|
|
 |
Getting to grips with Photoshop -
Holiday Blues Murphy's Law seems to dictate that whenever I go on holiday the light is not great for photography. It came into play again on a recent trip to the highlands. Although it was dry, unusual for Scotland, the light was poor and the skies plain and uninteresting.
Plockton was the setting for the TV series Hamish Macbeth and is a most picturesque village. As you can see above the picture lacks punch and that sky is horrible.
Having first duplicated the background layer I add a levels adjustment layer.
I click on the white eyedropper tool and move it over the white building, as I do this I watch the Info pallet until I find the brightest part of the wall, then click. This will set the white point.
That has lifted the picture already. Looking at the histogram I can see that there are not many black pixels so I will move the black point slider towards the right to give a good black. The contrast in the picture now looks better, more like a sunny day.
Next I will change the colour of the boat. Judges seem to have a weakness for red boats; I'm told that ARPS stands for "A Red Piece Somewhere".
I'm going to use the replace colour tool to change the blue to red, but I only want to affect the boat, not the blues in other parts of the picture, so I zoom in on the boat then draw a selection around it with the Lasso tool making sure to include the reflection as well.
From the Image menu choose Adjustments/Replace Colour.
In the dialog box that appears, click on the eyedropper tool then use it to sample the colour to be changed. Drag the fuzziness slider until all the blues are selected, you can see from the preview how much has been selected.
Drag the hue slider to alter the colour. Do not be alarmed if you don't seem able to get the colour you want. Colour is made up from three components, Hue Saturation and Brightness; so far we have only altered the Hue. Get the colour into the general range that is required then adjust the Saturation and Brightness.
If necessary readjust the fuzziness to change any remaining blues. When satisfied with the result click OK. Now to do something with that awful sky.
As the sky is almost the same tone and colour all over it is a simple matter to select it with the Magic Wand. Make sure "Contiguous" is ticked so that only pixels in the sky are selected. I set a tolerance of 10 for the first attempt but it missed out quite a few pixels. Moving the tolerance to 15 gives a good selection. Turn off the original Background layer or you will not be able to see anything happening, then press delete to erase the sky.
Zooming in to check the edge reveals a few pixels that were missed and the edge looks a bit ragged. I have pressed Ctrl + H to hide the marching ants outlining the selection. From the select menu choose Modify/Smooth and a radius of 3 pixels then press delete again. The edge is now cleaner and smoother.
Open up the image with the donor sky. This one was taken on a previous trip to the highlands. I often shoot interesting skies to use for this sort of work.
Using the rectangular marquee tool I select the area of sky I want to borrow, and then use the Move tool to drag and drop it into the other picture.
As the curser turns to a plus sign release the mouse button and a new layer containing the sky will be created.
The sky I have imported was shot on a 4.25 mega pixel camera, whereas the picture of Plockton was taken on a 6.25 mega pixel camera, which explains the difference in size.
To stretch the sky to make it fit use Edit/Free Transform (Crtl + T).
Using the grab handles pull the edges out until the borrowed sky is big enough to fill the space where the old sky was.
Now the sky layer needs moving behind the background. In the layers palette grab the sky layer and pull it down the layer stack until it is between the original and the duplicate layers.
The original background layer is not really necessary but I like to keep it as a safety net, if I need to I can use it to recover from a mistake. I'll leave it in place but turned off.
When combing parts from different pictures it is a dead giveaway if the lighting directions are different. Here the light is strong on the right hand face of the building but if you look at the clouds you can see it is more from the left. To cure this I will flip the sky horizontally with the Edit/Transform menu.
Use the move tool to place the new sky into position. The sky is better but needs a little adjustment to enhance the blue and bring out some more detail in the clouds.
When I open the levels dialog box for the sky layer the histogram shows the weakness.
I'll move the white slider down to brighten the highlights in the clouds and move the black slider up to deepen the blue of the sky. A slight adjustment of the mid tones just darkens the greys in the clouds.
Press the Tab key to hide the toolbox and palettes and press F twice and you get a clear unobstructed view of the image on a plain black background. Repeat the key presses to revert to normal view. I think the two buoys on the right are a bit distracting so a quick application of the patch tool gets rid of them. Finally I will add a border to finish it off.
From the image menu I choose Canvas Size and add 100 pixels
to the height and width. The centre anchor point is chosen so the extra
will be added evenly to all sides.
From the Layer menu choose Layer style/Drop shadow.
Adjust the angle, size and spread to get the desired result.
Here is the original to compare.
|
