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For this we are going to work on this image as a basis. Original made by Sq3r.
The first thing I do notice is that the image is somewhat blurry. The solution would be to sharpen it up, however the mistake in my opinion is that people stop sharpening the image when one area of the image gets oversharped. Im going to first duplicate the layer then on the top layer I name "sharpen" I will add two [Filter<sharpen<sharpen more] to get this result.
Now don’t get intimidated by the result, there are some areas of the beard the hair and the wooden splinters where that much sharpen is justified, however it look horrible around the eyes the skin and the spices. To
counter this, add a new layer mask to the "sharpen" layer by clicking on the "add new vector mask" button.
Select a round brush of appropriate size with the hardness set to 0% and the foreground color to black and about 25% opacity and start drawing over the areas where the sharpen is to strong. Continue to take down the sharpen in grainy areas until your image looks good again. Just beware not to revert the image back to looking blurry again. And if you feel you need to redo the sharpening in any area just set the color to white to paint it back.
I do like the colors in this image but there is always room for some improvement I want to make the colors look a little less widespread and more intense. Blending modes is a good way of improving colors quickly, with the risk of images getting a bit dark/light, however there are cures for that later.
for now I want to sharpen up the colors a bit by using a blur
... first we don’t want the sharpen effect to come along here so I make a copy of the original layer and put it on top of the two I currently have. Then I go to [filter<blur<surface blur] and do this.
Then I go under image adjustments and desaturate the image as we don’t want the color saturation to change and then put the layer to overlay. At 100% opacity stuff looks pretty evil and dark so I start of by playing with the opacity until I come around a level that makes an area of the image look improved and toggle the layer on of to see if it gets better in opinion. At 50% the spice jars look good but not the face and once again masking is the way out.
Once again start brushing away at the mask to hide away what looks bad, for example the top shelf and those eyes look awfully dark.
After that I added a hue/saturation adjustment layer with +15 to saturation settings, on top of the layer stack to further add some of that orange colourset to the image.
Im quite satisfied with this result but let’s say I wanted to make this image speculary lighter, I don’t want to have my whole image to be lighter, only the oncoming light. People often turn to the levels slider to lighten up the lighter colors. Myself, I feel when it comes to photos the levels often do a poor job maintaining the picture sharpness and quality when you want to apply more or less extreme modifications. Using masks and blending modes however proves better suited.
To apply an effect such as a blending modifier to your work requires you to have something to blend something against often a slight modification of what you already have or no modification at all does the trick just fine.
The useful tip here is the "make a new merge of what you see on screen into a new layer but leave the underlying layers intact" function. To use this, make a new layer then hold down on PC(the doodle instead of Ctrl on Mac) alt-Ctrl-Shift and E. This will snapshoot what you have and see into a raster on the new layer.
To this I added 4 pixels of Gaussian blur, increased the lightness by levels about 15% and set the layer blending mode to screen then I applied a mask, just like we have done and masked away areas of shadow and around the speculars. I then increased the effect by duplicating the layer Crtl/doodle J and then merging the two layers together with masks and all checking the "Preserve mask" when the dialog box asks and continuing to mask away areas with to much specular until I reached this result.
Compare the final outcome and the orginal
Masks are great using all kinds of effects like sharpens, blurrs, adjustmentlayers, blendings. Hope you enjoyed
Edited by Dance, 11 August 2006 - 06:14 PM.
