Week 2: Photoshop tutorials.
This tutorial, found here at PSTtuts+, is called How to Turn Humdrum Photos into Cinematic Portraits by James Davies.
I took the original shot last January, of my husband while we were on the Bainbridge Island ferry to Seattle. This filter was complicated and required a lot of hand-painting, and took me a bit more than four hours to complete. I can't wait to try it on some more well-suited shots; I think it would work better with a source file that is more evenly exposed (rather than slightly overexposed like this one was) and preferably a closer, more straight-on view of the subject's face. The raindrops and cloud images used as source textures are courtesy of Stock.EXCHG, a free stock art site.
Week 2: Photo Corrections & Red Eye Removal
On the image with the woman and her dog in the snow, I felt the original process had washed out the color and midtones of the image too much. On the third version, I started as before, using crop to rotate and eliminate borders. Then I used the Healing Brush and the Clone Stamp to repair the lines, dots, and torn corner. Next, using the Color Sampler tool, I sampled the white on her teeth, the snow near her left shoulder, and some snow behind the dog, and ran an Auto Tone. This time, the the magenta cast was corrected as before, but whites did not wash out overly much, nor did the snow turn too cyan. Then, to increase warmth, I went in manually and corrected the midtones using Image>Adjustments>Selective Color and further reducing magenta and adding a bit of yellow in Neutrals. Finally, I increased Saturation very slightly (+2) and increased Vibrance, to bring back the color detail after the cast correction. This made sure that warmth was retained. Then, in Adjustments>Levels dialogue box, I eliminated the flatness of the image and brought back the contrast by bringing up the shadow value and dropping the highlight value to match the curves on the histogram.
Notes on the Red Eye reduction tool: I found I got the best results by greatly reducing the default pupil size and darken settings (less than 20% for the pupil size, between 10-15% for darken). Because this is a photo taken with flash outdoors in a blueish light, I wanted to leave the eyes bright and pupils small. This setting may need to change in a darker indoor shot or one taken without flash.
After I used the Red Eye tool, I thought the dog's eyes looked too colorless and dark, so I went back in with a tiny Dodge brush to restore the highlights in the dog's eyes, then sampled some of the brown color from the dogs fur and ran a 30% color brush over the irises. I also sampled some blue from the woman's pants and added a 30% color wash over her irises as well (I have no idea what color her eyes were originally, but made the decision based arbitrarily because I thought blue would look pretty with the rest of the colors in the image). I think the Red Eye tool desaturates a bit too much by default.
Notes on the Red Eye reduction tool: I found I got the best results by greatly reducing the default pupil size and darken settings (less than 20% for the pupil size, between 10-15% for darken). Because this is a photo taken with flash outdoors in a blueish light, I wanted to leave the eyes bright and pupils small. This setting may need to change in a darker indoor shot or one taken without flash.
After I used the Red Eye tool, I thought the dog's eyes looked too colorless and dark, so I went back in with a tiny Dodge brush to restore the highlights in the dog's eyes, then sampled some of the brown color from the dogs fur and ran a 30% color brush over the irises. I also sampled some blue from the woman's pants and added a 30% color wash over her irises as well (I have no idea what color her eyes were originally, but made the decision based arbitrarily because I thought blue would look pretty with the rest of the colors in the image). I think the Red Eye tool desaturates a bit too much by default.