Interesting people, places and events
From the category archives:
Rachel at 35, originally uploaded by TimDD.
We celebrated with Rachel and her mother on Rachel’s 35th. This was a simple on-camera flash shot, bounced off the ceiling; significant surface blur and a good half-hour of brushing to bring the key details back. We’re going to gallery-wrap this one for Rachel’s mother, Susan.
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I have been doing a lot of reading and experimenting with Photoshop techniques — out of fear that other pixel manipulation products would take over my life. I have been making a great deal of use of LucisArt, Topaz Adjust, and Photomatix Pro — and wanted to get back to some of the “primitives” of Photoshop CS3 to build some nice images. Here is the original photo:
First observations: A great expression, but lack of dramatic punch — and several distractions in the background. Oh and there’s that nagging eyelash over the subject’s left eye. So I got out the clone stamp tool to remove the eyelash — no problem. I wanted to get rid of that pink area over the subject’s shoulder — so I matched the color of the surrounding background as the foreground color. I used the magic wand to select the pink area — then the “refine edge” capability to improve the selection. I picked up a soft-edge brush and started painting at low opacity — 20% — and increased until I was comfortable the area would match.
I also wanted to remove the upper right area reflection — and it started out pretty ugly. Here’s an interim version:
I continued to work on that area until it was properly brushed into irrelevance. It takes some experimenting to get it just right.
Next I went to the channels palette and selected the “blue” channel — it has nice contrast and detail in the beard and skin. I copied that channel, than returned to the layers palette and pasted that selection into a new layer. I changed the blend mode to “overlay,” and then applied the Sharpen / Unsharp Mask filter. Here’s the result, after selecting the “Soft Light” blend mode:
A bit stronger than I am looking for — so I pulled out the “Lorton” trick: take a copy of the original layer, place it on top of the layer stack, apply a heavy Gaussian blur, and apply the “multiply” blend mode. Add a curves adjustment layer (but don’t make any adjustment), apply the “Screen” blend mode. Adjust the opacity of each of these layers to your liking — I also added a “Hue / Saturation” adjustment layer to address the ‘cumulative saturation’ phenomenon of the activities so far.
Again: the final:
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What a fine morning walk we had with the new Gitzo tripod. This final image is the result of four vertical five-frame exposures, stitched together in photoshop. Cropped. A channel selection used to create a mask, and a couple of blending layers used to, well, undo some of the magic that Photomatix sometimes gets carried away with. Topaz helped provide some nice crunchy detail to the tree line, and a nice gradient vignetted the foreground. Orig post on flickr.
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