Digital Work flow Part 2
Continued from Part I- Initial Backup and Sharpening (Review
Part 1)
In part one we discussed corrective sharpening and color
compensation. In this installment of Digital Work Flow
we will discuss some of the ways of working with your images
from a more creative aspect. There are literally 1000s
of ways to manipulate images in Photoshop it would be impractical
to cover more than a few features here, so I have selected
3 effects that many photographers create by adjusting what
and how the camera sees a subject. First we will cover
how the camera creates the effect then how to recreate
the effect in Photoshop.
Effect 1 - Depth of Field or Distance Blur.
In the camera, the f-stop controls the amount of light
that enters the lens and the depth of field (DOF). The
lower the f-stop number the shorter the DOF. By carefully
controlling DOF a subject can be accented in the image
by causing closer and further objects to soften and become
less distinct.
Photoshop can create the same effect with the masking
tools and the Gaussian Blur filter. For this discussion,
download the reference
photo.
Lets pretend that this is the client's father and this
is was only close up that could be taken. This photo was
taken in a hurry, poorly composed and shot with the automatic
settings of the camera (please note, this is a lower resolution
example photo, as always, the better the photo the better
the result). Now lets see if we can salvage this shot into
something our patron would be willing to pay for. Digital
Work Flow Part 1 has already been applied to the
image.
1) Open in he image in Photoshop and duplicate the background
layer.
2) On the new layer with your choice of mask tool, isolate
the subject from the background.
3) Invert the selection and delete the selected background.
De-select all pixels. At this point you should see the
background from the layer below with only the subject overlayed
on a seperate layer.
4) Select the background layer and create a quick mask.
Use the gradient tool ( colors set to white and black)
to create a gradient mask from the top to about 4/5th of
the way to the bottom. This will cause the filter to be
less effective in the area closer to the subject near the
area of best focus. Switch out of quick mask to make the
result a selection. You should see the marching dotted
line. For information on the quick mask tool click
here (opens in new window).
5) Apply the Gaussian Blur filter with about 5 pixels.
Flatten the image and do a "save as"
See result here.
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