Nature walk finds.

I'm a big girl.

Playing with food... coloring.

Before the Sprinkler.

After the Sprinkler.

Photoshop Tutorial #3

Fixing a blurry picture

What a great shot this would've been if it wasn't a bit blurry. I hate it when that happens. I end up deleting most of the blurry shots and keeping just a few that aren't too bad since Photoshop can help me fix this.

Here's the origianal shot.




1. From the 'Filters' menu bar, go down to 'Sharpen' then to 'Unsharp Mask'. Use the sliders to adjust the sharpness by viewing the image in the preview box.























It's not totally crisp and sharp and can't get any better than that without it looking really bad, so this will do for me.




2. Then I look the 'dodge' tool with a medium size brush and lightened some parts of her face.

3. Next and final step, took the 'burn' tool with a larger brush and darkened the outer edges for more intensity.




The side by side comparison. Not as blurry anymore and more vibrant now.




I think this photo would look pretty cool in black and white also. So I simply set my foreground color to black and my background color to white. Then from the 'Image' menu bar, go to 'Adjustments', then down to 'Gradient Map' and there you have a lovely black and white photo.






One step further to make it a warm sepia tone... go to the half circle icon on the bottom of the layers window and choose 'photo filter'. I chose the sepia at 75% density. I like. :)

Photoshop Tutorial #2

Before I got my dslr, I relied on my p&s to take half decent photos. Well with a p&s, some come out ok and others are just eh. I relied heavily on Photoshop to fix the lighting, colors and overall, to just make it look better.

Here's a shot a took a few months ago with my Olympus FE-170. Looks pretty drab, so I'm gonna fix all that with Photoshop. Btw, I'm using Photoshop CS2. Need to upgrade to CS3 soon.



























1. I use LEVELS to bump up the lightness and contrast. Take the white slider and slide it to the left... more or less depending on the exposure of the orig photo.




















Already looking better.



























2. Create a new layer (command J on Mac) and change the layer blend mode to HARD LIGHT. Lowered the opacity to 60%. Then flatten the layers.



























3. Take the blur tool with a medium size brush and blur the background some.



























4. Now take the burn tool (my favorite!) using a large brush and darken the outer edges. I then took a smaller brush and spot burned some shadows for more intensity.



























And that's it! Look at the difference side by side! Pretty cool!