Photoshop: Blend Modes

If you have never played with blend modes in photoshop, you are missing out. This started out as a picture of Courtney and I added a photo I took of wood planks. One day when Kyle and I were in the Railyard Park in Santa Fe, we took a mini photo safari getting lots of texture pictures. This was one of them. 

Just to give an idea of how blend modes can interact, here is a breakdown of what I did. I started out by masking so just Courtney was showing and did some brightness/contrast fixes on her and then just on her face to get it to match the brightness of the rest of her. All of those adjustment layers used the multiply blend mode. Then I put the wood photo over top and duplicated it, blending with luminosity on one layer and color on the next. Then two more wood layers masking to add a frame blending with vivid light and hard mix. Then a curves adjustment layer with a mask for Courtney blending on overlay. I was really trying to get it to look like she was painted on the wood, but keep her bright enough to see all the detail. Lastly I did a texturizer smart filter to give that wood grain look to the Courtney part of the picture. 

I am quite happy with how it turned out. 

Photoshop: Quickpages

A couple years ago I signed up for classes over at JessicaSprague.com but never really did them. Now that I know photoshop, I went back to look at her classes again. I took a free class called the Photoshop Top 5 and it was a great review. She had some great tips. Something I learned about was quick pages. They are just drag and drop templates, and don't come layered so they aren't something I would use over and over again because it is hard to customize the pages. But they did make for some quick, cute layouts. All I did was add journaling (and used a brush to add the bracketed journaling areas) and my own photos. I love how they turned out...and I love how quickly digi lets me scrap my most recent photos!

 All of these photos come from our Spring Break 2013 trip we took to see Roswell, Carlsbad Caverns, and White Sands, New Mexico. And all of these pages were quick pages from JessicaSprague.com.

Photoshop: Filters and Blend Modes

This week we practiced with filters and blend modes. My favorite way to use the filters is as a smart object. I love to go back in and play, which you can't do if you do a simple filter on a photo. I also played around with digital scrapbooking, since that is where I see myself using my Photoshop skills most often.  And because it seemed like a good forum for sharing a photo edited like this--photoshop for the bad, my teacher calls it. But Courtney loved it and she was excited for me to make a page with it.  My title was made with alphas from Sahlin Studio. Being a newbie, I finally figured out the difference between alphas and fonts. Fonts you can type with. Alphas are elements that need to be dragged in and placed one by one. BTW, the smart filters I used for the photo are plastic wrap (why do I love this one so much?) and glowing edges.

Photoshop: Retouching places

And with this post, I think I am finally caught up on sharing my Photoshop class projects. We continued learning about retouching and for homework needed to retouch something instead of somebody. Last week our family went to White Sands, where we encountered stink bugs. Turns out they aren't too keen on someone putting a ditch in front of them (a.k.a: drawing a line in the sand with a stick). Courtney had fun setting up this bug race, after the bug got up on it's haunches from her drawing the starting line. He was kind enough to stay there until we got the finish line drawn.  Unfortunately, our son Ben had fun making footprints in the sand and walked right through the middle of our race. Also, the day was overcast. Great for playing outside in the sand without the glare, not as good for lighting on our photos. Photoshop to the rescue!  I removed the footprints and made the white sand more, um, white. And I just had to throw in a close up of our little buggy friend.

Photoshop: Retouching and Masks

Apologies, Mom. In class when we were learning more about retouching, we used someone with wrinkles to learn to reduce the lines. So, I found this picture of you and thought I could practice my retouching on you. I love you Mom. :)

You'll notice that in the after, she still has some lines on her face, but they are hardly there. I wanted to make it natural, not give her plastic surgery. And I also worked a lot on color and lighting. The shadow behind her was too dark and blended in to her too much. And I also removed some color in her face. My teacher recommended working on the color of the skin behind the glasses to help it blend in to the rest of the face, and I tried to do that, too. This picture was taken at the wedding reception of her first granddaughter.

Photoshop: Brushes

One of the Photoshop Week videos is about brushes. I played along with Khara (the teacher) and came up with a couple projects. The first one is a graphic piece using a brush I made from the truck photo I used on the beach composite. It also uses shapes built into Photoshop and a starburst brush I found online at brusheezy.com. It was fun playing with blend modes on this one. 

The other project I did was making a brush using Lorem Ipsum text in different fonts and at different angles. I turned it into a brush and used one large stamp of the brush as the background for this scrapbook page. I also used my mad retouching skills to remove my son rolling his eyes from this cute photo of my daughter Courtney and her best friend. Courtney wasn't too thrilled with the jibberish text in the background, so I used this chevron brush to cover it up to her liking.  The banner and flower are from the Persnickety Prints All You Need is Love kit. The butterfly is from their Storyteller kit.

Photoshop: Composites

We have been learning a lot about compositing and using layer masks. Understanding masks can be difficult, but it is integral to most photoshop work. This week we had to do another composite image. I used these photos I took in Forks and LaPush, Washington. Again, there is a lighting issue. I tweaked this picture so many times, trying to get the truck to look like it belongs on the beach, but I couldn't get it to do what I wanted. Part of it was the lighting, (bright sun on the truck, cloudy on the beach) and part of it was focus. The truck is too in focus for it's placement in the photo. But, as our teacher says, she isn't looking for perfection. These assignments are for us to practice and learn. She loves for us to come in with our problems so we can learn in class how to fix them. She showed me how to use gaussian blur to blur in the truck. But getting the light coming in from the same side as the tree, that will take a bit more work.

In this composite, I did a lot of work on color and brightness to get the truck to fit in better. I didn't think it would be this hard to make these two pictures go together. :)