Brooke's Photoshop Work

Final Magazine Cover

2010-07-30T19:38:00.000-07:00

My husband was an olympic lever kayaker. Couple years ago he went to the world surfski race in Crissy Field San Francisco, he listed No. 7 out 38 in his group (I do not know how they category these surfskis), Anyway, he is still pretty good after not done competitive racing for almost 20 years. I had a groups of photos shot from those cheese cameras, out of focus and bad as I always get on my photos. I touched up on them using level and sharpening mask. I also cropped out my husband with his surf skill out of one of the photo.

For fonts, I like people to be able to see so I used Turbuchet for sub titles. For the "surfski" title I used "stencil"

Quick Mask Filter Haltone Dots or Not

2010-07-30T19:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLRBidDuvmg
Why not we all sing first, I love Winnie the Pooh. I hope I lived in a hundread acre woods.. not have to do all the craps I have to do...

This is using the filter for background, did not use halftone dots as it turned out to be ridicleous. I used "conte crayon", give it a stage backdrop look.

Here is the original photos:

I used the quick mask and filter on the hundred acre woods background. The cotouts are from two of the following photos.

Field of Depth

2010-07-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

Here is an example of field of depth. There is nothing much to write about. It is quick and esy.

Surrealism

2010-07-29T23:36:00.000-07:00

I found this photo when my daughter was 18 month, really like her dress. It is a very bad photo, totally out of focus and dark. Cropped out and put onto the waterlily pad. Use the pen tool draw the ouline of the Chinese character on the right bottom which means dream. I add the poem using a font called "Chiller", love the effect, not sure if it goes with the theme, but heck, it is for fun. This could be a CD cover for some baby music product, maybe something can help the baby sleep through the night. I can make big bucks... ha ha ha dream on

I bought this water lily photo from fotolia and it has defect, I use the patch tool to get rid of the horizontal line. Then use the clone stamp, smudge tool to enlarge the background to 1200 by 800 pixels, from original 850 pxby 560 px.
I found this chinese "dream character " from the internet and use the pen tool to draw out the outline as shapes

Here is my pen tool generated dream super imposed on the original image, not bad for 5 minutes job. I must say I am very good at the pen tool. When I took the illustrator class in fall 09, i spent more than 50 hours drew Van Gogh's Irises using the pen tool that really helped me understand how to use the pen tool. PS and Ai are pretty similar in terms of pen tool, you know these anchor points, i am pretty good at manuplating them.

Lesson 7 painting and retouching

2010-07-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

Deke the dude is good, I really like about the paint brush, prior to this class, never really used brush, well except in Illustrator. Illustrator and Photoshop (not the writing part) are fun, if life only comprises of them, not CSS, PHP/mySQ or myopiaL, life will be pretty good.

I really like the paint brush with "hue" blending method, you paint new hue values without changing luminosity and saturation. Fixing the cracks are piece of cake with CS4's healing brush and patch tool. I also used the clone tool. Too much to write, just go with the feeling. I wiped out the blue tint of the beard and the background using the paint brush. For the mustash, I chose a skin tone color and set the opacity of the brush to 50%, the brushing (under "hue" bledning mode) generated very realistic color correction. I also use the same brush effect to brush away the light blue tint near the edge of his left cheek.

Well Deke the dude is not God, I did not like his way of doing red eyes, I think photoshop's red eye removal tool usually generate very unrealistic pupils. I like this way:
1. select the red pupil region (oval marquee usually is good in this case), sometime you expand 1-2 pixels, then do a 1-2 pixel feather.
2. Use the adjustment--hue/saturation--red, decrease the red saturation down to almost 0, then reduce the "darkness" in the Hannah case I think I reduced to 60. (I wish PS can save these values, I think CS10 will be able to do it).
3. Zoom to pixel level use clone stamp to do some fine touch on the edge of the pupil --reduce the size of the pupil. When flash is used during photography one's pupils got dilated, so the red-eye removed pupil is very large, this is not the way when photoed in natural light -- one's pupils are significantly smaller. This is the scientific detail most of the Photoshop retouch book never mentioned.

Here is after the red-eye removal using my technique. Large pupils due to flash during phtography, if you only correct the color, that is not enough.

The following is zoom to 400% screnshot of the eyes, blueish grey with significantly smaller the pupil. The size of the glint is also reduced. I think this is the most important step in retouching red-eye, of course this takes much more effort. You need to be really good at cloneing stamp like I am :-)

I do not like Deke the dude's way of doing teeth, I generally do not like dodge burn or sponge, it is really hard to control the brush, you need to really get lots of experience before you can use them for serious image retouch. I tried his way using burn, the area around the gum got effected, ideally, you need to change to a very small size brush tool around the edge, and it is hard to remember where you painted as the brush taking on the compound effect. This is I do white teeth similar to red eye, instead of reducing "red" in hue and saturation, I reduced Yellow, and increase the lightness.

Mid-Term Protect Kids Vision

2010-07-18T18:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2009/12/walk_away_from_the_screen_your.html

Here is one interesting article to read on which explains why I choose right now this very moment -- the mobile age, kids are hooked to these handhold gadgets, with large of the school work goes to digital, the amount of near of work is unprecedented. Evolution did not design our eyes to look at these tiny screens and not so tiny screens. We were hunters and gatherers, we were made to hunt animals and harvest crops.

We have done campaigns on Tabacco, Fast Foods, yet, when it comes to our precious vision, "It is not big deal, just wear glasses and contacts, or when you get old enough you can get LASIK". This is an epidemic, yet so little research and public focus has done to address the issue. I do believe that myopia (nearsightness) is determined both by genes and environment. Yes, there are some people can spent all their life watching YouTube on iTouch and still have perfact 20/20, however, a lot of the people can not. Little effort has been made for preventions. Some research has indicated the amount of the time you spent ourdoors is crucial to eye development. Australia has the lowest myopia rate in the developed countries, as the outdoor sports are prevalent and people spend a good amount of time outdoors. Sometimes common sense is more important. You can just not wait all the data comes in and then do something, we as parents need to really make an effort to protect our kids' visions.

Here is the screenshot from the apple website. I am shocked as they advertise Games On and On.
http://www.apple.com/ipod/
I want a kid face on the final composite, I find a good one on fotolia. The kid is cute however his eyes are out of focus and he looks sedentary. I lasso him out also the iTouch ad along with one of the Steve Jobs photo. I used to really respect him, I was touched by his speech he made at the Stanford 2005. I just wonder, if all the kids are hooked up to playing games on the iTouches, they won't be able see him well enough when he makes his next college commencement.
I chose Arial as the font, as it is very easy to read, I chose a light metallic grey as the background. I used 2 shapes from the Photoshop library. The kids image is too vibrant, I used the hue and saturation reduced the red and yellow amount to match with over all greyish tone.I also got an eye image, which I used 20 px feather lasso out the oval eye then give it a 20% opacity.

My goal is to achieve a simple and powerful message. I am pretty happy with the overall result in a very short time.

Lesson 6 Typography and Poster

2010-07-18T12:36:00.000-07:00

If you click on all the photos you can see a much larger version of the poster
I am very proud that my hometown Shanghai is hosting the world expo this year. I select the night skyline of the city near the Huangpu river. The font I use is Turbuchet, a simple sans-serif. For the slogan "better city, better life" I used Emboss and gradient overlay which kind of have an interesting effect blending with the nightline. The logo for world expo ( the green simple ) on the left is a chinese character of "world", i used emboss as well, also choose the blending mode of dissolve which generating kind of sparkling effect around the edges. Another logo (the rainbow chinese character "heart" under the slogan, I use the same effect

Lesson 5 Channel Masking

2010-07-10T23:02:00.000-07:00

Here is the final composite using channel mask.

This is the original image shot by my niece Lily, I love this photo of my daughter with her two big front teeth missing. I actually like the original photo, the only reason I put it onto a different background is for this class to practice channel amsking. I learned quite a lot, as I never used channel masking before. I like the textbook mentioning mixing the red and green channel together which generate a new channel. Then I used offset of -100, to get better contrast. I use this photo for practice is the hair is kind of messy because of the wind gust at the beach. It would be very difficulty to use other selection tools.

After the channel masking (I used a variety size of brushing tools to paint around the hair, the black white screenshot of the channel mask is the best I can do. When i load the selection, some of the sky still come out. I used the background eraser tool to clear the edges, which does magic job.

For final touch I did color match just slightly tone done the color. I used clipping mask to generate the watermark (added dropshadow).

Leeson 4 Colorizing and Color Theme Composite

2010-07-10T20:05:00.001-07:00

Here is the before and after photos of coloring, the original photo was black and white, shot by my niece lily of her friend. Although the it was a great pose, the original photo was a little out of focus and to dark.

I used unsharpen mask to sharped it which got great results. I also brighten up the image about 20%. I used the gradient map qudratone supreme from the book and it turn out surprisingly well.

For color theme, I chose one of the photos of lily and my kids, the original photo was shot in front of a bush in the fall, it was a great photo with the kids smiling so naturally and just the background needs to be changed. I found this a daisy blooming in spring photo from fotolia and brought it.

I used polygonal lasso tool lasso out the rough outline of the kids and then use the background eraser tool (chose a soft brush ) cleaned the edge. I adjusted the brightnes and contrast a little and also use the clone stamp and healing patch tool to get rid of lily's bracelet on her teeth also brightened her teeth a little.

Homework 3 Duotone Guess What Are the Stuff in the Front?!

2010-07-02T16:06:00.001-07:00

Hi, Everyone: Happy PhotoShopping!!

Here are the two original photos I bought from Fotolia, yes for this homework I did spend quite a few bucks and quite a few hours. Hope you can tell what are the stuff in the front, you know the rectangle stuff in the front. I can NOT tell what they are if I did not done it myslef :-)

Here is how I did it:
1.I spent more than three (maybe five) hours finding the rectangle stuff (solar panels) on Fotolia and lasso them out (I tried at least 5 different images). I finally settled on the above photo as it is kind of the same perspective as the background photo. Still not quite happy with the selection of photo.
2. I mainly use the Polygonal lasso tool to select them, actually my preferred way of doing it is instead of selecting them, I tried to delete the background. I had done at least thousands of selections in the past year, I think the quick selection and magic wand tools are Painful, because they usually get jagged edges and sometimes miss spots later on in the workflow you realize that you missed half of of the finger! I do usually have a solid fill color layer underneath. I also cloned some part of the panel and resized them.
3. I use the CTRL+CLICK in the layer panel to select the png image. Then "selection"--"modify"--"feather" 2 fixel, after that, copy the png into the background image. That really helped blur the edge a little to merge with the sunset image.

4. The background image(sunset) is enlarged (to 960px wide)using smart object filter, I like it better than upsampling. The background image I want it to be a little blur to cause the "field of depth" feeling, so enlarge is not really a problem.
5. I duplicate the solar png layer. I did the color match to get the solar panels have the orange brown tint. (I did not do "invert", it is just too yellowish). Then I reduce its opacity to 50% and blending mode "color" with the original solar png image. Merge those two layers together.

6. I convert both of the images into black and white before I greyscale them. Using "Adjustment"--"black and white", I played with the manual settings a little to get what I think the best contrast black and white of photo.
7. I then used "grey scale" and duotune.