Coloring with Photoshop – Skin

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com 

Photoshop Nut : Janine Smith

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We’re going to perk things up a bit with a little help from history. First, we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions; what era is our image from and what era’s style do we want to borrow from? Of course, you can color your images any way you like, but personally, I like to borrow styles from the era the image was taken in. For the really old images that may mean striving for a watercolor or pastel look of a hand tinted image and portraits taken in the 40’s may call for the more saturated, glamorous style of that era. I’ll go more into the styles of each era and inspiration at a later date, but for now, since the image I’m working on was taken in the 40’s, you can go online and find an image or images from that era that appeals to you in terms of skin and hair color. You may feel like it’s wrong to borrow an image, but It’s okay to use these images for this purpose – all you’re going to do is sample color palettes, you’re not using the image or reproducing it in any other way. I liked the skin tones in this image of Rita Hayworth so I sampled some of the colors"

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From The TipSquirrel.com Archive : HDR Sharpening in Photoshop

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Janine Smith

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I recently put a photo up on Facebook and Twitter that generated a lot of buzz, using HDR Toning in Photoshop as a way to sharpen old photos. I discovered this method while working on the Adobe Prerelease of CS5. Previously I had been using the High Pass filter, but I’ve since pretty much shifted my loyalty over to HDR Toning. Why? It’s a bit more difficult in that you have to make a duplicate of the photo and flatten it, then drag and drop it into the original file when you’re done, but for me it’s absolutely worth the two minutes worth of extra work because of the presets and, most of all, because of the results! People were messaging and emailing me asking me what, exactly, I did for this particular photo. It’s really quick and simple and goes something like this: In the midst of a huge restoration project for a client, I found this really great photo. Apart from the normal age-related damage, it had some problems. The top of the photo had some blurring – maybe due to the wind moving the trees, and it was dark and rather murky, but I love the sun shining through the trees and the two men walking along the snowy road. I’ve used HDR Toning on a lot of photos since Photoshop CS5 came out and thought it might be just the thing to sharpen the photo a bit and really bring out some detail. After I did all the normal restoration bits (specks, dots, spots, etc.), I went to Image > Duplicate. Don’t worry about naming the duplicate image, it’s a throw away, so just hit OK. Working on the duplicate, go back to the Image menu and select Adjustments, then HDR Toning. A pop-up will ask if you want to flatten the layers (assuming you have more than one, and since you hopefully won’t be doing your restoration work on the original layer, I’ll assume you do!). Click Yes. When the HDR Toning dialog box pop’s up, scroll through all the presets. There are a lot of sliders that adjust the Edge Glow, Tone and Detail and the Color; these are great to get to know and to experiment with to see how they can improve your photo, but for right now we’ll just go with a preset. I went with the Photorealistic preset, because I liked the way it sharpened up the trees without that heavy fringing that HDR can cause when not used lightly. The over-the-top HDR look has no place in photo restoration, in my opinion, but it can improve a photo if subtly done. Notice the sun looks pretty bad, but we’ll be taking care of that. After you’re decided what preset to use, click OK to close the dialog box. Making sure the Move Tool is active, drag and drop your HDR toned duplicate layer into your original file. Be sure to press the Shift key before you let go of your left mouse key to drop it into the file, so the new layer is centered. To make things look a bit better, a Layer Blend Mode is definitely in order! As with the HDR Toning presets, scroll through the Layer Blend Modes, find the one that lightens (or darkens if appropriate for the photo you’re working on) the photo enough to see all the detail, while still maintaining, or adding, plenty of contrast. I went with Lighter Color, lowering the Opacity to 70%, because it brightened up the sky in a way I liked. It still needs something, though, so I’m going back to HDR Toning! This is how easy it is to go back for another round or see if something else works better for you; just go back to your duplicate image and hit Ctrl+Alt+Z, Cmd+Opt+Z on a Mac, once to delete the state change and you’re back to your flattened image, per-HDR Toning, all ready to start again! Image > Adjustments > HDR Toning again, and you’re ready to try another preset or move some sliders around. This time, I went with the Default preset because it totally brightened up the whole image! After dragging and dropping this layer into my original file and cycling through the Layer Blend Modes, I decided to keep the LB Mode on Normal, 100% Opacity. It gave it a little more of a rosy glow that I liked and lightened up the details just a wee bit more. When you’re done trying out the HDR Toning presets and sliders and have found a look you love, you can delete the duplicate layer. And that’s really all there is to it! I initially tried all the other methods, Curves, Blend Modes, etc. to bring out the details and make a good photo great, but this worked better and, frankly, was a lot easier! Give HDR Toning a try on your next restoration project!

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Hard Restoration, Easy Fix in Photoshop

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Janine Smith

The first thing you may think as you look at today’s before image is “How in the world am I going to get all of that red-colored mess off?” Or it may not be, but for the sake of argument, we’ll just say it is. Here’s what you need to do to fix this. Pay attention to all the steps, here… Go to your Adjustments panel and choose the Black and White adjustment. Since this is a red-colored mess we’re dealing with, go to the High Contrast Red preset. Now select OK. Did you get all that?

Obviously from looking at the image you can see I’m not funning you! Sometimes it really is just that easy, especially when the problem area is distinctly a red, blue, yellow or green tone. If nothing else, this article should serve to show that it’s an area that should be checked, especially in a photo that was originally black and white or one that you’d be ok with being converted to B&W. Since this article is so short it barely warrants the description “article” (“check out my paragraphs on tipsquirrel.com!”), I’ll go ahead and go over the very few other steps I took to finish the image. I don’t care for straight-up black and white or greyscale. I think all images look better with at least a little color tone to them and the person to whom this image belongs wanted the finished image to have something like the original color, so I sampled a portion of the frame that had a color I thought might look good. I then made a new, blank layer and filled it with the color. Since the color you just sampled should be the foreground color, use keyboard shortcut Alt or Opt + Backspace to fill.

Now go through the layer blend modes to see how each one affects the fill layer. I liked how the Vivid Light mode looked both in terms of what I’m going to do later and the brightness and clarity of the image itself with it applied.

Next it was just some simple clean-up of the cracks using, mostly, the patch tool with some healing brush. I worked in the 200% - 300% zoom range to make sure I was getting everything and not leaving any smudges or artifact behind.

You may notice the insignia on the hat is a little clearer in the last version. The client requested this if I could arrange it. He told me specifically what it was, so I went online and found an image of the insignia which I then separated from the background, re-sized to fit the area, used a Soft Light Blend Mode to help integrate it with the original, and brought the Opacity down to around 17%. Now all that’s left are a few details like replacing the frame and taking down the color just a tad. To do this I simply made another Black and White Adjustment Layer, kept it on the default preset and brought down the Opacity to 25%.

Kind of amazing how an image that looks so bad at first can be improved so quickly and easily, isn’t it? I do wish they were all this easy!