The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers part 33 docx

ptg 301Chapter 10Special Effects for Photographers The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Five: Press Command-L (PC: Ctrl-L) to bring up the Levels dialog, and drag the shadows Input Levels slider (the triangle under the far-left side of the histogram graph) to the right a bit (as shown here) to darken in the shadow areas, so there’s a big difference between the bright areas and the dark areas. Step Six: Now you’re going to darken the edges of the photo on all sides, to give it that burned-in edge look. Go under the Filter menu and choose Lens Correction. When the dialog comes up, click on the Custom tab in the top right, then go down to the Vignette section, and drag the Amount slider almost all the way over to the left to darken the edges quite a bit (as I did here, where I dragged it over to –92). Now drag the Midpoint slider (which determines how far in toward the center of your image the darkening extends) to the left to +31 (as seen here), so it almost looks like there’s a soft spotlight right on the bride. Click OK when you’re done. Continued Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 302 Chapter 10 Special Effects for Photographers The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Seven: The final step is to add a bit of overall softening (you don’t want the photo to be super-crisp), so press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate the layer (it’s called Layer 0 now because when you use the Lens Correction filter, it has to convert your locked Background layer into a regular layer), then go under the Filter menu, under Blur, and choose Gaussian Blur. When the filter dialog appears onscreen, enter 25 pixels for your blur, then click OK. Lastly, go back to the Layers panel and lower the Opacity for this layer to 20% (as shown here) to finish off the effect. A before/ after is shown below. Before After Download from www.wowebook.com ptg The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 303Chapter 10Special Effects for Photographers Continued I used to have an entire segment in my live Photoshop seminars where I’d show you the seven things you needed to do with your camera to shoot a pano that Photoshop would merge seamlessly together. Then Adobe improved the Photo merge feature so vastly that you only needed to do one simple thing (more on that in a moment), and they added a few extra features that make it produce the best results yet. In fact, it’s so easy, there’s no reason not to be shooting panos every chance you get. Here’s how: Panoramas Made Crazy Easy Step One: This first thing isn’t technically a Photo- shop thing, but if you do it, it sure will make working with panos easier. When you’re out shooting, and you’re about to shoot a pano, before you shoot your first pano frame, hold your index finger up in front of your lens and take a photo. Then go ahead and take your pano, and right after you shoot your last frame, hold up two fingers in front of your lens and take another photo. Here’s where this pays off: When you open all your photos from that day’s shoot in Mini Bridge, you could easily have hundreds of photos (especially if these are vacation photos). As you scroll through, as soon as you see an index finger, you know these are your pano photos (by the way, if you have that whole self-loathing thing going on, or if you’re a teen, you don’t have to use your index finger). Plus, it not only tells you that you shot a pano, it tells you exactly where it starts and where it ends (as seen here). It sounds silly, but if you don’t do this, you’ll actually miss panos you took, and you’ll just kind of wonder, “What was I thinking when I took those?” and you’ll scroll right by them. It’s happened to me, and so many of my friends, that we now all use this technique, and we never miss a pano. SCOTT KELBY Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 304 Chapter 10 Special Effects for Photographers The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Two: You can star t by selecting the individual pieces of your pano in Mini Bridge (as I have here, where I took 11 individual photos, hand-held, in China’s Forbidden City, something I never would have tried a few years ago. That’s how good this Photomerge feature is). You just select everything between the two finger shots, click on the Tools icon, and under Photoshop, choose Photomerge (as shown here). Note: If you already have your photos open in Photoshop, then you can go under the File menu, under Automate, and choose Photomerge. Either way—they both will get you to the same place. Step Three: When you choose Photomerge, it brings up the dialog you see here, with the images you selected listed in the center column. (Note: If you opened your pano photos from within Photoshop, the cen- ter column will be empty, so you’ll click the Add Open Files button.) We’ll look at the Layout part in the next step, and jump down below that center column. Leave the Blend Images Together check- box turned on. Now, there are two other options you may need, depending on how you shot your pano: (1) If you have lens vignetting (the edges of your images appear darkened), then turn on Vignette Removal (as I did here), and although it will take a little longer to render your pano, it will try to remove the vignett- ing during the process (it does a pretty decent job). If you’re using a Nikon, Sigma, or Canon fisheye lens to shoot your panos, then turn on the Geometric Distortion Correction checkbox at the bottom to correct the fisheye distortion. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 305Chapter 10Special Effects for Photographers Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Four: In the Layout section on the left, the default setting is Auto (as seen in Step Three), and I recommend leaving that set to Auto to get the standard wide pano we’re looking for. The five Layout choices below Auto (Perspective, Cylindrical, Spherical, Collage, and Reposition) all give you…well…funky looking panos (that’s the best description I can give you), but suffice it to say—they don’t give you that nice wide pano most of us are looking for. So, let’s just stick with Auto. Click OK, and within a few minutes (depending on how many photos you shot for your pano), your pano is seamlessly stitched together (as seen here), and you’ll see status bars that let you know that Auto-Align Layers and Auto-Blend Layers are both being applied to make this mini-miracle happen. Step Five: To make your pano f it perfectly together, Photomerge has to move and rearrange things in a way that will cause you to have to crop the photo down to get the final result you want (we get the easy job—cropping only takes about 10 sec- onds). So, get the Crop tool (C) and drag out your cropping border (like you see here, encompassing as much of the pano as possible without leaving any gaps). Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 306 Chapter 10 Special Effects for Photographers The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers TIP: Why Make Panos with Photo- merge Instead of Auto-Align Layers? If you use Auto-Align Layers, you’ll notice that many of the layout features seem the same as in Photomerge. So, why use Photomerge for stitching? It’s because Photomerge does more than just align layers—it stacks all your images into one document, then it aligns them (like Auto-Align Layers), but then it blends them together into one seamless pano. It does all three things at once. So don’t let the Photomerge dialog fool you— it’s doing more than it seems. Step Six: Press Return (PC: Enter), and your pano is cropped down to size (as shown below) and you can make any other adjustments you want. Now, for Photoshop to pull this mini-miracle off, there’s just one rule to remember when you’re shooting: over- lap each photo segment by around 20%. That’s the one rule I still teach. Do that, and the rest will take care of itself. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 307Chapter 10Special Effects for Photographers Continued Being able to easily turn a photo into a realistic-looking painting has been on the photographer’s wish list for quite some time (this look is very popular with wed- ding and portrait photographers), and in Photoshop CS5, Adobe majorly updated the painting tools and painting engine, allowing the most realistic photo-paintings yet. The idea is not to paint the subject from scratch, but to use the colors and tones from the original image, and mix them using brushes that make the photo look like a painting (luckily, it’s easier than it sounds). Turn a Photo into a Painting Step One: Open an image you want to turn into a painting. Now, you’re going to want to paint on a separate layer above your Background layer, so start by creating a blank layer (click on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel). Next, get the new Mixer Brush tool from the toolbox (click-and-hold on the Brush tool, and the other tools appear in a flyout menu [as shown here], or press Shift-B until you have it). Step Two: When you choose the Mixer Brush tool, all sorts of new Brush options appear up in the Options Bar, along with a number of Blending Brush Combination presets for how the brush applies your “paint.” For this particular project, we’re going to go with an oil painting look, so from the presets pop-up menu, choose Very Wet, Heavy Mix (as shown here). ©ISTOCKPHOTO/EKINS DESIGNS Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 308 Chapter 10 Special Effects for Photographers The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Three: There are a couple of other little tweaks we need to make up in the Options Bar to set up our brush the way we’ll need it for this look. Starting at the left, there’s a button for loading the brush after each stroke, and it’s on by default. Go ahead and turn this off by clicking on it (it’s circled here in red). Now, come all the way over to the right side of the Options Bar and turn on the Sample All Layers check box. This is really important, because turning this on lets us automatically use the colors from the original photo on the Background layer, which is pretty much the key to making this all work. Step Four: One last thing before we begin painting: we have to choose our brush tip. Click on the Brush icon on the far-left side of the Options Bar (it’s the second icon from the left), and the Brush Picker appears. You’re going to start by painting over the background areas first, so let’s choose a good brush for that—the Flat Fan High Bristle Count brush (as shown here). Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 309Chapter 10Special Effects for Photographers Continued The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Five: Now you’re going to start painting over the image, but the idea is to paint in the direction of the shape (for example, later, when you paint over the baby’s hair, you’d paint in the direction the hair is going). You’re going to need to vary the size of your brush using the Left and Right Brack et keys on your keyboard (the Left Bracket key makes your brush smaller; the right, larger. They’re located to the right of the letter “P” on your keyboard). Start painting over the blanket on the baby’s head, and just try to stay pretty much inside the lines, which I know these days is supposed to be a mentally limiting exercise, because in kindergarten we’re told to always stay inside the lines, and now everybody wants to paint outside the lines so they experience personal growth, but these people aren’t painting with the Mixer Brush tool in CS5, so just paint inside the lines for now, and let your therapist deal with the aftermath at your next visit (kidding). Step Six: Go ahead and paint the blanket the baby’s lying on, as well, then you’re going to switch brushes to something smaller for the detail areas (like the baby’s face). So, go up to the Brush Picker and choose the Round Curve Low Bristle Percent brush (as shown here), lower the size of your brush, and begin painting over the contours of the baby’s face (it won’t look good quite yet, but the next steps are what bring this baby home. Well, at least figuratively). Also, if it seems “too wet,” lower the Wet amount (up in the Options Bar) to around 15%, then lower the Mix amount to around 52%, and the Flow amount to 60%, so the intensity of the effect is much lower. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 310 Special Effects for Photographers Chapter 10 Step Seven: Keep painting, varying your brush size, until the image is fully painted over, then click on the Background layer and press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate it. Drag this duplicate layer to the top of the layer stack (as seen here). This puts the original untouched image on the top of the stack. Now, to blend the original photographic image (with all its original full detail) and the painted version you did on the layer below it, just lower the layer’s Opacity until you like how the blend of these two look (thanks to Adobe’s own Russell Brown for the idea of bringing back the original photo for added detail). In our example, I lowered the Opacity to 40%, so you see a lot of the paint strokes, but you retain detail in key areas. Step Eight: One last step: Press Command-Option- Shift-E (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E), to make a new layer at the top of the stack that looks like a flattened version of your image. Now go under the Filter menu, under Artistic, and choose Underpainting. When the filter dialog appears, don’t touch anything—just click OK. This puts an underpainting effect, complete with canvas texture, over your entire image. Luckily, this is on its own layer, so to blend this top texturized underpainting layer with the layers beneath it, just lower the Opacity to around 20% (as shown here) to complete this simple version of the painted effect. Download from www.wowebook.com . Effects for Photographers The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Five: Press Command-L (PC: Ctrl-L) to bring up the Levels dialog, and drag the shadows Input Levels slider (the. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg 308 Chapter 10 Special Effects for Photographers The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers Step Three: There are a couple of other little tweaks. before/ after is shown below. Before After Download from www.wowebook.com ptg The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers 303Chapter 10Special Effects for Photographers Continued I used