Photoshop layers and woodgrain tutorial

Project 7 Layers and Masks

I got the picture above using layers, masks and filters from this:


This is my nephew being goofy and trying on my new sun glasses. He should know I always have a camera handy just to catch these embarrassing moments. It wasn't the best picture for this assignment. I should have found one with more shadows and highlights. But I wanted to see what I could do with those sunglasses. So here's what I did:

First I made a new layer coping the original. I always do this in photoshop because I've screwed up originals in the past. I turned off the visibility of the original layer and made a layer mask on my copy (I call that my working base layer). Then I selected the mask by clicking on the mask thumbnail on the layer palette. Then on the photo I used the quick selection to select large sections of the kitchen in the background. I used the paint bucket to paint the kitchen areas black. That made the kitchen invisible. I threw in a gradient background layer, just to see that I had my mask just right.


I made several copies of this image so I could play around with several versions and not have to redo the first mask.

For my next image, I put a new background behind this picture. I use to do this kind of thing a lot using the eraser tool to get rid of cluttered backgrounds. But the mask layer method is so much better because its not destructive. When I realized I had masked out areas I didn't want to lose, I just went back and painted that area on the mask white which restored that part of the image. So here's the image with a new background (from a cruise to Redoubt Bay).

Next I wanted to play with those sunglasses. What I wanted to do was put Brian on a sunny beach and add the reflection of a girl in a bikini showing in the lenses of the glasses. But I didn't have a good picture of a bikini clad girl. So I settled for another scene from Redoubt Bay. I made another layer of Brian and made a mask layer of the lenses. This was a little tricky because the glasses and the lenses are so close to the same color. There's a little flare of light on the right lens that proved to be very problematic. I ended up painting my mask layer with the paint brush tool rather than using selection tools. Then I slipped in another layer between the two layers of Brian's face. The top Brian layer had the glasses masked out so the image underneath it shows through. I wanted to make the lens look reflective using the blend modes. But I could never find the right one for that. I ended up using the lighter color blend mode on the waterfall layer.

So when I finished, I thought it looks silly. But I learned a lot about layers and mask and next time I'll pick better photos to start with.

Next I used the technique John demonstrated in his YouTube video. I used the selections drop down menu to select and make layers of highlights, midtones, and shadows. Then I took each layer and played around with hue, brightness, saturations and levels. I saved several and put them together.



The top left one I saved because the skin tones look kind of bronze or golden. I've tried to make gold before and it never looked right. But now I have a formula for it. Base layer flesh tone, the highlights are greenish yellow, midtones a darker green and shadows blue. So the next time I want to turn something gold, I'll know I can do it with layers.

On the top right, I made the shadows and midtones dark and deleted the highlights and base layer letting the background show through. For the bottom left I was just playing with color hues, added the disco gradient, flattened all the layers and them applied the poster edge filter.

My favorite is the lower right image. I started with the image on the top left and I added black squares to the background layer. I deleted the layer with the base photo of Brian, I flattened the remaining layers and applied the cutout filter (under artistic filters). The filter settings were: number of levels - 6, edge simplicity - 10 and edge fidelity - 2. It's the only image I did that isn't goofy looking. But I think it made the others worth whiled.

Photo.net panoramic project of the month

Photo.net, a web site for photographers, has a monthly project. This month the project is panoramic photos. If you want to see an interesting collection of panoramics from all over the world, check it out at:
http://photo.net/monthly-project/2009/april-panoramic
I don't think you have to be a member to post one of your own photos.

Panoramic Stitching - Quilters Delight

Call me crazy, but I totally overdid this assignment. The assignment was to take a series of at least 3 photos and stitch them together in a panoramic and then add text to them. (What up with that?) I really enjoyed doing this, so I overdid it. I did three different series of 4 to 8 photos for 3 very different panoramic images. The images are different but the process was the same.

The first series of pictures I took in Sitka's Ben Franklin store where the quilters go for fabrics. When I show the wall of fabric, I thought it would be perfect for this assignment. Unfortunately there were perpendicular aisles very close to this wall so I couldn't step back far enough to get good starting pictures. I knew this would be a problem with the perspective, and I was right. But I gave it a shot anyway and decided to post it.

For all three of my projects, I used the same process. I started by reducing the size of the photos to 20 inches wide (10 for the harbor pictures). Then I took the end photo and expanded the canvas. This one I started on the left, but I found it more natural for me to start on the right. Anyway, I selected the whole photo of the second image, copied and pasted it on my expanded canvas and moved it into position. I tried using John's trick of lowering the opacity to see how to line things up. I had trouble with that. Everything looks fuzzy and I can't tell which fuzz is which layer. So I started off with a lower opacity in my top layer, then once I had it close, I adjusted back to 100% opacity.

This fabric image was the hardest to do. I tried to use the free transform tool to adjust the perspective and that ended up throwing things out of alignment. But I think I have most of my transitions pretty close. This is really a flat wall, but the composite looks like a corner or a big V.

For my other images, I found that if I line up the largest details in the background, I can use the free transform tool to line up the details in the foreground. I got things close and then used the arrow keys to nudge. One thing I like about the free transform tool is that I can use it and nudge, transform and nudge and transform more without having to change anything in the tool bar. I just had to click on the move arrow at the top of the tool bar and then select free transform under edit. That trick was really helpful in my harbor image too.

After I had my first two pictures lined up, I made adjustments to brightness/contrast to blend them. Then I used the eraser tool with a soft edge and a large diameter to blend the edges. Once I was happy with that, I moved on to the next picture in the series. After they were all lined up and blended, I cropped the edges. I learned after this one to take photos with more than I wanted in the final image. A good portion of the top and bottom gets cropped away to make the edges smooth.

So although this image didn't turn out as well as I hoped, I learned a lot that made the next two turn out better. It is all about the process.

Panoramic Stitching - Crescent Harbor

Now you're going to know I'm crazy. Instead of doing 3 or 4 photos to stitch together, I decided I needed 8! Well I ended up with so much overlap between some of them that I only used 7. I thought this would be the most difficult project, but it turned out to be the easiest of the three.


I caught a break in the weather and had a relative snow free hour to get these photos done. I was standing at the harbor shelter so I had room to back up and get a good perspective. While I was taking the pictures, all I could see in my view finder were hundreds of masts and vertical lines. I thought I would never be able to match them up. But by the time I got to this one I had discovered that it's easier for me to work from right to left. And if I have something large in the background to match up, I can use the free transform tool to mesh the lower details together.

Of the three that I did, this one has the best perspective, true to the real scene. And that was without me having to over manipulate the perspective with the transform tools in photoshop.

I had so many photos for this one, I reduced the size (width) to 10 inches each. That made the math easier to work with and it made the final image a more manageable size. Unfortunately, I didn't save a copy of the right most photo. And I flattened the image before I realized it. But I have the panoramic. And of the three, this is my favorite final image. The most interesting thing to me is that I think none of these individual photos is outstanding. But the panoramic is pretty cool. I guess the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Panoramic Stitching - Fresh Produce

Now this one was my favorite to photograph. I thought it was a great idea to go to the grocery store and get in out of the snow and rain for indoor photography. And the produce department was a big enough space that I could step back and get my shots with a better perspective than the fabric shots. It sounded like a good plan. But in the middle of my salad photo shoot, I felt a little tap on my shoulder. The manager of SeaMart asked me to leave the store and not come back with a camera. They do not allow photography of their merchandise. Then he recognized me as a customer and explained that he thought I was someone else. It seems the other grocery store in town was recently sold to a chain. And the new owners have been sneaking in photographing SeaMart to check out the competition. Once the manager knew I wasn't there for asparagus espionage he agreed to let me continue photographing. But I had lost my enthusiasm at that point. So I had to work with what I had already done. I had enough photos for the panoramic, but no where to put in any text. So I had to create a sign. I did the sign with the custom shape drawing tool set at the glass button mode. It's pretty cheesy looking but it was fun to do.

As for the stitching, this was pretty straightforward. There were lots of little details to line up. The perspective is still off, it looks like a curved counter. But without a tripod and a lot more space, it's the best I could do.

And the experience of being almost thrown out reinforced one of my core philosophies in life: It is usually better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

Filters

Our assignment was to take a new picture and apply filters to create 3 new images. We are to have a goal in mind and not just apply random filters. My goal was to turn a photo of a still life into a painting or sketch.

Some of the differences in these images are subtle. Click image to view in larger format for best viewing.



This is my original picture for this assignment. I was just in Dallas visiting family and took this picture in my sister's kitchen window where she displays a collection of antique purple glass bottles. The window was covered with dew and was a little frosty so the trees outside the window are obscured. I thought that if I painted, this would make a nice still life. So that is the effect I was hoping for.

I tried several different options to turn this into a "painting" only to discover that the frosty window turned into a very busy background. So my first step ended up to select the window with the quick selection tool and apply a Glassian Blur. Then I applied the Accented Edges filter to bring out the details of the bottles and compensate for a lack of contrast. I decided I liked that image. So I stopped there and saved it. I used it as the base layer for other images.

For the image above, I started off applying the Paint Daubs filter with a brush size of 1, sharpness of 0 and type of wide sharp. Then I applied a Box Blur (to the window) with a radius of 12 px. It didn't look enough like a painting, so I applied the Accented Edges with edge width of 9, edge brightness of 19 and smoothness of 14. Then I decided it needed to look more like a canvas, so I used the Texturizer filter for Canvas with a scale of 88, relief of 17 and light, top left. Then I made the mistake of trying to smooth out some of the splatter on the window. But I discovered that once you apply a texture filter, further adjustments really mess that up. So I backed off my last adjustment deciding I liked the window with a little splatter.

Then I decided to make the bottles into a still life sketch. This turned out to be the hardest effect to create. I tried several different filters and ended up with big areas of black (like on the big bottle to the right). This attempt was a combination of a Graphic Pen filter with stroke length of 15, light/dark balance of 40 and stroke direction of right diagonal and a Watercolor filter with brush detail of 6, shadow intensity of 1 and texture of 1. I was hoping this looked like a pen and ink sketch. It doesn't really. But I liked it anyway.


This was my final attempt to convert my purple bottles to a pen and ink sketch. I started with the second image above (Glassian Blur on the background and accented edges). Then I applied the Photocopy filter with detail of 24 and darkness of 50. I played around with this a lot and either have too much black in the center of the bottles or I lose the outline of the middle back bottle. I never found the right combination of filters to look like a pen and ink drawing. But I came up with some interesting variations of my original image.

So this is the last one worth putting out for display. I was going for a watercolor look. But I know the Watercolor filter in photoshop looks very little like a true watercolor. So I used the image with the Glassian Blur and this time Sharpen Edges. Then I used the Photocopy filter with a detail of 7 and darkness of 15. I over saturated the base layer and then reduced the opacity of the top (filtered) layer to 55%. There's not as much contrast as I wanted. But further work only messed it up. So now I really am done.

Thanks for viewing. All comments welcome.
Ann