Need advice on touching up photos

I've been tinkering around with my newest camera (a Canon A620), and I spent last week on a cruise ship, visiting some exotic islands like St Thomas. I took up a gig worth of shots, and they're all saved on my PC. I want to touch them up, but I'm still not sure what will bring out the best results. I have Photoshop, and the camera came with it's own editing program, but I could use your advice on what effects I could apply aside from tinkering with the brightness and contrast to bring out the best quality possible.

Here's a sample of the shots, each specific in the kind of photos I'm prone to taking (outdoors, fish life, dogs, etc).

Spoiler:

Offer your suggestions, and feel free to post your edited versions of my pics.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Well, you can Level the image first, and then up the saturation. Don't overdo the saturation though.
Take a look.



Okay, the green is kinda obnoxiouse


There's nowhere I can't reach.

Hmm, I dunno, the colors look a bit washed out. It works on the horses, but perhaps it needs to be lowered a bit.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I like the doggy and the dude's statue the most, they have a lil personality to 'em. The only thing I see wrong with the horses is a little pixelation on their bellies in the edit.

One thing you wanna do is make sure that nothing is competing with the object of attention. The statue of that aristocrat (i think?) stands out a little more in the first, but in the edit the grass competes with it and the eye just decides to pull away from the image.

I have a canon rebel xt, nice camera though better ones are out there yup yup, and the first thing to learn and dominate is playing with the aperture and shutter speed of the camera, (if you can manually do it, then better). If you know about it you can freeze or blur moving objects, allow more or less light in to do so, etc... Also, getting the right angle and moment helps. I think the horse statue picture is pretty good, just wonder if it would have been better to freeze the water or blur it in motion, who knows.

Ooooooooooo! Do you know about clone stamping in photoshop? It's a sneaky lil technique you use to mask stuff up in pictures. Example! Take your first picture and open in photoshop. Click on the clone stamp icon in the tools bar, or hotkey S. Hold "alt" and click on the part of the picture you wanna copy, then let go of alt and just "paint" with the stamp over the place to paste. Try it out with the sky and that building in the first if you want completely get rid of it. Just be careful with patterns.

The fish picture could have been a reeeeeally good example of a concept in design called irregularity in pattern, where that fish with yellow colors breaks the pattern of all the other blue fish. Just one thing, the golden rule or ratio sort of divides that image rectangle into about 4 parts, so that fish would be placed in the middle of one of those but a little closer to the middle of the whole thing.... hehe lots of design crap going on all the time

Well these are all just tidbits of info that you might know. Have fun most of all, yup yup.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Quote:

One thing you wanna do is make sure that nothing is competing with the object of attention. The statue of that aristocrat (i think?) stands out a little more in the first, but in the edit the grass competes with it and the eye just decides to pull away from the image.

It's a pirate.

And I aggree, the edit takes too much focus away from the statue, which should be the center of attention. Touching up just the statue while leaving everything else intact would be the way to go (not sure if there's a way to do that though).

Quote:

The only thing I see wrong with the horses is a little pixelation on their bellies in the edit.

Also aggreed. The gold sheen is a nice touch, but the problem is that they look a bit pixelated. If there was a way to keep that color while keeping the horses smooth, then we have a winner.

I'm intrigued by the techniques you mentioned, but it would help a lot if you had pictures that serve as examples.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Wow, I need more posts before posting URLs or images. ok...?

Anywho... For the horses you can use the dodge and burn tools in order to bring out the bright and dark colors. You can do the same with your pirate or you can go using the magnetic lasso tool and loop it around him, thus you'd only end up editing whatever's inside the lasso (him) and not outside

Ok ok, I decided to show you an example using your pirate's picture!

The first attachment is your original, and the second is my edit. Can you do me a favor and post both pics up in the thread since the background is dark? Thanks.

First, I used the magnetic lasso tool and revolved it around the pirate. I adjusted the levels to increase the contrast because this is the figure of attention plus he's in the foreground. Then I saved the selection into a new channel so that I can just use the magic wand tool with that channel active, which lets me reselect the whole outline without having to redo the lasso thingy

Ok, then I copied the layer and made a new one. I gave that new one a vector mask and I gaussian-blurred the top layer to about 2.7. Then I "erased" the pirate in that mask layer so that the blur wouldn't apply to the pirate. Then to further increase focus on the pirate, I reduced saturation on the top layer (which shows the background) to -47 or so.

Then I wanted to touch up the pirate himself because he looked a little too dark. So I applied the dodge tool with a fuzzy brush to about 50% exposure on the highlights to bring out the "gold" in the buttons and the tendons on the bronze skin and such. Right now I'm just kinda concerned with the white sky (that's the issue now......... clone stamping! )

However in the end... it's all up to your taste, babe

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Hm... Let's see where to start.

Well, let's go with the doggie first:

Usually, the first thing I would do is to adjust the levels. The thing with digital photos is that you rarely get an absolute black point without having to adjust it in photoshop. You'll notice this when you go to adjust the levels.


See those three triangle things? Looking at the black lever, the histogram shows that there isn't an absolute black point. So you want to move the black lever to the right. All the dark pixals will become darker. You want to get it as dark as aesthetically possible without loosing important information in the dark areas.

Next your mid-tones. This is the middle, grey-ish lever. This can have a dramatic effect when trying to create a certain mood. Its common use is to remove color casts. You see its corresponding eye-dropper to the right under the options button? Click that. Now experiment. To remove color casts, you would take the eye-dropper and select a neutral grey. However in this case, I decided to increase the brown slightly. And that does it for the levels.

One thing that irritated me about the photo was that the floor was too bright. when levels doesn't catch this, then use the Burn tool located here:


Select a fairly large brush size (around 150 or so), set the range to Midtones and lower the exposure somewhere below 10% so you don't get a harsh and obvious mark. The result is this:



Another thing that bothered me was the the right side of the dog was too dark when compared to the floor. I wanted to balance it more. So I used the Dodge tool located where the Burn tool is. The settings are generally the same (big brush size, low exposure, midtones) and I slightly went over the right side to bring it out a bit more. The result is this:



The last thing that irritated me was the pink pillow in the background. It was drawing too much attention away from the subject. Since the color is fairly uniform throughout the pillow, I went to Select --> Color Range.


Fuzziness should be set somewhere low like 20 or 30. Select the clear eyedropper and click the pillow. Next, select the eye dropper with the plus sign. Click and hold the mouse and drag the cursor over the interior of the pillow. This will add the corresponding colors to your initial selection. Click ok.

[edit] Now that I think about it, It'd be easier to use the Sponge Tool located with the Burn/Dodge tool. Set it to Desaturate and a select a brush size that would cover the majority of the pillow without disrupting anything else. Set the Flow to something low (between 10% and 20%). [/edit]

Next go to Image ---> Adjustments ---> Hue/Saturation and lower Saturation by lowering the Master lever. Resulting in this:



I'm fairly pleased with how this came out. I usually stop after a quick level and hue/saturation change so the Burn/Dodge and Pillow Desaturation is optional of course. They just bothered me personally.

Next!

The Fishes of Doom:

This was actually pretty easy. This is a great example of a color cast.



The first thing you notice about this photo is that it's too blue/greenish, and it's flat. There's no depth at all. So again with the levels. Again, this photo lacks an absolute black point so move the black lever to the right keeping the important information in the dark areas in mind. I actually moved it further than the first picture.

Once you get that done, click the mid-tone eye-dropper and experiment again. I think I clicked one of the fishes in the lower right hand corner and the results were absolutely incredible.



There wasn't a whole lot else that needed to be done.

And last.

Statue dude:

This was probably the most difficult. The statue is slightly silhouetted which makes a straightforward level change impossible. There are a few ways to take care of this but this is how I did it:

First I took the magic wand and quickly selected the areas of the statue that have the most color conformity. After selecting most of it, I used quick mask mode to select the rest. Quick mask mode is located here:



The right button enters the mode. When you click it, you'll see red (red is the default color which can be changed by double clicking the Quick Mask Mode button) where there is no selection. To refine the selection you already have, select the paint brush tool along with the colors absolute black and absolute white. White makes the selection, Black deselects.

When you have the statue selected (everything is red except the statue) return to Standard mode by clicking the button directly to the left of the Quick Mask button. Now you'd want to go to Select --> Save selection as a new channel so that you'll always have that selection on file should you need it. Name it accordingly (Ex. Statue)

Now, with the statue selected, select a selection tool (any is fine), right click within the parameters of the selection on the image, and click Select Inverse. This will select the background. Now you can change the levels without darkening the statue.



If you ever loose your selection, go to Select ---> Load Selection and select your saved selection.

Now, with the statue selected, adjust the levels.



The statue is too dark now. To correct this, I selected the Dodge tool (settings for this usually stay the same) and lightly went over the statue until it matched the background somewhat. Now it looked too washed out. So I took the Burn tool and went over the dark areas to create depth. Then I lowered the size of the brush and darkened the finer details like the folds in the sleeves until I got this:



It still looked a little dull so I went to Select --> Load selection ---> Statue and selected the statue again. Raised the saturation in Hue/Saturation and got this:



The only thing that bothers me about this image is the sky. You could add in a sky from another photo using a layer mask but that would take some time. Check your camera, is there an option that alters the exposure levels? Perhaps you could lower them a little so the whites aren't so harsh.

[Edit] Ok, I looked at your manual and Page 54 talks about exposure settings. Usually you wouldn't mess with this cause you can just adjust these in Photoshop but if you find that your lights are too white like the sky in this photo, then adjust the exposure compensation.

Oh, another thing I should mention is when altering the levels and Hue/Saturation, you should go to Layer --> New Layer Adjustment instead of Image --> Adjustment. This way your adjustments will be stored on a new layer so that you don't alter your original.

Or you could just copy the original image and work on the copy...

Yea that's about it. Pardon the lengthiness.

FELIPE NO

That's one long-ass informative post. This is very useful, thanks man.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Oh, just to add something to Silver Ogre's entry about aperture:

In addition to stopping motion (well it's more shutter speed related but shutter speed and aperture are both interrelated), aperture can bring more focus to your subject. Here's an example of a wide aperture (or f/stop, same thing) vs. a narrow aperture:



The top is a wide aperture of about 1.4. Notice that point of focus (the tripod) is sharp while the surrounding background is rather blurry. Now compare it to the second photo which had a narrow aperture of about 16. The subject is in focus and the background is clearer.

Good for like portraits and junk. This effect can be replicated in Photoshop but I feel it’s too contrived. There’s a blur option in CS that’s supposed to imitate this but I don’t have CS :p.

[edit]Ok, I looked at your manual and on page 50 They talk about aperture and shutter speed. Refer to that if you feel bold enough to manually set those.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Yup! And once you go into this, you enter the world of lenses. In this case's example, a tele-lens (sp)... which you can use to get really cool zoom-in pictures of insects and whatnot. One thing I do with such pictures, and others of course, is to try and play with color schemes to make everything more harmonious and can really juice up images.

You can check articles online or in magazines about how to correctly play with aperture and shutter speeds to get the right image... whole worlds just about it really.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

That is some fantastic work, Kazyl. I really appreciate the advice, and I'll be sure to practice on it so I can emulate your awesome touch-jobs.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I really enjoy the pirate photo the most. One of my tips is to have taken it with a low aperture, preferably 1.4 if you have it or 2.8 is reasonable. The reasoning behind this is the same as Kazyl stated. Make the background blurry and keep the pirate in focus. It will really bring it out. You should do the same with your dog -- it will look less like a snapshot and more like an artsy photo.

Taking photos at different angles can help as well. For example, pay attention to backgrounds and such. For the pirate, I can see the back of a basketball hoop stand. That just looks terrible. An easy way to remedy this is to crop, but the problem is that you'll end up cutting off the arms. And the weather unfortunately cannot be helped, but an easy way of fixing that is to just insert your own in Photoshop or make the color of it bluer.

You should also take the horses at a different angle as well. Those horses look like good photo subjects, but the people, cars, and hotel in the back are just plain snapshot-ty. What you could've done is crouch low beneath the statues and point the camera up to the sky, which is brilliantly blue. You might get wet in the process, but hey, it's a good photo. Just make sure your camera doesn't get wet.

Overall, good set of pics, and they all can be remedied with PS.

Double Post:
Alright, here is my (bad) attempt to edit your pirate in PS. I'll go through a few steps of what I've done.

Spoiler:

Original:


My edit:

Spoiler:

Original:


My edit using Kazyl's (wonderful) mask technique:

Basically, I knew I couldn't use the lasso tool or the select tool to easily select the pirate, unfortunately. I really dislike using those tools to do that, so if anyone has a better idea, please tell us. So I first started with trying to get the sky. PS has a cool tool Filters>Renders>Clouds. Just pick a color. After that, I manually blurred the background. If I chose the time to lasso around the pirate, I could've used better techniques, such as filters, to better blur, such as under Filter>Noise for example. Then I used the dodge tool to make the face a little brighter. After that, use Curves to change the levels around, and I also used saturation to get the reds and blues of the statue out.

Edit: I just looked over Kazyl's way to select. I'll try that right now and see how it works!

Edit 2: Wow, that works wonders, but it takes a little patience and time. After you do the selection: Duplicate the layer, and select the bg. Cut it out and paste it into a new transparent workspace that is the same dimensions as the original pic. With that, I used Filer>Noise>Median at around 5 px for further blurring the background. Then I cut it out again and pasted it back onto the original pic. Select overlay or soft light or something that'll look good. That makes it a little more blurred. Then I just saturated the pirate a tad bit more.

I hope this helps! Fiddling around can work wonders too.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Dee reminded me of something. I've just recently beeb trying to achieve that shallow depth of field with photoshop for my digital pictures (I can't manually select the f/stop or shutter speed ). So I did it to the dog image:

Spoiler:

I used the blur tool which is the water drop icon next to the burn/dodge/sponge icon with a relatively low strength (10%ish). When blurring, you want to select of point of focus. Here, it's the dog. The arm of the couch is rather close to that point of focus so not a lot of blurring needs to be done there. However, the other end of the couch is further a way hence, it would be more blurry. Keep in mind though that moderation is good. Don't go too overboard with the blurring unless it needs it. But yea, that's your call.

Also, part of the dog is beyond the point of focus. His tail for example. So blur that a little too. Just blurring around the dog will give it that cut-and-paste look.

I was speaking idiomatically.

About the dodge and burn tools. I never use them. IMO, a better way to go about that is to create an overlay layer and fill it completely with 50% gray. Then, use the airbrush tool to paint black or white onto that layer. You can vary the opacity of the brush to get different brightness levels. If you don't like one, just paint back over it with 50% gray and it's just like new.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I believe you can vary opacity with dodge and burn as well. Anyway, Piccolo's way is the same concept except the added advantage I see to it is that you can use different layering properties (like soft light, overlay, etc). Depends on what you are most comfortable with.

I like that animated gif there. Spiffy. And I noticed in the dog shot there are things on the sofa! Try to remove any unnecessary objects in the background.

FELIPE NO

Another advantage to my way is that it is completely non-destructive, and also undoable and alterable at any time because it is on a separate layer. If you're working on an image and half an hour later you find you don't like the way you dodged or burnt something, just go back into the overlay layer and change it!

Double Post:

How about this:



I used the magic wand tool to select the sky, since most of it was a solid color that contrasted sharply with the man and the background. The tolerance was 30. Whatever was selected improperly I fixed manually. Most of the sky itself was already at 255, so there was no way to get any of it back, so I cloned in a sky from one of my own photographs, and adjusted the levels to match the level of haze and sunlight in the picture. I then used the quick mask tool to select the pirate, adjusted his levels, inversed the selection, and the applied a lens blur filter to the image. Then I went into LAB color mode and adjusted the curves to enhance the colors a little. I then used some of my photokit sharpener tools to selectively sharpen and bring out certain parts of the pirate.



This one was easy. I just reduced the level of green in levels, than used a nifty little technique called "Local Contrast Enhancement" to increase the local contrast between the fish. It's simple. Just go to the Unsharp Mask dialogue and set the radius to around 30-50, and the amount around 20-60, and there you go. It produces better contrast between small areas than just increasing the contrast. I noticed that the LCE blew out the highlights on the white area of sunlight underneath the fish, so I went back and did the LCE on a seperate layer, and then went into the Blending Options dialogue and dragged the highlight slider down, so that it didn't affect the highest highs.



I took some liberties with this one, heh.

And there you have it.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Sorry, I meant to reply to this sooner.

Piccolo, your touch-ups of my pictures are fantastic. That's the best version of my pirate photo yet. I'll be trying to follow your techniques from here on.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Heh, thanks. If you ever need help, just post here, or PM me.

How ya doing, buddy?

Lots of nice work here. Only problem is the way you guys have been editing the photo of the pirate statue. That round whitish object to the right of the pirate is clearly in the foreground, yet all of you have blurred it as though it is in the distance, attempting to simulate depth of field. That ruins the illusion for me sadly. You could put it on a separate layer with a very mild blur, but i'd estimate that object to be no more than a few metres behind the pirate at most.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Ulysses

Lots of nice work here. Only problem is the way you guys have been editing the photo of the pirate statue. That round whitish object to the right of the pirate is clearly in the foreground, yet all of you have blurred it as though it is in the distance, attempting to simulate depth of field. That ruins the illusion for me sadly. You could put it on a separate layer with a very mild blur, but i'd estimate that object to be no more than a few metres behind the pirate at most.

Yeah, but depth of field can be varied. Perhaps my interpretation just has a wider aperture. It was adjusted so that the DOF encompasses just the pirate. I know that is how I would have composed the shot if I had been there.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Ulysses

Lots of nice work here. Only problem is the way you guys have been editing the photo of the pirate statue. That round whitish object to the right of the pirate is clearly in the foreground, yet all of you have blurred it as though it is in the distance, attempting to simulate depth of field. That ruins the illusion for me sadly. You could put it on a separate layer with a very mild blur, but i'd estimate that object to be no more than a few metres behind the pirate at most.

The back of the basketball hoop? I originally thought that the pirate was the sole subject, so I wanted to just blur the background as if he had taken the photo with a small aperture. Besides, I think that's the biggest thing that ruins the photo. I would've probably gotten an angle without background distractions.

I was speaking idiomatically.