I’m a big fan of organization when it comes to my music collection, videos, and photos. I use a very structured folder hierarchy and tagging process so that I have little difficulty in finding just about anything. I became a huge fan of using a program called Photoshop Elements (actually, I began with a program called Photoshop Album, which is now bundled with Elements) for my photo collection. It only made sense to me to move on from my previous photo editing program (one that had been outdated and discontinued for a few years – clicky), to the program that marries nicely with what I was already using. I don’t use the full Photoshop program, because of its obscene price tag. Instead, I use the watered-down, novice-friendly Photoshop Elements. Lately, I have made a concerted effort to learn to use the graphic EDITING features of the program, so that I can make good photos into better photos.

Some of my editing projects are done for fun (like this, this, and this). Others are done because I have an ALMOST great picture, and I really don’t want to delete it just because Tyler was in mid-blink when the shutter snapped on the camera. The purpose of what I hope to be a semi-regular series of posts titled Photoshop Phun is to showcase some of the things that a novice (yes, I am a complete novice where it relates to Photoshop, but I’m learning) can do with your almost-perfect pictures. Don’t worry, most, if not all, of the pictures will have Tyler in them, so it still fits with my daddy-blog focus, right? RIGHT?!

Here, we have a picture of Tyler with his Aunt Ace.

The picture looks great, right? Well, that’s because you’re looking at the after picture. If I showed you the before picture first, you’d inevitably say that you can easily see the difference and the manipulation was the work of a novice (which as I’ve said, it is). Here is the before picture:

The only difference is the spot of marinara sauce on Tyler’s nose that needed to be removed. Oh, and the fact that he couldn’t keep his eyes opened for the 1/200 second shutter speed.

So, how does one salvage a picture like this? His Aunt Ace looks beautiful, and I frankly don’t have a lot of pictures of the two of them together. Finding a way to keep this picture is crucial. In a nutshell, here are the bullet points in making this picture work:

1. Find another picture with the features you need. Here, I need a picture of Tyler with his eyes open. He needs to be in the same perspective as well (it’s not critical, but it definitely helps). What I mean is, he can’t have his head turned too far, since he’s looking straight on in the photo I’m trying to fix. I picked this picture, because it was taken just minutes later, so the lighting was identical.
2. Cut the eyes out of the picture from step one and paste them into the photo you’re fixing.
3. Make the cut out eyes layer 50% transparent.
4. Position the eyes directly over the half closed eyes and resize them to match.
5. Knock the opacity back up to 100% (not transparent).
6. Use the feathered-edge eraser to erase the hard lines around the cut out eyes
7. Adjust lighting, hue and saturation to match.
8. Don’t tell anyone, they’ll never notice unless you draw their attention to it.

Be Sociable, Share!

•