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CIOS 252--Photoshop Final Projects
1. Building an Image Using Photoshop 5.5
This originally started out as a Photography project. I wanted to hand color a b/w photo using paints and pencils to show a photographic "Special Effect" but I needed to plan out what I was going to do before I spent alot of time painting. What better way to do it than in Photoshop?Original Scan
Below is the scan I began with. It's a b/w photo I took myself. I like the composition. It's soft with a country feel. However, the eggs are begging to be colored.
Retoucing and Color Correcting
Even though the printed photo had good contrast the scanning process darkened it quite a bit. It also needed a fair amount of "touch up" of dust spots and other artifacts that were present on the original print. (I wish getting rid of those darn dust spots on a print in the darkroom were as easy as it is on a scanned image in Photoshop!)I began by cloning out the defects and artifacts in the image, and color correcting the whole image with levels. Even though this is a b/w image, levels did a great job on leveling out the tonal range of the image and bringing out the details which is especially noticeable in the basket below.
Layering & Selecting
After the color correcting was complete, I started building the layers. First, I made a copy of the background layer and selected the basket only. I saved this selection as an alpha channel and made a layer mask out of it.Next, I began to select the eggs. I made a new layer for each egg, naming each a descriptive name as I went along. Then I selected each individual egg and put each on it's own layer. I spent alot of time on these selections trying to make them as good as I possibly could knowing that making a good selection is one of the keys to using Photoshop efficiently. I used the magnetic lasso tool to select each egg with the edge contrast set to 2% and the frequency set to 57%. This gave me a fairly good selection. I then smoothed each selection [SELECT|MODIFY|SMOOTH] usually about 5 pixels but sometimes I applied it more than once if the selection still seemed a little ragged. Then I entered quick mask mode so I could "paint" the selection mask on and off for the fine tuning. I mainly used the paintbrush and pencil tools with various brush tips for this. This gave me more control on making a tight selection than using the lasso tools would. Once I had a good selection, I saved the selection [SELECTION|SAVE SELECTION] and then turned it into a layer mask by clicking on the Layer Mask button on the Layers palette so it would be readily available for editing if need be.
Coloring The Eggs
Then I began coloring the eggs. I used the airbrush with a fairly big, diffuse (antialias) "brush tip" so that the color would spray on lightly over a fairly large area and fade at the outer edge of the stroke. I used several strokes to get the color onto each egg. Then I modified the Layer Opacity of each layer (each egg is on it's own individual layer) to adjust the depth of color I wanted. Each color ended up being a slightly different opacity based on what looked right to me at the time. I wanted pastel colors to keep the softness of the image and show the shadows and highlights in the photo but I wanted the color to show too.Note: When I printed this image on a test sheet of ink jet paper before printing on photographic quality paper at the Media Center, I needed to up the opacity by 10-15% as the colors appeared very faded and dull in print than on screen. After uping the opacity the photographic quality print turned out fairly well but it still could benefit from more vivid coloring of the eggs. I'm not sure how to judge this other than more experience working from screen to print and also with various kinds of printers.
Final Results
Here is the final image with it's layers palette showing all the layer masks. The layers palette also shows all the variations on the background I added later. The final file size of the eggs.psd file is 15.5 MB! It prints a 5x7 print at 200 ppi resolution which greatly adds to the file size of the image as does all the layer and mask information included with this file. All images on this page are scaled down to less than a quarter the original size and saved as JPG's. Average size of each JPG file is 50 KB.
Finished Image |
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Variations
After coloring the eggs, I thought the background looked kind of boring so I decided to play with it. First, I selected the background using the magic wand and the freehand lasso tool (to add large areas to the selection). Once I had a good selection of the background I saved it [SELECTION|SAVE SELECTION]. Here are a few renditions with different backgrounds and one with text added and rotated.
| Filters | Noise--Added to Selection Noise added to the background selection only [FILTER | NOISE | ADD NOISE | GAUSSIAN | MONOCHROMATIC | 50%] I think this makes the basket stand out more than the original background did. |
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Gradient Background Transparent Rainbow gradient added from upper right corner to lower left corner. The original backround shows through on this one giving it an interesting look. |
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Gradient Background & Text Foreground to Background Gradient added from upper right corner to lower left corner. Gives it a surreal look. Text with drop shadow added and rotated. I didn't add the text until after I saved this as a JPG and resized it because text seems to be adversely affected by resizing. |
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Filters | Filter | Texture | Grain | Clumped | Intensity=60 Contrast=70 | Fade Grain=56% | Adjust Levels to lighten entire image. I like how the eggs look mottled in this one. |
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2. Exploring Photoshop's Artistic Filters
Here are some experiments with the Artistic and Sketch filters in Photoshop. I am attempting to make note cards that look hand drawn from a scanned photo of my dog. I have not been able to find the right kind of paper to print these but they show great promise when laid out in MS Publisher and printed on regular paper.I experimented at length with the options available with each filter as well as the FADE FILTER option available from the Filters menu. Here are my favorites...
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Finally...
I am sure I missed using a few of Photoshop's tools while working on these projects and all the things we did this semester but I am pretty comfortable using the program now. Thank you for one great class. I really enjoyed it. I wish there were more but onto Flash and Illustrator...
P. Kalbaugh
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