels to your image. As the pixels are created or destroyed, how do you control the way Photoshop decides [More...] Create a Horror Skin Effect With Photoshop By Simon Rudd

Making horror art I often get asked how I get texture to show through flesh, its actually very simple and uses my favourite Photoshop tool, Layer Masks. Step 1. Download the skull [More...] Make a Mesh with Liquify to Speed Your Photoshop Workflow By Michael Hoffman

If you’re like me, you’ve been working on larger and larger files, and sometimes the Liquify command in Photoshop just can’t keep up with all those pixels. Fear not! Here’s [More...]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Janine’s course, Photo Restoration with Photoshop, is now available on Lynda.com

Here’s a super simple way to add a little depth to an old image just by making certain elements stand out from the rest.

This is a great image taken from my current scanning project. There’s not much wrong with it at all, maybe a tiny speck or spot here and there and the color isn’t really to my taste, but the composition and overall condition are wonderful! Still, it could use a little something to make the mother and baby stand out a little from the background and it one simple step, they can!

All you have to do to accomplish this fairly dramatic transition is to darken the areas behind your main subjects, the mother and child in this case, to make them recede and bring the main subjects out.

After you have your image open in Photoshop, add a Curves Adjustment layer by going to the Create New Fill or Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the layers panel.

Bring the Curves histogram from the center down towards the lower right hand corner to darker the image.

There are many ways to make the mask, of course, but I just “drew” the mask in. You can mask the background the way you like best!

After your mask is done, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and move the slider to a point where the edges are just slightly softened, to blend the sharp edges.

Now lower the Opacity of the mask. I used the value of 85%. 100% was a little too obvious, but I still needed the darkening to be enough to make a difference.

And that’s all there is to that! Just this one simple step brings out the central subject, causing the background to recede and the foreground to stand out in a very subtle and natural way!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Towards the end of the video I’ll show you a couple of great effects to further enhance the image by adding some film style grain and a simple rounded corner border.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Win Adobe Master Suite CS5.5

To celebrate the launch of Adobe UK Education’s great new competition they’ve kindly given us a copy of Adobe Master Suite CS5.5 Teacher and Student Edition to give away to one of our readers. All you have to do to win is to Tweet this; I’d…

Creating a Copy to Work on in Photoshop

Sometimes I like to save an image and continue to work on it. There’s a lot of ways Photoshop allows you to do that but we’ll have a look at just a couple of them here. What we’re after is to be able to work on a new version of our image without …

Michael Hoffman

Add Some Drama with Photoshop

Today’s tip is a simple but powerful trick to create a more powerful mood within your photos, using Photoshop with just some adjustment layer and masking techniques. I first saw Eddie Tapp use a similar technique years ago in a Canon workshop, and it…

Understanding Layer Style Contours in Photoshop

If you’ve played around with Layer Styles in Photoshop, you’ve almost surely seen the “Contour” setting in the “Quality” section of the layer styles dialog box. More that likely, you’ve just moved right on by. Or, if you’ve clicked on i…

Understanding Layer Style Contours in Photoshop

If you’ve played around with Layer Styles in Photoshop, you’ve almost surely seen the “Contour” setting in the “Quality” section of the layer styles dialog box. More that likely, you’ve just moved right on by. Or, if you’ve clicked on i…

Photoshop’s Free Transform–one stop ‘Shopping!

There are quite a few commands embedded under Photoshop’s Edit > Transform submenu: From Scale and Rotate, to Skew, Perspective and Warp. But when push comes to shove, there’s really only one command you need to remember – Free Transform. The ..

Richard Harrington

Straighten Your Photos with Photoshop

If your photos are unintentionally crooked, they can look very distracting. There’s lots of contributing factors including a crooked tripod, shooting handheld, or just an uneven surface. But solving the problem is really easy. In Photoshop, select t…

Image Clean-up with Photoshop’s Dust and Scratches Filter

The Dust & Scratches filter provides a more powerful way to remove noise from an image. Dissimilar pixels are modified to achieve a balance between sharpening and hiding defects. You’ll want to try different settings on your image because…

Gavin Hoey

Scene Cleaner (and Uncleaner) in Photoshop Elements

Photoshop Elements 9 packs some very impressive technology under its dark interface and much of it has been lifted straight from it’s bigger brother, Photoshop CS5. But there’s more to Elements then a few borrowed features. Elements has been…

Dan Moughamian

Depth of Field Effects with Photoshop Elements 10

This week Adobe released the latest version of their prosumer photo editing package, Photoshop Elements 10. This new release offers several new features that are useful to photographers and scrapbookers. One of my favorites is a new option within Gu…

Simon Rudd

Simple Grunge Text in Photoshop

This month I thought I’d show you how to make a simple grunge effect for text using a very simple technique utilising a very powerful feature found in the Layer Styles dialogue box. Step 1. Make a new document and fill with a light green colour (#8d…

Scot Baston

Noise and Sharpening in Lightroom

This will be a quick and short tutorial today, to show you the benefits of a sharpening mask within Lightroom. I have had a couple of people ask me about noise in high ISO images and how to maintain details while removing the background noise,…

Glyn Dewis

Photoshop’s ‘Never Ending Lighting Rig’

Hey Folks, For today I thought I’d record a video showing a Photoshop technique that has come in handy for me on more than one occasion; I call it ‘The Never Ending Lighting Rig’ and it’s based on a technique I learned from my good friend, Photographe…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Lines in images can be a real challenge when it comes to restoration. You can try to subtly blend them away if the lines are thin enough. You can try to select each and every line and change the blend mode if they’re thick enough…okay, let’s get real! I certainly don’t have the time to select tons of lines on an image, do you? I didn’t think so! So what we have, here, is a dilemma of a sort. I had an otherwise simple restoration a few weeks ago, merely compositing a number of images from a family reunion together so the entire family was present and looking in the camera. The proverbial fly in the ointment was that every image had lines going through them.

Since the lines were in all the images, that told me that it was a problem with either the camera, the flash card from the camera, or the flash drive the customer brought the images on. Lines can also result from printing and scanning. Of course, the best thing to do is to retake the image or reprint or rescan with different equipment, but in some cases, like 100^th family reunion pictures, that’s not an option. There’s one good thing about the lines being the result of faulty equipment, though; my job would have been even harder if just one of the images had lines. At least the surface to be repaired was consistent!

The simplest thing to do, maybe even one of the only things, is to go to Filter > Other > Maximum. Keep the pixel radius low, as low as possible in fact. I’ve never gone above 1; bad things happened when I did. Try it, and see for yourself! Now all there is to do is hit Enter! How simple was that? The Maximum filter increases the lighter portions of the image, decreasing the darker areas, so if you have fairly thin, darker lines, this fix could be perfect.

The only drawback that I can see, other than the image being a little softer, less sharp, than it was is that some images, especially those with thicker lines, tend to have a moiré pattern appear after the filter is applied. It’s for you to decide if the result is worse than the lines!

Let’s try the Maximum filter on another image, this one with thinner, slightly lighter lines.

Again, we’ll go to Filter > Other > Maximum, and keep it to a pixel radius of one.

This is the sort of image, those with thinner, lines, where the Maximum filter really shines! It’s still a little soft, and, as all images you use the Max filter on will be, lighter. To get some of the sharpness back, you can duplicate the image (Image > Duplicate) and go to Image > Adjustments > HDR Toning. When it asks if you want to flatten the image, say yes – that’s why we made a duplicate! Scroll through the presets to find the best starting point; I find Photorealistic usually works great. Now start moving the sliders, especially the Detail slider, but also Highlights, Shadows; Vibrance and Saturation if it’s a color image, even Radius and Strength if done very sparingly. Click OK when done to your satisfaction.

Now use the move tool to move the HDR copy to the tab of the original image, holding down the Shift key to center on top of the image. Change the Layer Blend Mode to Soft Light and lower the Opacity to 75%. If you don’t mind the softness of the image, just use a Curves Adjustment (black eyedropper in a dark area, only) to darken the image up a bit.

If lines in your images are bugging you, give the Maximum filter a try; at the very least it’s better than selecting all those lines!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Photo by Gavin Hoey

A couple of days ago TipSquirrel.com held its first workshop at the beautiful Peterborough Cathedral. Fortunately the rain held off and most people found their way with little confusion, a good start in my book!

Gavin Hoey and Glyn Dewis kicked off the day by helping the attendees to find and photograph interesting shots around the inside of the cathedral, but most people said that there was too much, in fact the cathedral just had so much to offer the first couple of hours flew by.

Photo by Gavin Hoey

There were some spectacular sights and it was interesting to see how people were tackling the subject. I’m not sure what other visitors made of a group of photographers laying on the floors, crawling through chair legs and taking photos of bricks (textures!) but I know it warmed my heart.

Once we’d found our way around it was off into two groups, one with Glyn for a portrait shoot and one with Gavin to tackle the climb to the top of the cathedral.

Modern Vampire Portraiture

When Glyn decided on the theme of Modern Vampire and Gothic I was a little worried, but I informed the cathedral and I took the fact that they didn’t shout at me as an ok to go ahead. Of course I promised no blood and a great deal of taste, and that’s what Glyn delivered in liaison with Abi Corby and her two models Katie and Sophie.

Abi’s new to the world of photographic make-up only having completed her course recently. She has however already started to build quite a reputation as a very skilled young lady, so we left it in her hands to get the models, outfits and look ready for the day. A daunting time for seasoned pros so well done Abi for taking it all in your stride.

We liaised with her a couple of times and tweaked ideas but it wasn’t until the morning of the shoot that the final look was agreed with her and Glyn.

So, it was down to business, with Glyn giving a start to finish on setting up the lights, camera and models for the desired looks. With a pocket full of Pocket Wizards soon the graveyard was awash with the sounds of camera shutters.

With the premise that we’d be adding moonlight and mist into the finished shot Glyn had some great advise for shutter speeds, apertures and of course how to get the best look from the model. With a tight schedule this was no mean feat and its commendable that we he set up, taught, shot, encouraged and dismantled within the allotted time.

Photo by Attendee Steven Lawrie

To The Roof!

Photo by Gavin Hoey

While one group did the portraiture the other joined Gavin Hoey on a trip to the ‘unseen’ area of the cathedral. Anyone that’s seen Gavin’s work and especially his 15 minute Challenge series will know that he has an eye for the details and a sixth sense for finding them.

This tour was a real challenge for photographers so it was great to have Gavin to talk us through how to shoot in the low light that we found ourselves in, and how to visualise the image once we’d got them out of the camera. Getting the image right in camera is of great importance but Gavin talked about textures, panoramas and HDR as well as the use of angles, lines and a whole pile of other techniques.

The tour took us higher and higher up the cathedral following a narrow walkway. It was here that I found my niche in the day. You see, there were some people that were unfit and struggling to climb the stairs or they were terrified of the height we found ourselves at. So I bravely wheezed, sweated and shook like a leaf to allow the attendees to feel better about themselves. Any stories of me squealing like a girl and running between pillars so I couldn’t glimpse the view are probably exaggerated.

When I did break character and take a peek, the view was stunning, from the floor looking up at the ceiling is great, looking at the floor from the ceiling is awesome.

We continued over what were hopefully solid boards to the tower. And so here again Gavin was faced with a new area to teach. From the gloom of the inside we now found ourselves in sunlight with, literally, the city before us.

Tired, Worn Out and Time For A Cuppa

We finished the day with some post processing techniques from both Gavin and Glyn, some of which you’ll find in the not too distant future here at TipSquirrel.com.

Looking around the room I saw many people putting their images onto their laptops and from what I saw there was some amazing shots, I can’t wait to see more of them in the Flickr Group.

Finally Gavin had devised a challenge for myself and Glyn, a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire style quiz. Now I don’t want to blow our own trumpets so I wont tell you how close we got to the million, lets just say we won an amount with more than eight zeros in it (some would argue that we really should have done though!)

Thank you to everyone that took park. To Gavin and Glyn for their tuition, Abi for the make-up and wardrobe, Katie and Sophie the models and of course to the attendees, or ‘New Friends’ as they’re now know.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Today, I would like to show how to create a custom print page within Lightroom. The final output should look something like this

Lets start by going into the Print module

As you can see above, the print module is set up to print a single image. Choose the Custom Package which allows us to place multiple images on the page .

In this example, we want to create a landscape image so we need to change the Page setup.

Click on the Page Setup… button in the bottom left of the screen to bring up the dialog box below

In the Orientation section, click the right hand diagram to select landscape format and click OK. This will now show a blank landscape formatted page. Time to add some placeholders for our images, so in the Cells tab in the right hand panel, click one of the Add to Package buttons to add the placeholder.

This place holder is moveable and scaleable by dragging any of the square node points. One problem is not knowing where the centre of the page is..

It is possible within Lightroom to snap placeholders to a grid, to do this turn on the grid setting in Grid Snap and tick the Show Guides tab.. both are found in the Rulers, Grid & Guides tab in the right hand panel.

Having set that up, I added a couple more image placeholders using the Add to Package buttons mentioned previously.

My new placeholders are the wrong way round for the images I plan to use here, so all that needs to be done is click the Rotate Cell button in the Cells tab.

To add images to the placeholders is as easy as clicking the placeholder to select it and then dragging your image from the filmstrip at the bottom of the page. (don’t see the filmstrip? try pressing Shift-Tab till it appears)

I have chosen to overlap my images in this example. if one of the images had been hidden behind another, just right click (ctrl click on a mac) and a context sensitive menu allows you to move images forwards or backwards as required.

Now we come to a little work around…

I’d like to add a faded background image to the entire page. Lightroom doesn’t currently let you place a transparent background image but it does let you create one with the identity plate!

The trick to this is to have created an image that matches the size and aspect ratio of your printed page. In this example I have a photo saved earlier to the dimensions of an A4 page. In the Page Panel. click the tiny little arrow in the bottom right of the Identity Plate preview and select Edit…

Choose your image and press ok

Resize and locate your background by dragging with the cursor. Make sure the Render behind image box is ticked so that all your photos sit on top of the background.

I then lowered the Opacity of the Identity plate to about 65% and end up with the finished image below. This is now ready to be sent to the printer or printed to a Jpeg file as required.

Now that you have your design, you can drag and drop different images onto your placeholders to create different looks.

When you are happy with your design, it is always a good idea to save the template for future use. To do this, click the + button in the Template Browser panel on the left handside.

I hope you have found this useful and as always, feel free to ask any questions

Cheers,

Scot

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Let’s look at this image for instance. Granted, it doesn’t have a terrible color cast, more of a slightly yellow haze, but it’s definitely not all it could be. Color Balance lets you adjust the primary colors, the additive primaries, red, green and blue, and the subtractive primaries, those made by combining the primaries: red + green =yellow; green + blue= cyan and red + blue=magenta. Color Balance is a little like a non-destructive version of Variations, with the extra added benefit of you being totally in control!

Also, like Variations, you can work on the Shadows, Midtones and Highlights independently of each other, but with a much better all-around result.  You can adjust the tones in whatever order you like, just keep in mind that if you switch to another image and come back, for whatever reason, the program switches back to the default, Midtones. It’s a good idea just to keep an eye on that setting.

All you do with Color Balance is move the sliders to the left and right and discern which adjustments look better to you. That’s it! You can go back and do more whenever you like, unless you access the Color Balance panel through Image > Adjustments > Color Balance, or Ctrl/Cmd +B. In that case you need to make a duplicate layer specifically for the adjustment as it’s destructive and works on the image itself, and you can’t go back and readjust later.

­­Talk about a simple adjustment! What could be easier? But there’s something else that can make it even better, a good old Curves Adjustment! Here’s another image with a slightly green cast.

Make the visual adjustments as before:

Then add a Curves Adjustment, using the black and white eyedroppers on the darkest and lightest points. If it’s too bright, bring the opacity of the Curves layer down to between 50 and 75%. This image now looks like it was taken today!

Now we know it works great on light color casts, but what about heavier casts? This image has a heavy red/yellow cast. Let’s see what Color Balance can do for it.

First, go through all the tonal adjustments. A heavy cast may take a step or two more, so don’t worry if it’s not perfect. Just go for a decent visual adjustment.

Now add a Curves Adjustment, using the black and white droppers on the darkest and lightest points.

If it’s too bright, which this is, and here’s the beauty of adjustment layers, go back and tweak the Color Balance adjustments!

Yet another color correction tool to try, Color Balance is sure to be a keeper in your digital restoration took kit!

Below find a small before/after gallery of images lightened, brightened and corrected using Color Balance:

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

In my last post I used the Warp function to make a page curl effect, but it looks a bit flat.

In this video I add a couple of shadows and a highlight and use Warp again to get just the right shape.

Can’t See The Video? Click Here

Bookmark It

Hide Sites