Classes
Lesson 1 Introduction to PSE 5.0 and printing
images.
Lesson 2 Improving the basic photograph
Lesson 3 Retouching general images
Lesson 4 Retouching images of people
Lesson 5 Tips and techniques for going further
Lesson 6 Brief look into creative Photoshop Elements
Assignments
Lesson 1 Reading: Pages 1 – 45
Homework: Using the procedures developed in class
produce a final print for the file BonVoyage.jpg. You should consider straightening the horizon,
quarter inch borders, portrait orientation, and printing on letter sized photo
quality paper. Do the same thing with
one of your photographs.
Lesson 2 Reading: Pages 46 – 71
Homework: Try the quick fix method of improving image: Overexp.jpg. Using the selection method outlined in class
crop the image to remove the really bad material. Use the Adjustment Layer technique to improve
the image: PatShadow.jpg. Do any of the
above to your own pictures.
Lesson 3 Reading: Pages 72 – 107
Homework: Practice isolating figures from Beckham’s
images. Some are easy, while others are
hard. Try: layers 1.jpg, making montages
1.jpg, and making montages 13.jpg.
Practice workflow on your own pictures.
Lesson 4 Reading: Pages 108 – 131
Homework: Practice retouching with three of Beckham’s
images: restoring old photographs 1.jpg, retouching portraits 4_1.jpg, and retouching
portraits_2_1.jpg. See what you can do
with some of your own portraits.
Lesson 5 Reading: Pages 132 – 185
Homework: Use the
techniques on page 114 to convert: color to B-W1.jpg to B & W. Create faux DOF with: depth of field effects
6.jpg. Do a vignette with:
KimonoGirl.jpg. Work on your own images.
In
Class Lab
Lesson 1 Goal: Produce a “ready to print” image.
Task: Start with the test picture called
BobPatSkiing.jpg. Resize the image such
that its height is 14 inches at 300 ppi.
Do an 8 by 10½ fixed sized cut of a pleasing section of the photo. Paste this on to a letter sized blank new blank
file that has a resolution of 300 ppi.
Lesson 2 Goal: Get to feel comfortable with Quick Fix and
Adjustment Layers.
Task: Use Quick Fix to improve on Beckham’s page 24
example. Use Adjustment Layers to
correct Beckham’s page 32 image. If time
permits, work on other Beckham images.
Lesson 3 Goal: You should begin to feel comfortable taking
apart images and making adjustments to each segment.
Task: Work on the image: Parasail.jpg. Here are some ideas for modification: Try to straighten the horizon. Improve the overall contrast and
brightness. Isolate and enhance the sky. Isolate and sharpen Pat. Isolate the chute and play with H/S/L.
If you find you have extra time try to cut
out the girl from the image kimono girl a.jpg.
Once you have a copy on the clipboard you might try to paste it into the
scene called Ocean.jpg. I have made this
task easier for you by scaling both pictures to approximately 4.5” by 6.0”.
Lesson 4 Goal: You should be able to improve on portraits
you take. In this session you will
retouch the picture of Mike’s younger brother, Keith.
Task: Use the same workflow we used in class with
the image of Mike. You will use the
image of Keith, Keith.jpg. Start by
isolating the subject and remove him from the background. Next “heal” Keith’s acne. Remove any highlights from the picture. Do not sharpen the eyes as the glasses make
this very hard to do. Add an interesting
background to the final picture.
Lesson 5 Goal: To master some additional image altering
techniques.
Task: You will want to exercise extraction,
perspective correction, and faux depth of field techniques.
Lesson 6 Goal: To be able to recreate the silk screen effect.
Task: Load the photograph SilkLight.jpg into
PSE. Starting with the sky, select broad
areas of the image and create a layer via copy.
Choose a color and “paint bucket” that color into the area. Be careful with the windows of the lighthouse. Select the windows before you do the body of
the lighthouse. Then when selecting the
body, exclude the painted widows with the Magic Wand by area subtraction.
Notes
for Lesson 1
Intro Introduce the course as a whole.
Objectives Explain the objectives for the entire
course. Point out that this is just a
small subset of PSE. There is a lot that
we do not have time to get into; image organization for example. PSE is a really big program. The objectives are the things I want you to
be able to do after taking this course.
Outline Outline for the entire course. The slide lists the topic of each lesson.
Lesson 1 Explain what we are going to do
tonight. This is the lesson 1 outline.
Meet Introduce myself and give a brief biography. Ask the students to introduce
themselves. Show how I have used
photography in my career. Spend some time
justifying my approach to teaching.
Objectives Display the objectives for tonight. Note that we have accomplished a few of them
already!
Course CD There
are restrictions on the use of the class images on the CD. Go over what is on the CD. Beckham’s material is under copyright, mine
is not.
Starting PSE Show how you can start PSE by the icon, or by
any graphic file type that has been tied to PSE. Use the slide of the desktop to illustrate
starting any program including PSE. Explain
version 5.0.
Editor Explain what to do if the Editor
does not come up. Workspace is a new PSE
term for the Editor window. It has two
tabs: Full Edit and Quick Fix.
Preferences Briefly explain some of the preferences
and how to set them. Doing a general
reset back to the factory defaults. Talk
about PSE “remembering” of the defaults and why this is both good and bad.
Workspace Look at the basics of the Editor’s
workspace. Tour the workspace geography: We will mention (briefly here): A. Menu bar,
D. Shortcuts bar., Workspace buttons (tabs), B. Tool box, E. Options bar, C.
Photo bin, F. Palettes, and H. Palette bin.
Note that the letters refer to the PSE manual page 27.
Workflow Workflow is a term that refers to the
process of taking an image and producing a final print. Here are the basics. The first file to work on should take no
adjustments. Use OceanView.jpg as a
demonstration file. We need to open the
file in the PSE editor, change it from the camera size to the print size, and
print same. Most workflow will be more
complex, but we need to start somewhere.
Open File | Open to select your image. This was done earlier such that the tour had
an image loaded.
Adjustments There are things we could do to this image,
but at this point we will bypass adjustment and move right on to resizing the
image.
Resizing First we will discuss the basics so
you will have to take it some things “on faith.” Everyone’s camera is different, so some of
these rules will have to change. Without
explaining resolution now, I assume your picture, as it comes from the camera
or scanner is fairly large with respect to pixels. I shoot all of my images at 2000 by 3008
pixels. This means that the picture
comes into PSE as a 6.667” by 10.027” @ 300 ppi image. Clearly this would fit on a “letter size”
piece of paper (8½ by 11), but it would be nice for the image to fill the paper
save a ¼” boarder.
Image | Resize is the process we want to
execute. I am going to enlarge the width
of the picture to 8” and accept that the height is going to exceed 10.5”. In the next step I will crop the picture
taking off a bit of the sky. Therefore
set the width to 8.0”. Make sure that
the Constrain Proportions checkbox is checked.
This will force the height to 12.032”.
Crop by cut I typically crop by using the rectangular
selection tool in concert with cut ‘n paste.
While there is the Cropping tool, it is fairly limited and we will be
using selection all of the time, so we might as well get used to using the
Selection tool.
Click on the Selection tool and set the Mode
to Fixed Size. Make the dimensions of
the selection 8 by 10.5. Click anywhere
in the image and the selection is made.
Note how you can move the selection.
Make sure you are removing sky.
Next do Edit | Cut to remove the image. Close down, but do not save the
original. Cut placed the image on the
Windows clipboard. To place it in the
workspace command: File | New | Image From Clipboard.
Blank image In order to have the white boarder we could
just print the image, but I like the step of creating a letter sized image. Then you can select, copy, and paste. Select | All to define the image and Edit
| Copy to
place the image on the clipboard. Create
a new active image by File | New | Blank File. The Preset is Letter, Color Mode is RGB
color, and
the Background Contents is White. When OK is pressed a blank image is placed on
the workspace. Edit
| Paste
will lay the image on this blank page.
Printing The “finished” picture is now ready
for printing. [Note: OceanView.psd is
the image after resizing] File
| Print invokes
the PSE printing window. Nothing needs
to be changed here. Press the Print button
and you will bring up your printer’s driver. Everyone’s printer is different. This driver is for my printer, the Canon
S9000. Choose the paper type to match
the one you are using. Print your
picture.
Rotate In order to demonstrate image
rotation I am going to use Beckham’s raccoon as he did not supply the bird he
used on p. 29. [Note, in a day or so I am going to
replace Beckham’s image with one of my own.] The key to an accurate rotation is to have a
baseline to match. Use the grids to provide
a horizontal baseline. We will put the
raccoon’s eyes on this line. View
| Grids
turns on the grid lines. [If the grids
are the wrong size it can be set with Edit | Preferences |
Grid] Image | Rotate | Custom 11° to the left will do
it. I had to play around to get the 11°
alteration just right. A better way is
by Transform.
To start the process do: Image
| Transform | Free Transform. As you
start into this procedure you will get a warning message about creating a
layer. We will talk about layers in
depth over the next few sessions. For
now just accept the new layer with the default name. When you move the cursor outside of the image
it turns into a linked arrow. By
dragging it around you rotate the image.
To finish the transform you must click the green check mark. A number of tools work this way so be on the
lookout for these green check marks.
Once rotation has been done, by either
method, you need to crop the picture or it will not be square. Use the Selection Rectangle in Fixed Aspect
Ratio mode. This will make sure that you
end up with a picture that will fit in an 8½ by 11 print. Select, Cut, and Paste the new image. Resize the image to 8 by 10½ as we did
earlier.
It
is important to understand what enlarging and reducing an image means. These terms refer to the pixel dimensions of
the image and not the page size of the printed image. On this picture we are not changing the ppi
resolution so an increase in document size is the same thing as an increase in
pixel dimensions. When you are enlarging
an image, as we are here, you get a better looking image if you use Bicubic
Smoother to Resample Image. On the other
hand, if you are reducing the size of the image choose Bicubic Sharper.
If, however, your camera produced a 72 ppi
image with a much larger document size you have to be careful. My Olympus C-750 will give you images with a
smaller pixel size owing to its smaller sensor.
But, the pixels are arrayed such that the document size is larger. Here is an example: If I had taken this shot with the C-750 the
pixel dimensions would have been 1520 by 2288.
The document size would have been 21.111” by 31.778” @ 72 ppi. You might think that we would be reducing
this image to get a document size of 8.0” by 12.042 @ 300 ppi, but you would be
wrong! When you entered those dimensions
and look at the pixel size the new values are 2400 by 3613, almost the same as
the Nikon pixel sizes. We are actually
enlarging the image by adding pixels.
Therefore we would use Bicubic Smoother resampling in this case too.
Notes
for Lesson 2
Homework There are three things that need to be
covered with respect to homework. First,
we must deal with people who cannot get their prints produced at home. Next, we can devote some time to the student’s
own images. Finally, we need to handle
questions from the Beckham book. Be
careful not to get too deep into book questions that you jeopardize class time.
Enhance This is the second step in our
workflow. Last week I was suggesting to
you that the first step was resizing your print. Now it is time to improve upon the basic
photo. We will begin with a shot that
does not need a great deal of enhancement.
Quick Fix The Quick Fix tab in PSE 5.0 is a new
feature. It combines in one place all of
the automatic photo repair tools. It is
a great place to begin our study of PSE for photographers. You should use Smart Fix or Lighting
& Color. Sharpen is best left to the
more detailed corrections in Editor. If
Auto does not do it for you, it is better to return to the Editor tab and proceed
by “hand.”
Smart Fix Smart Fix is the one stop shop for
automatic correction. It is often the
first thing to try. Push the Auto button
and see what happens. If you like what
you see, you are home free. If you do
not like it: hit the reset button to undo everything.
As
it turns out Smart Fix does very little for Roger except make him a tad more
red. This is not what Roger needs. We want to remove some of the shadows in his
face, so hit the Reset and start over.
Lighting Quick Fix is fine, but it really does
not do a great job. For this we need to
start to investigate real image enhancements. Lighting is the study of contrast and
brightness. Switch into the Editor, from
which we will spent just about all of our time.
Following our workflow we will correct lighting and I will assume that
you did not go into Quick Fix (or that Quick Fix did not do the job for you).
To
best understand lighting we should start with black and white. Let’s take photography back 100 years to a
time before color imaging. Here is the
same picture showing extremes of contrast and brightness.
Histogram Histograms are a plot of an image’s tonal
distribution. If the following is a bit
too technical, you can safely “zone out” for a few minutes and not miss anything
practical. The horizontal axis shows the
pixel brightness. The darkest value (black
= 0) is on the left and the lightest value (white = 255) is on the right. This is a range from deep shadows to bright
highlights. In a B&W image the darkest
value (0) is black and the lightest value (255) is white. This defines 256 columns in the plot.
The
vertical axis shows the number of pixels having the same value. Thus column one represents the number of pure
black (in B&W) pixels. It is easier
to talk in terms of black and white rather than shadow and highlight so I am
going to use those terms for a minute.
Later, as we talk about color I will return to the more proper
terms.
I
like to keep the histogram palette visible when I first look at an image in
PSE. The Levels tool allows you to make
adjustments to the histogram. We will
discuss these adjustments shortly. A
good image with a pleasing balance of contrast will have pixels at every column
position. The picture of Pat in this
slide has a pretty good balance although it misses pure black and pure white.
Now
let’s consider some problems. If most of
the pixels are bunched up at the left the image is lacking detail in the
shadow. If they are bunched up at the
right the detail is missing in the highlight area. If the information is not in the image, no
amount of processing is going to bring them back.
In
the Distribution Shapes slide, the histogram under the image shows patterns. The low contrast image has the pixels bunched
in the center of the graph, indicating no black or white but just shades of
gray. The high contrast shot has the distribution
well spread out and the lack of detail in the image at both in the black and
white.
The
brightness study is different. The dark
image has all of the pixels shifted left as you would expect. The light picture is just the opposite, the
pixels are shifted right. Now I doctored
the base line image to demonstrate these concepts.
Adjustments It is instructive to explain how I produced
the five images of Pat. The full color
picture was the starting point. The
first thing I did was to remove all of the color information: Enhance
| Convert to Black & White. I saved
this in a file called BaseLine.jpg. I
then created four copies of this image:
C-40.jpg, C+40.jpg, B-40.jpg, and B+40.jpg.
These are the four corner images that you see on the slide. Finally, I made the adjustments using the Brightness
& Contrast tool: Enhance | Adjust Lighting |
Brightness/Contrast. This slide shows the B+40
window.
Final Now, how do we use the Levels tool to improve the
full color picture of Pat? As I was
suggesting to you earlier, the picture is not really a bad one. We could stretch the distribution a bit to
add a tad more contrast and I would like to brighten the midtones just a
little. By using the term midtones, I am
now reverting to the full color language rather than black and white. From here on in we will talk about shadows,
highlights, and midtones. To do this we
are going to use the Levels tool. From
now on we will always use this tool to make lighting adjustments.
Invoke
the Levels tool by entering: Enhance | Adjust Lighting | Levels. Notice the three sliders just below the
histogram. These make the adjustments to
the shadows, highlights, and midtones.
They are a touch counter intuitive to use, so take careful notes
here. The control on the left, the black
triangle adjusts shadows. We want to
stretch the distribution to add contrast so we are going to clip off some of
the dark pixels. You move the slider to
the right and the image gets darker.
What is happening is some of the pixels which were not the deepest
shadow (black if you will) are redefined as the darkest (or value 0). Said another way, the pixels in column 20 are
now in column 0 when I move the left slider to 20.
Next
we do the opposite with the highlight slider on the right. Moving this to the left redefines the high
end of the distribution. Now the image
gets darker as the brightest highlight is no longer 255, but 247. What we have done now is redefined the range
20 – 247 and stretched this out so it now fills the entire span 0 – 255.
The
midtones slider works as a factor based around 1.0 rather than a specific
column number. It shifts the center of
the distribution. It too is somewhat
backwards. If we want the midtones
darker we move the slider to the right.
We want the midtones lighter so we move the slider to the left. OK, so it is confusing so let us do by hand
what the program does when you push the Auto buttons in Quick Fix. We are now returning to the practical and
leaving the land of the technical.
The
first thing you do is move the shadow and highlights sliders toward the center
of the distribution. Keep looking at the
image after moving both sliders a bit.
You want the sliders to just get into the mass of pixels. Then move the midtones slider left or right
until the picture looks just right. I
used the highlight area on Pat’s right cheek to keep the contrast from washing
out the light areas. I used the shadow
on her left cheek to keep definition in the dark areas. As you become familiar with the Levels tool
you will find it is very useful for tuning up lighting. This is the second step in our work flow.
Burn/Dodge Another way to adjust lighting in a small area,
like a face, is to burn and dodge. These
terms came from the B&W darkroom where they were applied to the negative in
the enlarger. The dodge tool is used
more often. If you had a clear spot on
the negative too much light reached the print causing it to go dark. In digital photography a face crossed by
shadows is too dark. In the enlarger if
you blocked some of the light in a small area you could lighten the print up a
bit. You would construct a lollypop
looking tool and shake it between negative and the print to block the
light. This was called dodging.
We will use the dodge tool to remove
shadows. The first issue we need to
address is where this tool is to be found.
It is next to the last tool in the toolbar, but it will be showing the
sponge tool by default at first. Click
on it and the dodge tool will be among the hidden tools in the Option Bar. Select it.
A good starting configuration would be a Size: 40 px., Range: Midtones,
and an Exposure: 30%. Work slowly.
Adjustment We are going to cram a lot of PSE into a
few minutes here. If you do not
Layer get it all, don’t fret. There will be plenty more discussion on
selection, selection tools, and layers in future lessons. Explain the “onion peeling” method of
development. Layers are like clear
plastic sheets that stack up above the original image. You can place things from the base image on
the layer and work on them independently from the original image. The layers concept is used often and it is a
critical skill you need to master.
Often when taking pictures of people in high
light settings, like this skiing scene, you and/or the camera need to make a
compromise on the exposure. Here, the
background is fine, but Bob is in shadow.
We will use the technique outlined in Beckham, page 32, to effect this
change.
Create an Adjustment Layer to manipulate
Levels. Name it Bob if you want. Move the midtones slider to the left to
brighten the picture. You could change
the shape of the histogram if you want to, but it probably is unnecessary.
Once the figure is set, choose a soft
brush. Start with a brush size of 500
and “chip” away the layer with a black foreground color. As you remove the “paint” on the layer you see
the original image below. As you get
closer to Bob, switch to a smaller brush.
I used 15 close in, and 100 a little bit further out.
Once
you have a pleasing image, you should flatten out the adjustment layer. Layers | Flatten will do that for you.
Improving Like other techniques PSE gives you a
great many tools to make color
Color corrections. We
will touch on a few of them and spend some time with one of them. Removing color casts can often be handled
very skillfully by the automatic correction button. Hue & Saturation is the standard color
tool. We can even use the color channels
of the Levels tool. Finally, we will
briefly mention layers once again in connection with color correction.
Color casts One of the “issues” that the automatic button
of PSE handles well is dealing with color casts. Sometimes the digital camera is fooled and
you end up with a color cast. Snow
scenes are notorious for having a gray or blue cast as in this picture of Pat
in Park City, UT. Bring up the image in
Quick Fix, press the Auto button, and most color casts are gone.
Hue & Sometimes color correction requires
a tad more intervention. The tool
Saturation for this job is found: Enhance
| Color Adjustment | Hue & Saturation. The
image here was scanned from a slide. The
rich fall colors are somewhat washed out.
We need to make them more vivid.
While there are lots more to describe about the Hue & Saturation
dialog box, let’s just make a few simple adjustments. What you see in the picture is after 3 small
adjustments to the Reds, Yellows, and Greens.
Here are the adjustments that were made:
|
Color
|
Hue
|
Saturation
|
|
Reds
|
-20
|
+20
|
|
Yellows
|
-5
|
+20
|
|
Greens
|
0
|
+40
|
Layers Once again we are going to use the
Adjustment Layer to restore the guys in the boat to the original color. This time we will form the Adjustment Layer
with Hue & Saturation. Layers
| New Adjustment Layer | Hue & Saturation are the menu choices. You can name the layer Color or just let it
take the default name. Repeat the three
color modifications as we did with the picture as a whole on the layer. Then, as we did before, use a brush ( the 100
pixel soft brush works nicely) with the black foreground color to “chip away”
at the layer so as to reveal the original color of the boat on the base (background)
level. To really see the hole in the
adjustment layer you might turn off the “eye” icon on the background layer.
Bit color In an attempt to get “Fall” color into
the trees, we have been shifting the hue yellow into the orange. In this much enlarged view (600%), we shifted
the Yellow by H: -20 and S: +20. Take a
look at the pixels around X: 0.183 Y: 0.897.
The original was (R: 196, G: 168, B: 100). The transformed pixels came out as (R: 202,
G: 145, B: 80). By depressing green and
blue we get a much richer red/orange.
Notes
for Lesson 3
Marquee We have used rectangular selection
before. Review the three modes of use:
Normal, Fixed Aspect Ratio, and Fixed Size.
Once the selection has been defined you can drag it anywhere on the workspace,
although you would rarely move a selection without placing in a layer. The elliptical selection is rarely used. The area it selects is an ellipse; however
the bounding box is the same rectangle you have just seen in action. Note that an ellipse with a fixed aspect
ratio of 1:1 is a circle.
Magic Wand Use the New Selection icon to start the
process. It is always wise to look at
this icon first as it is “remembered” from use to use and is often in the Add
or Subtract position. Next set the
Tolerance (0 – 255) to a low value for selecting colors very similar to the
clicked pixel or a high value for a large range of values. If the Magic Wand tool is to be used at all,
low values are the most useful. If that
does not isolate pixels, consider using another selection tool. The selection is based on color and tone.
With all the selection tools you can make a
first selection and then add to it with another selection. You can also subtract from it with another
selection. Don’t forget you can zoom in
on the workspace with <Ctrl>+.
This is useful with fine selections.
Paint Once we have isolated the sky we can ham-handedly
color it blue using the paint can tool.
This is not what we would usually do, but it gives you a good feeling
for layers and modifications to same. We
will actually this on purpose in lesson 6 to create a silk screen effect. Create a new layer with “New Layer via Copy.” Remember these steps because we will do this
time and time again from here on in.
Turn the lowest layer invisible by using the eye icon. Use the Paint Bucket tool with an extreme tolerance
of 255. Pick a foreground color of blue,
and click anywhere in the layer. Notice
that some white shows through the trees.
A really useful way to “fix” the sky is with
another image of puffy white clouds on a royal blue sky. The white showing through the trees would
blend into these low lying clouds. It
would be good to take a number of cloud images with blue sky above them and
make a cloud and sky “library.” The one
that would work best here is having a cloud in the lower left hand corner so
that the white that shows through the trees is taken for the cloud.
Lasso Another fix I have used with some success is to add
something to a picture. Look at this
shot of the Ritz Carlton hotel. It would
be a better picture if it had some foreground.
I am going to cut the jetski out of one shot and paste it into the beach
in front of the Ritz. The Polygon Lasso
just connects straight line segments with left clicks. I am going to use the Magnetic Lasso tool to
do the cutting. This tool hugs the boundary
of pixels with differing contrast. It
has three parameters that may need “tuning.”
Width – This is the distance in
pixels from which an edge will be detected.
A good tip is to turn on Caps Lock to see this width as a circle. A value of 10 worked well for this picture,
but the contrast differential will define this value. Too little contrast and this tool will not
work well at all.
Edge Contrast – A higher edge
contrast detects only very high contrast differences. The default 50% worked well in this setting.
Frequency – This value is the rate
at which the tool sets fastening points.
It is a range between 0 and 100.
The high the number the more often it will set these tie points
automatically. Of course, every time you
left click you set a user defined fastening point.
It is useful to use any lasso tool at a high
zoom factor, so this trick will help you move the image while lassoing. If you hold the spacebar down the Hand
repositioning tool becomes active and you can move the workspace and then
continue to lasso. You can also change
to the Polygon Lasso in the middle of a Magnetic Lasso run by Alt-Click.
When the lasso almost surrounds the object a
double click will close the selection.
Once that is done copy ‘n paste the jetski on to the sand. You will need to do a little resizing and
repositioning.
Artifact Sometimes you need to remove defects
from your image. If you use a
Removal film scanner, cardboard dust is
usually a problem. When you scan
Memorandum