Launchpad C, Lesson 6: A few adjustments

It's frightening how easy this is to do, once you know HOW to do it. I'll never look at my photos the same way again :)

Janee, the first one's for you.


John, the second one's for you.

Launchpad C, Lesson 6: Replacing the Sky

There's a "late for the sky" joke here somewhere, but I can't quite figure it out right now.

Anyway, this was a cool part of the assignment. Once again, it took a lot of time (I HAD to pick a tree, rather than a simple building!), but it was quite enlightening to see what could be done.

First I fixed the sky with a sky gradient taken from another picture with a "good" sky. Then I painted out all the gray that was left using the mask. Then I used an adjustment layer to lighten the rest of the picture up and make it look a bit sunnier. And then I used Image-Adjustment-Hue/Saturation to slightly alter the color of the water, so that it would seem to be reflecting a bluer sky.

Launchpad C, Lesson 6: Layer Mask

Holy smoke! Was this ever tedious! If I were doing this for a client, I'd get my money up front!

As you can see, I still didn't really completely get rid of the outline, but I get the idea, and I want to get on with the next section: replacing the sky :)

Launchpad C, Lesson 6: Clone Tool

This clone-tool technique is very time-consuming, but the results are worth it! As you can see, the original picture has lots of extraneous people in it, and especially that little red-eyed monster behind my daughter who kept jumping into my shots at the last second. (GRRRR!)

To fix the photo, I cropped out the people on the right and a bit of the tree on the left. Then I fixed Lulu's red-eye with a paint brush; then I cloned away until the boy and the man in the background are gone, as well as the white signpost. I also used the Clone tool to fix a hole in the Christmas tree. The only thing I wasn't happy with was the top railing of the fence--it looks a bit blurry. At a large size, it's very obvious, but at a smaller size, a lot of sins are erased :)

Hmm...

I just realized, looking at those two pictures of Donya, that I should also have colored the reflection of the curtains. Oh, well. Next time...

Launchpad C, Lesson 6: Quick Mask

The Quick Mask is a very useful tool! I've been meaning to get new drapes in the living room, and now I can test out all the colors and see how they'll look!

The first picture is our dog Donya, who feels it is her job to know EVERYTHING that goes on in the neighborhood. In the second picture, as you can see, the drapes are a different color. I used the Quick Mask and set the opacity to about 60, to allow the shadows to come through.

Launchpad C, Lesson 5: Animation

This animation lesson was so much fun! And so time-consuming. I actually did the extra credit (the falling book) first, and it was easier than the banner--smaller file-size, too. The banner is really too big to actually use, but it's fun. It took a long time to get the motorcyles "gapped" just right, and on the first banner (where the bikes go around in a square) I couldn't figure out why 3 of them show up at the end, when only one is showing in the frame??

But this was really fun, and it gave everyone at Starbucks, where I was working on it, a laugh :)

My animations don't want to "animate" here, so here are some links:

Falling Book

The First Banner

The Second Banner

The Third Banner

Launchpad C, Lesson 4: Dust!

This was time-consuming but easy and very satisfying.

This is Estelle. I don't know who Estelle is, but her picture was in a folder of my mother-in-law's old photos. As you can see, Estelle's photo has been around the block a few times. I used the Noise-Dust and Scratches filter the most for the little specks, and then used the Healing Brush and the Cloning tool to get rid of the bigger spots. She still needs a lot of work to be good as new, but it's a start :)

Blue group--Lesson 4--Fixing Mike and Lulu

For this project, I used a picture of my daughter Lulu and my brother Mike. Janee asked us to open a partially closed eye, but I figured I could go one better on that (who, me? competitive?)--and besides, I don't have any other recent pix of Lulu with my brother.

First, I did Lulu's eyes. I found some eyes in another photo that were turned at about the right angle and were about the same size, and then I copied them using the Lasso tool and pasted them into this photo.

The eyes are about 2 or 3 pixels too low, but I couldn't get them just right using the Move tool--they kept snapping too high or too low. Any suggestions about how to avoid that would be appreciated.

Then I used the Healing Brush, the Spot Healing brush, and the Clone tool to blend them in with the rest of the eye socket.

Then I went to work on my brother. He'd just come back from a weeklong boat trip around the Puget Sound, and he obviously thinks sunscreen is for sissies! So I wanted to lighten him up a bit. I couldn't get him the right color with a Curves or Levels layer, but a Hue/Saturation layer worked just great. (I give credit to my friend Marie for figuring that one out--she heard me whining about it and suggested I try it.)

One question: I didn't sharpen the photo, because I couldn't figure out which layer to sharpen. Sharpening the adjustment layer didn't work, and sharpening the background layer left out the eyes. ???

Anyway, this was hard work, but in the end, worth it--it's a much better picture now. But if anyone has any suggestions about how to make it better, I welcome them. When I'm satisfied with it, I want to send it to my brother, so if you can see any improvements that need to be made, feel free to pass them along :)

Launchpad C, Lesson 3--Extra Credit

I used the same picture of the mountains and instead used the filter gallery to apply, first, paint daubs, and then rough pastels. Fun!

Launchpad C, Lesson 3--Colored Pencil

This is harder than it looks! I tried it a few ways and finally came up with something fairly odd-looking, but fun. I think all the snow made it hard to get the light right, but that's okay :)

Launchpad C, Lesson 3: Line Art

I think I need a lot more practice with this technique. I tried several different pictures, and learned along that way that shadows are veryverybad; ornate buildings come out looking like mush; etc. Here's what I came up with. I'm not so happy with it. Suggestions/comments are welcome :)

Launchpad C, Lesson 3--Gradients

Here she is: Menorah Dog!

I had a hard time with this one--I couldn't get the gradient to show up. I finally discovered that I needed to have "Normal" showing in the Mode box, but Photoshop kept wanting to change it to "Screen." Once I got that figured out, this part was fun :)

Hey, can you warp just the mask? I thought it might be fun to do that, but I couldn't figure out how.

Launchpad C, Lesson 3--Fading and Pink

Janee's question about how you'd make a photo all B&W except for the girl in pink was hard to answer, so I tried it myself. This is my daughter Lulu on the beach. I won't say how I did it, since I don't want to give away the answer to the question, but I'll say this: it was fun, and I bet there are three other ways to do it, too :)

Launchpad C, Lesson 3: Adjustment Layer 1

I've decided to post these as I go, so I don't forget what I did :)

Okay, here's my Samoyed, April. She's a very fuzzy dog, as you can see. I changed the background to blue and then painted April white again. I realized too late that I should have chose a SMOOTH object for this exercise--it took a long time to paint all that hair in strand by strand! But now I have a greater appreciation for why it took those guys over at Pixar 5 years to finish "Monsters, Inc." The smooth characters were tough enough, but the hair made them nuts. They had to invent whole new software for the furry characters, and now I see why :)