Don't trash your pics to fast !!!

Wisey said:

Yesterday I went to take some shots of a car rally that was nearby.
I couldn't get anwhere near where I could get an unrestricted view,
or an interesting angle, so I left after taking only a couple of
shots.

Last night I tried to salvage something from the day and here is a
sample of how photoshop helped.

http://www.edgestudio.com.au/5700/before_after.html

p.s. When I work out how to submit pics with my message I will do
this in the future.

Cheers.

Rob

Click to expand...

Hi Rob,

Nice moving effect that you created there, how did you do it ?

With very kind regards,

Dirk
http://www.pbase.com/dievee
Pbase supporter

Deed said:

Lovely photos, they look like an autumn evening, northern
hemisphere with it's endless period of dusk. What camera did you
use for those shots, the third one seemed to be on the ww end??
Regards
Deed
Auckland, New Zealand

Click to expand...

Hi Deed,

Thanks very much and yes autumn started a few weeks ago here. I used the Fuji S2 Pro. Could you explain what you mean by ww end (sorry but English is only my third language).

With very kind regards,

Dirk
http://www.pbase.com/dievee
Pbase supporter

GLB said:

--Again the best, you are numero uno....
GLB

Click to expand...

Hi GLB,

Thanks very much, you made me blush, all I do is doing my best as I like to see (and make) nice pictures.

With very kind regards,

Dirk
http://www.pbase.com/dievee
Pbase supporter

Hi all,

Thanks for the kind comments, I will try to explain how I did this (not easy to do for me as English is only my third language). To be clear it is not another shot, no flash use, I started from the first image to rework it PS.

1) Adjust levels on a duplicated layer (Photoshop is leaning toward turning this kind of near to monochrome images into a daylight version on Auto settings) with auto levels. Then I adjust the slider to get the % I want.

2) I duplicate the layer (called Layer 1) and blur this seriously, then I erase with a big and soft brush the part of the man out to get the underlying image of him and finally I set the amount with the slider that I want. and finally go to Hue and saturation to desaturate the background with the slider.

3) Then I duplicate the layer again (I’m always talking about the starting layer 0 when I say duplicate) and select the Layer 1 and select the transparancy of that layer and invert it and make a then Copy Paste so that I have a new layer with only the man, and I set that layer on screen and adjust again with levels. The parts that I don’t like are erased (sometimes with changing the amount for the eraser brush)

4) OK now the face is much to red due to the Auto adjustment in the levels. I go to Hue and saturation again and then I go to the red channel and change the Hue and saturation of the red color, or maybe even better I go to the Selective color and choose there the ‘red’ and adjust the color (you can see the changes in the preview). Best is again to do this in another duplicated layer of the man so that if the red changes in parts that you don’t want to be changed can be erased out so that the underlying are showing up again. You also have then the possibility to adjust even finer the amount of te change in the skintones with the slider.

5) Finally I go to the FILTER menu, choose RENDER, set it on SPOTLIGHT and play a bit around there to add a directional light (this again on a new layer so that you can erase unwanted parts out and adjust the amount of the effect on the whole image of the underlying layers with the slider)

So that’s it, I hope that you are not to confused, once used to this it goes very fast and the difficulty is to find a balanse in the light directions and amounts and make it as natural as possible, so settings will be different for other kind of images. Maybe if I find some free time I will try to show this all by making screenshots and make a PDF file that you can download, when it’s visual it will be much easy to understand I think.

All the very best,

Dirk
http://www.pbase.com/dievee
Pbase supporter

I'm glad you're not using a Coolpix, I was ready to call Nikon Tech support and ask them why wasn't my camera able to produce such a shot...

You might consider specifying what camera you use when posting here, it did make me wonder... thanks for sharing.

Dirk Vermeirre said:

Hi Hariette,

I'm using the Fuji S2 Pro but I'm posting here from time to time to
meet some friends and great photographers like Jarrell and because
my heart is still tending to Nikon (lenses, the body of the Fuji is
a Nikon, my accessories are Nikon).

With very kind regards,

Dirk
http://www.pbase.com/dievee
Pbase supporter

Click to expand...

Thank you very much. I have even more to learn about photo editing than I do about photography. I use Corel Photopaint and have done for years but I think that it has most of the capabilities of PS.

The English is fine. I used to spend a lot of time working in Belgium & The Netherlands & found that most people in both countries spoke better English than I did. (They definitely speak better English than people in New Zealand, where I am living at the moment!)

Meyricke

Dirk:

Thank you very much for the lesson... I spent the evening giving it a good on one of my photo's and I (think) I got very good results for my first go.

Thanks again for taking the time to assist us new (but we are learning like hell) types...

--
Cheers
Doug B.
CP5700; PS7; MAC Ti-Book G4

Dirk Vermeirre said:

Hi Rob,

Nice moving effect that you created there, how did you do it ?

With very kind regards,

Dirk

Click to expand...

Hi Dirk,

It is motion blur applied to a copy of the original on a seperate layer above the original.

You then an add a layer mask to the blurred image. You can then lightly airbrush out areas that you wish to be in sharper focus. The airbrushing on the layer mask lets you see the original (sharp) image on the layer below).
Cheers,

Rob
5700 Gallery http://www.edgestudio.com.au/5700/5700.html

Wisey said:

Hi Dirk,

It is motion blur applied to a copy of the original on a seperate
layer above the original.

You then an add a layer mask to the blurred image. You can then
lightly airbrush out areas that you wish to be in sharper focus.
The airbrushing on the layer mask lets you see the original (sharp)
image on the layer below).
Cheers,

Rob
5700 Gallery http://www.edgestudio.com.au/5700/5700.html

Click to expand...

Hi Wisey,

Thanks for the info, layers are a fantastic thing.

With very kind regards,

Dirk
http://www.pbase.com/dievee
Pbase supporter

Meyricke said:

Thank you very much. I have even more to learn about photo editing
than I do about photography. I use Corel Photopaint and have done
for years but I think that it has most of the capabilities of PS.

The English is fine. I used to spend a lot of time working in
Belgium & The Netherlands & found that most people in both
countries spoke better English than I did. (They definitely speak
better English than people in New Zealand, where I am living at the
moment!)

Meyricke

Click to expand...

Hi Meyricke,

No thanks, I'm glad if this could help a bit. I don't know Corel and always worked with Photoshop as I needed the CMYK conversion for my job and I'm working on Mac, but I heard that Corel has also great tools. Funny to hear that you worked here (where in Belgium ?), do you speak a few words of Dutch ? And yes most Dutchmen are good in English (they don't have to learn French as second language there like we do).

With very kind regards,

Dirk
http://www.pbase.com/dievee
Pbase supporter

D_Barber said:

Dirk:
Thank you very much for the lesson... I spent the evening giving it
a good on one of my photo's and I (think) I got very good results
for my first go.
Thanks again for taking the time to assist us new (but we are
learning like hell) types...

--
Cheers
Doug B.
CP5700; PS7; MAC Ti-Book G4

Click to expand...

Hi Doug,

I'm glad that you liked it and that it can help a bit. Playing around with the layers and other settings in Photoshop is really great to learn. This program is so fantastic that it would be impossible to put everything that can be done in a manual, it would have ten thousands of pages I think. Best is to try a lot of things out and know what they can do and then later analyse a picture, think about what you wanne reach and start using the tools. I wish you succes.
With very kind regards,

Dirk
http://www.pbase.com/dievee
Pbase supporter