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| Photo Fixing - The Enhance menu; Non-destructive editing; Intro to Adjustment layers; Levels Adjustments; Colorizing with a Hue/Saturation Adjustment; Fixing red-eye |
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For my first photo adjustment I used Color Variations to lighten the photo. While I also corrected the "yellow eye", I actually have another example for that. |
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I used one of Choctaw's puppy photos which, in addition to needing "yellow eye" correction also needed to be lightened a bit. |
| To lighten the photo I used Color Variations. While the difference is slight, it lightened the contrast between the chair and Choctaw to appear as it normally looks. While the chair is a dark maroon leather and Choctaw is a dark chocolate brown, I often look for him and don't even see him in the chair. | |
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Next I used a photo from my trip to China in 1999 which also needed to be lightened. Unfortunately I took a new digital camera on the trip without having time to work with it. I ended up with about 50 floppies of mostly awful shots. One of the reasons I started using PSP was to fix photos. I can see that PS Elements has some excellent photo adjustment features. Perhaps I'll get those photos corrected. |
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This is the original photo of the Terra Cotta Warriors in X'ian China. The lighting was very low and cameras were not supposed to be used. There were many Chinese people on holiday there viewing the site and using their cameras. I managed to get a few shots taken while they were shooting. The reason so many of the visitors were Chinese is that they had all been sent on holiday for a few weeks prior to the October, 1999 celebration of the 50th anniversary of Communism in China. By shutting down all the factories the air became much cleaner and the streets were less crowded in Bejing. |
| I used the Levels Adjustment to lighten the color of the photo. The result is actually a little lighter than the actual scene, but it does make it easier to see the images. Due to the artifacts in the image I also used some Gaussian Blur and then the Unsharp Mask followed by Sharpen. The story of the Terra Cotta Warriors is truly fascinating and I'm sorry that I don't have more photos from there. | |
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For my example of colorizing a photo I started with a photo I took this summer while sharing some of the Pittsburgh sights with visitors. |
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My original photo is a shot taken from the north side of the Allegheny River. The building with the sun reflection is the Pittsburgh Plate Glass building - all glass. The trees on the right are part of the famous point on the three rivers. |
| In colorizing the photo I used Hue/Saturation with the "colorize" box checked. I increased the Hue, decreased the Saturation as well as the Lightness. | |
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The last photo correction demonstrates correcting "red eye" or "yellow eye", in the case of animal photos. Once again I've used a photo of Choctaw when he was a puppy. What a sweet face! It's hard to believe that he was that small less than two years ago and now he's 120 pounds! He still sleeps in that chair only now when he wants to stretch out his front half is on the ottoman. |
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While the overal coloring in the original photo did not need any correction, the flash left Choctaw with the dreaded "red eye" problem. |
| I tried each of the Red-Eye correction methods but found that the third, painting in new pupils, worked best for me. To get the elliptical shape correct I started with a new layer and used the Elliptical Marquee tool and then painted within the marquee. Each eye was done on a separate layer. When I deselected the Elliptical Marquee I was then able to adjust the placement of the pupil. The highlights were also on separate layers. I lowered the opacity on the highlights as well as the pupils for a more realistic effect. | |
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I really like the photo adjustments we worked on this week. I also explored some of the others available and can see how they will be of use in the future. So many photos to correct! |
