Elements 3 13 Miscellaneous Techniques - Wofford Collegewebs.wofford.edu/whisnantdm/COURSES/DigitalDarkroom... · 2006. 12. 16. · Lesson 13 Elements 3 – Miscellaneous Techniques

Lesson 13 Elements 3 – Miscellaneous Techniques December 16, 2006 David Whisnant

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Photoshop Elements 3 – Miscellaneous Techniques

There are several useful Photoshop Elements tools that we haven’t covered in any of the other lessons. Here they are.

The Spot Healing Brush Tool

The Spot Healing Brush tool is similar to the Clone Stamp tool. It is particularly useful in removing small spots – dust from an image for example.

Open Dust.jpg and save it as Dust_1.psd.

This is a scanned photograph that has a lot of spots on the sky from dust that was on the slide when it was scanned.

Zoom in to 100% and look for dust on the image. A few spots are indicated by arrows in the picture at the right. We need to remove the spots.

We could use the Clone Stamp tool to do this, but the Spot Healing Brush tool is even better for this purpose.

Choose the Spot Healing Brush tool from the toolbar. Set the size to somewhere around 20 pixels and the type to Proximity Match.


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Position the Spot Healing Brush cursor over one of the spots and click the mouse. You should see the spot disappear.

Repeat this process for the other spots on the image.

As you can see, this is a quick and easy way to remove spots from an image.

The Healing Brush Tool

The Healing Brush Tool is like the Spot Healing Brush except that it is useful for removing lines rather than spots.

As an example, open LindaMe.jpg and save it as LindaMe_1.psd. As you can see, this is a picture of a wizened elderly man and his child bride. We would like to flatter the old guy and remove the wrinkles on his forehead.

Zoom in to 100% and focus on the old guy’s forehead.

Select the Healing Brush Tool.


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Set the Diameter of the Healing Brush to be slightly larger than the width of the wrinkles – maybe 12 pixels or so.

Position the cursor next to one of the wrinkles and sample this area by holding down the Alt key while you click with the mouse – similar to sampling an area with the Clone Stamp Tool.

Holding down the left mouse button, sweep the Healing Brush over small portions of a wrinkle, one after another. For example to remove the portion of the wrinkle shown in the picture at the right, I applied the Healing Brush five times to successive small portions of the wrinkle.

In my experience, removing small portions is important. If you try to remove the entire wrinkle at once, you may cause problems with the image.

Remove all the wrinkles from the old guy’s forehead. When you are through save the picture as LindaMe_2.psd. We will use it again.


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The Sponge Tool

The Sponge tool allows you to selectively saturate or desaturate colors in a small section of an image.

Open Posters.jpg and save it as Posters_1.psd.

This is a photograph of a several posters plastered on a wall. You worked with this photo earlier as a practice problem in the Selections lesson. Suppose we want to draw attention to the posters for two of the bands – Albert Hill and Dezeray’s Hammer.

Crop the photo and adjust its brightness and contrast with Levels.

Save the picture as Posters_2.psd

Choose the Sponge tool with these options

Size around 50 pixels Saturate mode Flow around 50%

Holding the left mouse button down, run the Sponge tool over the Albert Hill poster to increase its level of saturation. This will draw attention to that poster.

Do the same with the Dezeray’s Hammer poster. You might notice that this doesn’t work as well because of the yellow cast it gives the poster. Use Undo History to cancel these changes.

Save the picture again.


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The Sharpen Tool

If you need to sharpen an entire image, you almost always will want to use the Unsharp Mask. You may encounter a situation in which you need to selectively sharpen a small portion of an image, though. The Sharpen Tool is designed for selective sharpening.

Open AllTerrain.jpg and save it as AllTerrain_1.psd.

This photo is in dire need of sharpening, mainly because the vehicle was moving at a high rate of speed when I took the picture with a telephoto lens (to avoid being run over). Motion blur creates a difficult image, but we will do what we can.

First Zoom in to 100% and use the Unsharp Mask to sharpen the entire image. Sharpen it much more than usual – maybe 200% with a radius of 1.1 pixels and a threshold of 15.

Choose the Sharpen Tool from the toolbar. Choose a Size of around 60 pixels and a Strength around 20%.

Place the Sharpen Tool cursor over the face of the young boy, which needs more sharpening. Hold the left mouse button down and sweep the cursor over the boy’s face to sharpen it somewhat. Be careful not to do this too much or the face will become blotchy, as shown below. Remember, you can always Undo an action if you go too far.


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Use the Sharpen tool to sharpen the man’s face, his gloves, and the headlights of the vehicle. At this point we are far from having a perfect picture, but given the conditions under which it was shot, it is not too bad.

The Blur Tool

As you probably can guess, the blur tool can be used to selectively blur a portion of a photograph. This tool can be an important for cleaning up images that have been changed with other tools.

Open LindaMe_2.psd, the picture in which we removed forehead wrinkles using the Healing Brush in an earlier part of this lesson. If you zoom in on the forehead, you may notice that it is somewhat mottled – some because the old guy’s forehead is mottled to begin with and some from the application of the Healing Brush. We can smooth the forehead out a bit by applying the Blur Tool.

Select the Blur Tool from the toolbar. Choose a Size around 30 pixels and a Strength of 50%.

Holding the left mouse button down, sweep the Blur Tool over the forehead. You should see that this softens the imperfections there.


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Eraser Tools

There actually are three types of eraser tools.

Eraser Tool: The usual tool that we already have used.

Background Eraser Tool: Deletes pixels around an edge of an object

Magic Eraser Tool: Selects similarly colored pixels and erases them.

Open Dance.jpg. Crop the photo so that only one dancer is shown and save the cropped image as Dance_1.psd.

We want to extract the girl’s body from this image and paste it into another to create a photomontage.

Choose the Magic Eraser tool, which is useful if you want to erase a large area of the same color. Set the Tolerance to 25 and check Contiguous.

Click on the dark areas of the picture to erase the background. You may need to clean up the image with the regular eraser to produce an image like that at the right.

Use the Clone Stamp tool to remove the last bit of the scarf held in the girl’s right hand and overlapping her left arm.

Use the Blur tool to smooth out the edges of the figure.

Use the Paint Brush tool to build up and outline the girl’s right hand slightly.

Save the final picture as Dance_2.psd


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Creating a Photomontage

Open a second picture, River.jpg and save it as River_1.psd.

We are going to create a photomontage that will make it appear as if the girl is swinging from the lines strung across the river.

Go back to the picture of the girl. Select the entire image and copy it.

Go back to the picture of the river and paste the girl’s figure into the picture.

The girl’s body is too large for the picture so we need to shrink it down. Select the layer containing the figure.

Choose Image, Resize, Scale from the main menu.

Click on the chain icon in the Options toolbar to make sure that the aspect ratio is locked. Locking the aspect ratio changes the two sides of the layer proportionally so that the figure retains the correct proportions.


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Change the width or the height of the layer so that the girl’s figure is about the right size. I chose 27%.

Zoom to 300% and move the girl so that her right had appears to be holding onto one of the lines and her left hand is reaching for a second line.

The girl’s body now is in place but the picture doesn’t look realistic because her entire body appears to be on this side of the cable. We need to do a little erasing to improve the picture’s perspective.

Zoom in to 700% and erase a little of the top layer so that the cable shows through in front of the girl’s face, as it would if she were behind it.

You can tell from the shadows on the rock wall at the right that the sun is on the left side of the picture. The girl is positioned in the sun, so there should be shadows on her body. Slightly burn in the right side of her body to darken it. Slightly dodge the left side to make it lighter.

If necessary, blur the edges of the girls body so that it does not stand out too much from the background, which can look unnatural. Using discretion, you also might try using the Sponge Tool to slightly saturate the girl’s figure.

When you are through, flatten the image and save it as River_3.psd.


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Toned Monochromes

Sepia-toning is a technique used by photographers to produce a warmer “black and white” image like that in many old photographs. This is a nasty and dangerous process in the darkroom, because sepia toners usually contain selenium or sulfide, which are poisons. It is easy, and a whole lot safer, with Photoshop Elements.

Open Sepia.jpg and save it as Sepia_1.psd.

Use Image, Mode, Grayscale from the main menu to remove the color from the image.

You will be asked if you want to discard color information. Click on OK.

Now choose Image, Mode again, but set the mode to RGB Color again. Even though the color information has been discarded, choosing RGB Color will allow us to give image color again.

Use Levels to adjust the brightness and contrast of the image.

Choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Hue/Saturation from the main menu.

Check the Colorize box in the Hue/Saturation window

Vary the hue and saturation of the image to produce a pleasing warm slightly red-brown color. One web site on sepia-toning1 recommends the following settings:

Hue = 34 Saturation = 20

Save the toned monochrome as Sepia_2.psd. Remember this technique. When we restore photographs later in the course, we frequently will sepia tone an old photograph once it has been restored.

1 “Sepia-Toning a Photograph,” http://www.myjanee.com/tuts/sepia/sepia.htm

http://www.myjanee.com/tuts/sepia/sepia.htm


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Pegging Black and White Points

Pegging black and white points is an alternative to using the Levels Histogram to adjust tonal levels in an image.

One of the most common problems in the renovation of old photographs is that they are faded. Fading, which is due to black silver particles being altered by light and exposure to oxygen in air, artificially shifts a histogram. Because of this, moving the histogram pointers to meet the histogram curve may not faithfully reproduce the tones in the original picture. On the other hand, if you can find a point on the faded picture that you think originally was black, you can say “make this point and others like it black” by pegging the black point. You can do the same with the white and gray pointers. Pegging two or three of these points usually is enough to shift the images tones close to their original state.

The Info Window

Open Harbor.jpg and save as Harbor_1.psd.

Open the Info palette by checking Info in the Windows menu.

If you point at a pixel on an image with the cursor, the Info palette displays the tonal values of the three colors (R, G, and B) of that point.

For example, the tonal information shown at the right for a pixel is

Red = 251 Green = 248 Blue = 243

Remember that tones stretch from no color (0) to highest intensity (255). The pixel with the information shown at the right has all three tones close to their highest intensity. This pixel must be nearly white.


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On the other hand, the pixel with the information shown here has all three tones close to zero. This pixel must be nearly black.

Pegging the Points

Open the Levels window for Harbor_1.psd. Notice the three small eyedroppers in the lower right corner of the window. The left dropper is the black dropper, the right dropper is the white dropper, and the one in the center is the gray dropper.

Click on the black dropper in the levels window. Move the cursor over to the picture, at which time the cursor will look like a dropper. Move it around the picture looking for the blackest pixel you can find, monitoring pixel color in the Info window. The pixel I found is indicated by the arrow at the right (R=21, G=22, B=24). This is close to black and probably actually was black in the actual scene.

When you find the blackest pixel you can, click on it with the black eyedropper. This pegs the black point.

Now click on the white dropper in the Levels window. Bring the cursor over the picture again, at which time it again will look like a dropper.

This time look for the whitest pixel you can find. The best I could do was on a boom sticking up from the dock on the other side of the ship. The pixel is indicated by the arrow (R=255, G=251, B=237). This pixel is close to white and probably was white in the actual scene.


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When you find the whitest pixel you can, click on it with the white eyedropper. This pegs the white point.

You should see that the Histogram has changed and is more spread out over the entire range than it was. It is not perfect because the right slider is not on the end of the Histogram. This probably is because the picture did not contain many pixels that were pure black.

Gradient Map Effects

The Gradient Map command does two things:

Converts the image to an equivalent grayscale

Maps the grayscale image to the colors of a specified gradient fill.

As an example, suppose we begin with a grayscale image like the below

We then use a gradient map that converts pure black to pure red and pure white to pure green. Combinations of black and white (gray) are converted to combinations of red and green.

We can use gradient maps to achieve some striking effects.


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Open SnowScene.jpg and save as SnowScene_1.psd

Create a Gradient Map Adjustment Layer.

When you do, you probably will see the image converted to its equivalent grayscale.

Clicking on the inverted triangle by the grayscale mapping will display a list of colors you can use for the mapping.

A wider range of options will be displayed when you click on the triangle inside the circle.

The best way to learn about Gradient Maps is to experiment. Try different maps on the snow scene to see which ones you like.


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Practice Problems

1. Peshtigo.jpg

Use the sponge tool to selectively saturate the boater

Sharpen the image

2. OldState.jpg

Rotate the image until the center of the building is straight. Crop the image.

Adjust the perspective

Remove the man and the umbrella stand in front of the building

Use the Sharpen Tool to roughen up the area from which you removed the man and the umbrella stand

Sepia tone the image

Documents

Elements 3 13 Miscellaneous Techniques - Wofford Collegewebs.wofford.edu/whisnantdm/COURSES/DigitalDarkroom... · 2006. 12. 16. · Lesson 13 Elements 3 – Miscellaneous Techniques