After posting a version of this earlier today, I started wondering what the image might look like if the leaf hadn’t been amputated. Adding in a leaf is a fairly extreme Photoshop manipulation for me — I never alter the natural history of a scene in the ‘shop, and I generally tend toward minor clean up, dodging and burning, and the like. Still, my curiosity, coupled with too much spare time, and voila. Photoshop’s selection and edge refinement tools, coupled with transform and a little color clone-stamp make this easy.
So, now that I’ve done it, which one do you like? Note that the “new” version in this post has a slightly different black and white conversion and toning.
I really should be editing my 3000+ images from recent photo shoots in Monte Vista, Colorado and La Jolla, California. Instead, I’m watching photoshop videos. This video is almost as impressive as the one I blogged about last week. The stuff with the most relevance to outdoor photographers starts at the five minute mark.
I confess to uttering (several) explitives when I saw this, both out of shock, and, perhaps, from contemplating how much time this tool would have saved me on past retouching jobs.
Guess I’ll be buying Photoshop CS5 when it comes out next month.
(Note: I realize that many people are troubled by heavy manipulation of what they perceive as documentary images. I don’t disagree. This tool certainly could (will) be abused by some. But it also has a huge potential as a tool to ensure that the image matches the photographer’s creative vision. And in any event, I am not a documentary photographer).
I really like the look of a good split-tone (or even better, quad-tone photograph). The only problem is that the traditional way of making duotones/tritones/quadtones in Photosohp (using the Mode > Dutone command) is fiddly, not very interactive, and destructive. (It requires converting your image to eight bit monochrome first.)
Lately, following the suggestions of Paul Butzi, I’ve started using curves to tone my images rather than Photoshop quadtones. Paul has a great tutorial, so I won’t repeat the steps here. Be sure to grab his sample curves files if you try this technique.
But here’s the important thing that Paul doesn’t mention: you can use Photoshop tone curves to duplicate the toning applied by any scheme, be it Photoshop quad tones, your favorite proprietary toning software, fill layers, etc. That would be a huge pain to do manually. Fortunately, Guillermo Luijk has written a free utility to “extract” a tone curve from an image and save it in a tone curve file that can be imported into Photoshop. See some toned photos you like? Fire up Tonehacker and you can extract the curve from the photos and appy it to your own images. You can also use the technique to duplicate your favorite Photoshop dutotones/tritones/quadtones. You can download the utility at Guillermo’s website, just look for the “Descargar Tone Hacker 1.2″ link (much of the website is in Spanish). More info about using the software at the Luminious Landscape Forums.
Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Busy editing images from Bosque (and, unfortunately, working. Gotta pay for gear somehow). As a time filler until I post some more Bosque images, here is a series of informative and funny, but also sophmoric, crude, and probably offensive and NSFW Photoshop tutorials entitled “You Suck at Photoshop. Here’s the first one, with links to others below:
This is the first selection from Season 1; Season 2 is also available.
