photoshop: Creating Shadows

It’s very easy, I promise! All you need is ummm a good image that needs good shadowing to look convincing. Ehehe.

All you need to do is open up your image, select what you want to make a shadow, open a new layer, copy the selected area and then fill it with black pull it out, change the opacity and then viola! You got it!

Enjoy.. sorry my head hurts so that’s why I am not doing a real tutorial on it. When the head ache is gone, I’ll do a step by step tutorial.

Before                                                After(the shadow isnt this dark, but i darken it to show you guys only)

 

During (shadow)

Layers

burn and dodge technique on photoshop

Here is a technique called burn and doge on photoshop. I am using photoshop cs3 to burn and dodge this image in a none-distorted technique, what that means is, it will not ruin your picture or it won’t make your picture pixelated. It is also important to shoot your images in a RAW format and save it in a TIFF format so that your image will not be compress which will keep the quality of the image.

DO NOT USE THE BURN OR THE DODGE TOOL,  those two tools will distort your image and you will not be able to get the info of the image back. Keep in mind, it’s important to not destroy your image, we want all the picture pixel information there.

Step 1. open up the image you want
step 2. go to layer–>new—–> layer—> then name your layer—> change color to gray—> change mode to “overlay”—>click  on “fill with overlay-neutral color (50% gray)
step 3. use the paint tool to darken or lighten the area wanted —>use the black filter to darken image and use the white filter to lighten image——->use about 10% opacity while using the brush only, never use it at 100%
     if you darken of lighten something too much, do not delete anything, just use the simple tool and then simple the gray and paint over it to normal again.

very easy but just a lot of paying attention and etc

Below is the before image

Below is the burn and dodge layer. Yes doesn’t it look a bit freaky? ehehe

Below is the finish product.

Half Dome of Yosemite on HDR

These are pictures taken at yosemite of Half dome, taken while I was on vacation.

These images were shot in multiple exposures and then was brought into photometrix and set on HDR. What HDR does is it blends all the different exposure together to get a cartoonish (depending on how you like it) image. Once the photos are lined up together you have to fix the images to your liking..

I’ll have to redo the first one cos photometrix didn’t line the first one together to well.

Pictures were taken while I was on vacation in California. Yosemite was as beautiful as how I remembered it 10 years ago. It’s a must go location if you ever decide to visit cantral and north Cal! It’s well worth it and it always seem to continue to amaze me each time I go to Yosemite!

compositing images

Here is my final for my Photo imaging class. It’s a take home final, all his finals are take home b/c we have to shoot them ourselves and then put them together in our own time, well he did provide one class time to work and ask quesitons.

comments are welcome! it’ll help me improve

THe 3 images that i’ll be putting together

my layers

the finished product

Here are the other two that I did.. if you want to see the layers and or the images for it, let me know and I’ll put them up

I hate this one!!!! Ewww soo bad!

Color Theory Midterm

I finally got the grade for my Color Theory midterm and though I would share the image that I had produced for the midterm. For this assignment, our instructor gave us 30 minutes to shoot 10 random but GOOD images around campus (believe me, mine were horrible, not anywhere near good visuals at all). In order for her to be able to tell if we shot within our allowed time before we go shoot, we must take a photo of the hallway clock and then when we return we must take another picture of the hallway clock. Between the two times, it should be about 30 minutes in between the taken time.

From the 10 pictures we had shoot, we are to pick ONE photo that we like most and we must color correct the image and make it look appealing to the viewer. But the catch is, we are allow to use only 3 sheet of printing papers, which means one paper for the contact sheet so she can see all the images we took including the time, and then one print to see what we must do to the image and the last print is the final print.

During this time we are not allowed to ask for each other’s help or opinion, the instructor and assistance instructors are in our printing labs and our Mac labs to make sure no one is “cheating”. Everything must be our own judgments and how will we can color correct an image and if we can see the color cast. Since we are allow to only us 3 printing paper we must try to be as close to perfect as possible, we are allow to fix the images in any way we need to including cropping, as long as it looks good and no added artifacts.

She graded us on, how well we shot the image, or if we know which image is the best from the set of images we took, how well we color correct the image, or if we are able to white balance the image, she also graded us on how close we are to color correcting the image. She said that if our final print is not correct, as long as we can tell her what needed to be done to make the final print, she’ll also except that as well. On a separate sheet of paper we also had to explain what we did to the image for our final print.

Here are the steps I did with this image:
Open the image in Camera raw
gave the image a white balance and also cropped the image in camera raw
export it into photoshop
I sharpen some parts of the image
I used the fill to cover my sharpen image then paint in the parts that needed to be sharpen
Most important part besides white balance was the color balance (purpose of assignment)
I added 8 points of blue to my entire image to color correct it
Lastly I did an overall curve on the entire image and also pulled the two points in curves closer together to pop the contrast of the image and then simple the leaf so I can make a curve adjustment on that.

My overall grade for my image was a 98%. I was extremely proud of myself for this assignment with the short time limit we have and the limited location. We had about an hour to fix the image and get it printed and also get it turned in. Whew, I swear I thought I was going to get a horrible grade for it, but my color correcting was right on the ball, and the visual wasn’t so bad. My teachers comment for this assignment was “Well done Ze! Only thing- Burn down upper right corner”… After I read that comment I started to notice that it does needed to be burned down, if I did, I might had received a 100%, but either way a 98% was good enough!

(sorry, i lost some quality of the image since I had to copy and save it through PAINT since this is a 16 bit image and cannot be converted to JPG, too lazy to convert it to 8bit)

The horrible contact sheet

THe final print

my layers/what I did to the image minus the text, i had added the text just so I can post it up online with my name

HDR (HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE)

Scroll all the way to the bottom of this post for the finish product!

This is called “high dynamic range” aka HDR. for HDR, all you do is take a serious of images, well you take the same exact image multiple times with different exposures and then go to photoshop and merge the images together and start painting. Easy as that, Okay truth be told it’s not that easy. LOL. but then when I did this, i actually used a program called “photomatrix” that was provided for us from school. With this program, it’s much easier, all we need to do was drop all the image into the program and it’ll merge all the images together then we just adjust it to our liking. HDR gives the image a surreal, cartoonish look. This isnt the best since it was such a last minute image I had to do.  ENJOY

The finish product

Retouching/airbrushing before and after

Hey guys so last week and the week before that we had learned how to retouch and airbrush photos, it’s what the studios normally do to a person’s face when their face isn’t clear or more like my teacher would call it “make a good looking person look GOODER”. And yes he did used the word GOODER. LOL

Anyways, I had also screen cap the layers that I had made and used to fix this photo. And these layers are not in order of how I worked on them, but they are in the correct order so the pictures won’t look distorted.

We’ll learn “composition” next week and I am very excited about that. Composition is  when you turned 3 imaged and merged them into one.

So I lighten up her face, and airbrushed her lips and added lipsticks, sharpen her a bit more and then soften her face, I had also put blush on her. Like I’ve said there was more I can do, but I wanted to keep it natural.

Enjoy!!! Critique would be nice!

this is the before image, straight from the camera,
sorry the sun was horrible that day

This is the tools and layers I had used, screenshoot from photoshop

the finish product, i know there were more I can do to it
but i wanted to keep it as natural as possible

Old and damaged?

Here is an old and destroyed picture of my great grandma and some aunts that I had never met before. Sad, but this is the only picture I have of my great grandma and I had ruined this photo when we had moved from our beautiful old house to blah this other house.

Well the picture was ruined, some part of the image was stuck on the glass while other parts were not and there are many scratches and spots on it and you can tell this picture had aged a bit. The picture was torn away from the section that was stuck on the glass, so that means the picture is really ruined now. So I decided to give this picture a little fixing and restoring. Since this is the only picture I have of my great grandma, I want to cherish it forever.
So, after spending couple hours on photoshop fixing the damage picture, it now looks brand new! Whew, I am glad I can save this picture and cherish it forever! Although I had never met her and will never have my chance to meet her, I at least still have this one and only picture of her.

 

 

This is the damaged photo. Notice the picture has been torn and there are a lot of scratches and spots on the photo

Below is the fixed image, notice all the spots, scratches and even the torn part is all gone and now the picture looks almost brand new.  Yeah, I can continue to cherish great grandma’s picture!