Filters

For this assignment, I took a picture of my cat, Cinderella, sitting upon the windowsill on a sunny afternoon.

My first filter I used I wanted to give the impression that it was a sort of distorted glass window, like the kind you see at a Dr's office. I used the Distort, Glass filter to get this look.




>> For my second application I wanted to make something a bit more intriguing. I played with the artistic filter, Cutout to come up with the image you see to the right. It's reminiscent of cel-shading animation, a favorite graphic style of mine.








For my last assignment I was a bit lost. Concerned that any filter I would would be more for ' it looks cool ' than an actual direction, I strayed from the path a bit. I found the extract filter which allows you to isolate a selection of the image. Below is my selection:

Above is the final selection I chose, but I did have a few alternatives when figuring this out, as shown below.



For the final picture, I edited a small cities skyline, creating a new layer, and applying a variety of filters. Here are my two favorites. On the left I used a variety of filters, but have seem to lost my exact list in what order. On the right I simply used a watercolor filter.

Paint, Edit and Heal

I started off by mirroring the image and making the appropriate selections. From there it was basically filling in areas, using various paint brushes with different sizes and nothing but creative fun. I wish I hadn't turned this assignment in a bit late because it really wasn't difficult. Here are the blank mirror image, an initial coloring, some work with a paintbrush inside the lions face and finally, I added some grass using brushes that work like blades of grass. There was also another brush I used in creating the clouds, alternating in size and intensity to give them that fluffy, cloud feel. Overall, I think it looks pretty nice, kind of like a cover of a kids book.

Selections Part 2 cont...

For my second picture I wanted to try to put my face onto someone elses head. It was a much more difficult task than anticipated but I like the results. It also allowed me to use some of the lessons learned in the last chapter to make the image more realistic.

I choose a picture of Conan the Barbarian, I know being humorous was not part of the assignment, but I felt comfortable enough with the material that I could make a humorous image with relative ease. Throughout the process of making this image, I decided to take screen captures, since I am a very visual-oriented person, looking at these helps jog my memory on the steps I took, and also allows people to visualize the process as reading.

Let's start off with my picture and the picture of Conan, who is played by current Californian govener and long-term movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger.





The first step I took was to remove my face from the image. I flipped it horizontally and used the magnetic lasso tool to select a similiar edge to Arnold's face.



Refining the edge, I made it more round, removed the feather and took away any 'radius'. This made a clean 'cut' and allowed me to past the image right onto the face.



Using the opacity feature again, I lined up my faces features and Arnold's, making a decent match. Because of our actual face proportions I slightly stretched my face vertically to make it appear more realistic. Ideally, I could have cut my face out identical to how his was, matching with the shadow, but I found a sort of 'work around' I'll discuss later.



Our skin tones are way off. (That lack of Juneau sun really shows!) so I altered the curves, as well as the color balance to make them more similiar. I find out here that matching skin color can be extremely hard. I now understand a reason behind the 'dancing images' being black and white. I also used the smudge tool to slightly blend under my chin and on the side of my head.



I added some noise to the image next, to make our skin texture more similiar.



The final step I wanted to take was to make the lighting on my face more similiar to that in the original image. Because I didn't include the 'face shadows', I wanted to darken the back of my face and increase the brightness on the front. This feature is extremely easy to use and helps in making depth in the image.

I am fairly happy with the results. Because of my troubles with matching the skin tone I also converted it to black and white just to see what it looks like. The images are juxtaposed below.

Selections Part 2

This was fun! I've done something like this before, but not with Photoshop. I wasn't too fond of the dancing pictures (not that I didn't like them.... it's just not 'me', and I felt like making this project a bit more 'personal')

This is my first attempt and it turned out quite well. I randomly found this image the other day and thought it might be a good image to start with. I had to retake the pictures of myself because the backgrounds were not only too busy (made it hard for clean selections) but also because the lighting was too off.

Let's start off with my 'scary mug' and the image of 'Neo'




I started of by using the magnetic lasso and removing my face from the image. This is a really handy tool, but I had to try a few times before I got a good selection. I refined the edge and removed the feather and also smoothed out the edges.

Here is a screen capture of the process.


You can see in the screen capture I had removed Neo's head. This was from previous tooling around. I was attempting to use the "Paste Into" feature, but I realized it would only clip my head, resulting in a non-realistic image. Instead, I pasted my head directly onto the 'Neo' image.



Making the image opaque allowed me to visualize the placement of my face, lining up the nose, eyes and ears.

As you can see here, it is a fairly close match. I scaled the image to give it a more exact proportion.



Removing the opacity from the image. I was left with the process of making my face seem less like a 'cut and paste' and more realistic. I turned up both the Hue and Saturation. I then used a filter called 'Add Noise'. This gives the image a grainy feel. My face was crystal clear and the 'Neo' image was most likely a capture from a video, because of this the textures were way off. I added 2% noise and it made a pretty good match.

Here is the finalized picture.


It actually turned out pretty good. The shadows on my face is what throws the image off. So, instead of retaking my picture, I tried making a more 'theatrical version'. Adding a small lens flare on the middle left of the image in combination with using Lighting Effects (Spotlight) from the direction of the Flare gave it a slightly more lively feel.



If I've learned one thing with selections, taking a step back to look at the image really helps in making more appropriate changes. Looking at this Neo image I made the other day I already know a few different approches or techniques I could've used.

Right now I am working on a second image with my face, but I just wanted to post this and take a quick break.

Selections Part 1

I am already rather familiar with the selection tools in Photoshop so the initial selection assignment took me all but 10 minutes. Using the square selection tool, I made the 4 boxes at each corner of the 8inx8in image. Next, using the Polygon selection tool, I made the 'plus sign' within the 4 boxes. Using the 'subtract from selection' option and using the circle selection tool, I 'took out the middle' of the 'plus sign'. Using 'subtract from selection' with the Polygon selection tool allowed me to cut out the 4 triangles. Simply right clicking on the selection and pressing 'Fill' gave me the option to fill in everything at once. Easy peasy. Overall, this was a rather simple assignment but hands down it's one of the most useful things to learn in Photoshop. The ability to pick and choose what parts of an image you want to use is imperative for graphic design. As mentioned above, I am somewhat familiar with the selection tools in Photoshop (similiar to those in Gimp) so this was a nice 'refresher' for my memory.



I'll post the other assignment later today, still working on it.... the lighting of my 'mugshots' was a terrible match.

Color and Balance

Just waiting for class to start, so I was goofing off with Photoshop... took a panorama picture from a few years ago near the glacier and made it much more 'alive'. Never thought a slight adjustment in colors and levels could really change a picture. What was once a dreary Juneau day now springs with life!

Project 2 : Highlights, Midtones and Shadows & Color

This project was enjoyable but it certainly has showed me that if I am to eventually become more familiar with Photoshop, I am going to need to start asking more questions! I started the chapter last week on Friday and have tinkered with it over the weekend and the past few days but no matter what I try, I can’t seem to get the results I’m wanting… regardless, here is my attempt at Project 2.

We’ll start with the first assignment, which was ‘Adjustments’…

The first thing I noticed is the image appears much brighter in Adjustment 2, the desired image. To remedy this I increased the brightness slightly in keeping with the theme ‘big to small’, as instructed by the book. Setting the brightness to +35 was just enough to allow me to see certain shadows but not too bright. I ticked up the contrast a few notches to keep the road from appearing washed out and containing it’s ‘wet’ look.

The shadows of the image aren’t as dark as they should appear, so I used the Levels command to fix this. On the RGB channel, increasing the minimum value to 16, and lowering the highest value to 221 increases the darkness in the shadows but also the glow the highlights produced.

At this point, I felt I had made some progress so I saved the image as a sort of ‘check point’. I’ve had many (bad) experiences where I get caught up in the ‘editing action’, only unable to revert to my desired spot. I saved this as ‘Adjustment 1 Progress’.

Continuing, I opened up hue and saturation, setting the saturation low and the hue rather high. I thought at the time this would be an appropriate edit, but it was actually the first mistake of many. I couldn’t get the colors properly balanced, so I opened up Color balance instead, only to no avail. Everything seemed off no matter what adjustments I made. Struggling with this for a while, I decided to revert back a few paces, heading back into Hue/Saturation. I enabled the colorize option, setting the hue to 40 and the saturation to 30.

It looks decent but it’s not as good as I’d like it to be, so I step back into the Color Balancer and increased from cyan to red & yellow to blue, ever so slightly. It’s still way off, so I figure it may just be best to start a clean slate and restart, after all, this is a learning process!

I reload both images (scrapping my ‘progress’), this time I set the Levels to 10, 1.13 and 183, respectively. This gives me a much more appropriate pallete of colors to work with. I realized I should have set the brightness up a notch beforehand (‘big to small’), so I do that quickly, increasing it just a few notches, as well as the contrast. The brightness is set to +10 and the contrast to +20.

Opening up Hue/Saturation, I set them to 40 and 25 respectively to get a more desired hue. The image was a bit to yellow for my tastes, so I opened up the Color Balancer and made the following adjustments ; +8 towards red, +3 towards green, and +10 towards blue. The final result is about as good as I can get it with my current understanding. I’ve spent several hours on just this one adjustment, jumping around, trying new things but I obviously have only documented several failed attempts, and my latest ‘success’. The image is acceptable, but what bugs me the most is the ’50’ on the light posts. Somehow the yellow 50 is turning a shade of blue and I can’t figure out how to keep this from happening.

The Results:

The 'Colors' project I was a bit more comfortable with...

I used the Adjustments Match color and set the luminance and intensity to be comparable with the desired image. After that, I used Saturation to remove some of the orange from the image and also increased the Hue to correct the lighting. Bear with me, but according to my notes I then attempted to use the Levels command to increase the depth of the blue on the window. This didn't work out and a failed attempt at using variations results in me going to the color balancer. The Variations is a really nice tool, but it is way too 'specific' in altering an image it seems. In the color balancer I fiddled with the bars until I got the blues and greens in a way I liked them. Right now I am hating myself because I had written up an equally lengthy and detailed account of my progress through 'Colors'. I used a new image hosting site to try and include thumbnails in the blog but it gave me an error, deleted a piece of the HTML and also half my write-up. Tomorrow, I'm hoping that I can give this another shot with a rested mind at work and turn in something maybe better, late.

The results:

I’m hoping the next online class, tomorrow, John will be able to give us some insight on his process on these adjustments. The concepts of adjusting brightness, contrast, levels, using curves and histograms, as well as hue and saturation, are like wet cement in my head right now, flimsy, but somewhat concrete, even though I have watched the videos and read the chapter twice now. I spoke with a distant friend who works in the graphic design industry and asked him about the difficulty of an assignment like this for a beginner and he said my results were certainly decent for someone who has never used Photoshop before. Even though he said that, it still didn't make me feel better about my results. Either it’s my brain demanding more explanation, or simply the combination of a long day and exhaustion. Regardless of my frustrations, I have gained from these chapters a basic understanding for adjusting color, hue, and contrast. I’m hoping improve my grasp of these concepts throughout the semester and into a possible career in graphic or web design...