I shot a few photos of the models at the Westcott Lighting booth, during Photoshop World.  Mark talked about that a couple weeks ago.  This lady, and her boyfriend model in steampunk attire, were probably the most interesting.  I drooled over the cool lighting gear in the booth and moved on, not really thinking about what I would do with the photo.

I was browsing through Matt Kloskowski’s book, Photoshop Compositing Secrets, and it looked pretty interesting.  He shows you many examples of his work and goes through the process extensively.  I highly recommend Matt’s book.  With a little time on my hands, today, I figured I’d give it a try.   I started by extracting the model from the background.

Since I don’t usually do this kind of stuff, my stock of background images is pretty small.  I settled on this door from a photowalk in Harper’s Ferry.

Matt keeps his eyes open during his travels for backgrounds that he can use later.  Guess I’ll need to keep that in mind for later efforts.  For best results, you should also use the same lens and perspective in all your composite photos.  I violated this rule completely – not only were my lenses unmatched, my photos are from two different cameras.   When I combined the photos, I immediately noticed the difference.  I put in some noise in the model photo to get closer to the look of the background photo.  I also needed to adjust the color balance to get everything similar.

In the end, I’m not sure I got it completely right.  The model still looks like she needs some more work to fit perfectly into the background.   You should give compositing a try.  It’s good practice for lots of photoshop techniques and can give you the a chance to create something that wasn’t there when you made the original photographs.

My whole life I was moving because my father was in the Navy, and I was in the Army, so I don’t have a photo of a favorite place that I can get to easily.  I decided to create a composite image from more current photos.  You can do the same.

I started with a picture of the house.  It was just a little too colorful, so I lowered the saturation a bit in the final composite.  I quickly realized that I needed to crop the image or the photograph in my hand would be too small when I aligned it with the background image.  The best crop also dictated a change from landscape format to portrait format.

I originally had my hand in the house photo, but I didn’t like the image as much as the one with my hand as the focal point.  That meant I had another photo to work into the final image.

And, finally, I needed a photo of some very cute children.  Where would I find that?  Well, Mark says I’m not happy unless I throw in a shot of a family member into the blog every couple of months, so I grabbed a shot of the grandchildren just to allow him to be proven right. 

I have the shots; now we need to open up Photoshop and get to work.

Since the house photo would be the background and the largest portion of the finished image, that was my base image.  I reduced the saturation of the layer, dulling the colors to make it look older and so they wouldn’t be as bright as the photo in my hand.

I opened the image of the hand as a layer on top of the base layer.  I only needed the hand, so I masked out the rest of the photo.

The final layer was the photo of the kids.  I used the Free Transform tool to shrink the image to appear like it was a photo in my hand.  I made sure that layer was fully saturated.  I aligned the photo to the bushes and the porch pole as you see being done in the other dearphotograph images.  I also put a white border around the kids’ “photo” to make it stand out better from the background.  When I put the kids in place (top layer) where it needed to be, it obscured part of my thumb and fingers.  I masked part of the kids’ photo, so the thumb underneath came through and created the illusion that I was holding the photo.  And the image was done.

All that is required is a sentimental caption to finish it off.

"The day is brighter and more colorful when grandchildren visit."

It was a fun little project.  If you have Photoshop, Elements, or a similar program, you can do this without too much fuss.  Keep having fun with your photography.

A friend and I were talking art (like paintings) the other day, and she wanted a new painting for her office.  While we were talking, she said she really wanted one of my photographs, but everything in her office was painted on canvas.  Too bad it wasn’t painted…  “What if it looked like it was?” I asked.

There are several software programs that, in the hands of a true artist, can convert a photograph into an image that looks like it was painted with brushes.  Fay Sirkis is such a talented artist.  You can see some of her work here.  She uses Corel Painter software to make her “painted” portraits.  I sat in on one of her seminars at Photoshop World several years ago.  She made it look so easy, but I do NOT have her skills or the software she uses.

There are some artistic effects in Photoshop that can be used to make an image look more like a painting, but they are rudimentary, at best.  (Or, maybe, I just need more practice.)   There is another way, however, for you and me to create some nice looking images with a free Photoshop CS5 plug-in from Adobe, called Pixel Bender.

The installation is simple, and you can have it up and running in minutes.  There are only five sliders to adjust, and some quick experimentation is all that is required to figure out the effect each will have on your image.  All of the effects are global, but you can use layers to build up the image if want the effects to be more subtle in specific parts of the image.

I think Pixel Bender works best on simple images that don’t have too many tiny details that are important.  Again, the effects are global, so you may want to create separate layers if you are unhappy with parts of your image. The workflow is fairly simple, and you don’t need books to figure out how to get the results you want.  I hope they’ll develop and improve this capability in the next version of Photoshop.

Print some of your favorites on canvas to enhance the feeling of a painting.  I like to use the folks at Artistic Photo Canvas.  They do a great job, and their prices are very reasonable.  You’ll be happy to hang these on your walls.

You should give this plug-in a try.  Pixel Bender will not turn you into a painter, but you can have a good time creating something different.

After making all my basic minor corrections in Adobe Lightroom, I made a virtual copy and exported it to Photoshop for editing.  Since PS and LR are so tightly linked, it keeps track of the files for you.

The first thing you can do is add space all around your picture.  Photoshop makes it easy to “Add Canvas”.  You can choose to add a fixed amount or a percentage of the picture.

Next, you select the inside of your image.  Again, Photoshop is very smart and will snap to the corners.  Go back up to the selection menu and invert  or Ctrl-Shift-I.  This will select the area you just added.  I went to the color picker tool and selected a spot of red from the base.  I knew I wanted that color for my frame. 

Next, add a new layer,  Ctrl-J,  and then under the Edit menu,  add a stroke.  A stroke is just a line that follows your selection I wanted it on the outside and played around until I had the width about right—120 pixels.  The width really depends on the resolution of your image and the size of the camera. 

That put a flat red line all the way around the picture, but now it is time for some PS magic.  At the bottom of the layers panel, fx allows you to add layer effects.  These can completely change the way that particular layer looks.  I wanted to make the line appear like a raised frame, so I went to the bevel and emboss menu.  By adjusting the height, direction and profile you can create 3D effects.  The sliders let you see how it looks as you are adjusting it.    I also added an Inner Shadow and that follows the exact same process. 

Finally, just Save the document.   Lightroom now will take control and your edited image will be there, next to your original.  It makes it a bit more of an interesting photo. 

Finished in just a few minutes

Play with the controls.  Remember you can always go back.  

Last thing folks - the registration for Photoshop World is open and is filling up fast.  If you want to really learn tips and techniques with a convention center full of like-minded geeks, join us in Orlando at the end of March.   www.Photoshopworld.com   It is worth it.

Today, the darkroom is your computer.  You can create high contrast images much easier than when I started playing with this technique in the darkroom.  And, while film changes were permanent, present methods use digitally-altered copies, and your original images can remain as you captured them.  

High contrast images have a unique look that I enjoy, but you don’t want to overuse them.  It works best with images that have distinct, simple compositions.  Easily recognizable shapes in front of sky or water work well.  Since edges within the image and details are very important to the success of high contrast images, this is not a time to use wide open apertures.  Make sure you retain sharp edges throughout the image for best results.  These images were created in NikSoftware’s Silver Efex Pro.  It works with Lightroom, Aperture, and Photoshop. 

You can use high contrast to emphasize details and textures in your images.  You won’t have to worry about the distractions of color if you’re working with black and white.  In addition, since you’re increasing the image’s contrast, the usual problems associated with direct sunlight (which reduces tonal ranges) won’t impact you as much.  The main problem from the direct light will be the harsh shadows, so be careful to avoid those.  This image was created with the tools in Lightroom. 

If you want to eliminate all the details, you can create an image that is looks like a pen and ink drawing.  This was created in Photoshop. 

Working with high contrast can create interesting images for your portfolio.  The digital darkroom tools help you transform your images to high contrast quickly and without all the chemicals and special films of the past.   I’ll show you how to create this effect in Lightroom in the next post.