Tips on enhancing your photos....

As an increasingly frequent user of this section, I couldn't help but notice some deletions. :eek: So for the benefit of us still cracking on with creative art :D I have taken the liberty of reinstating what tips I had saved from Hornbeam. I won't reinstate the photos as they aren't mine, but text is fair game. And its good advice that I am sure Hornbeam would like us to continue benefiting from

Selections
Some of you have asked how you copy something from one picture and add it to another. This is important because you can do so much with cutouts of one form or another.

The tricky bit is making the cut out accurate and smoothing it down nicely on the new photo. There are different ways of doing it depending on the sort of photo you are working from. The easiest way is to use the Magic Wand, but you can only do that if the object you want to copy is of a colour that contrasts with a plain background. We can come back to that later.

Cutting out does need some skill with the mouse and most people get discouraged because it is so hard to draw with the mouse. Relax - there is a much easier way.

Print this out so that you can work through it step by step.

1...Open both photos and click on the butterfly one to make it active. We now have to cut the butterfly away from the brick wall so choose the Freehand selection tool from near the top of the toolbox to your left. Set Feather to zero and Mode to Replace

2...Draw a ROUGH outline around the butterfly without making any attempt at accuracy. You will now see a dotted line all around it. Position your cursor on the butterfly and press Ctrl and C. You have now selected the cut-out butterfly.

3...Click on the snowdrop photo to make it active. Press Ctrl and L and now you have placed the butterfly over the snowdrops as a Layer. We don�t want to paste it down yet as we have more work to do on it. You should have something that looks like this now.



4...Two things need correcting. The butterfly is too big and we have to get rid of that remaining brickwork. Choose the Deform tool from near the top of your toolbox on the left. Click on the butterfly and you will see a box with handles at the sides and corners. Left click on one of the corners, hold and drag the corner in towards the centre. This will reduce the size of the butterfly. When its small enough, release the mouse. This tool is vital to correctly size and position cut out objects.

5...Position your cursor over the tiny circle at the centre of the box. Left click and hold. Drag the box to where you want the butterfly to be in your final picture. Release your mouse.

6...Go to Layers at the top of the page. From the drop down menu, click on ââ?¬Å?New Mask Layerââ?¬Â and then click on ââ?¬Å?Show allââ?¬Â.

7...Now comes the fun part. Click on Zoom so that you can se the butterfly better. Select the Paintbrush from your toolbox. Set the colours in the Materials Pallet to black for the foreground and white for the background. Set the size of the Paintbrush to 10 and set the Opacity to 100%. Set Step to 1, Hardness to 15, Density and Thickness to 100.

8...Carefully stroke the Paintbrush over the remaining brickwork. Magic! ââ?¬â?? the bricks vanish. Do this in short strokes so that if you make a mistake and erase part of the butterfly, you can go back and redo it. The Redo function is the curved blue arrow at the top of the page. Do what you can as neatly as you can ââ?¬â?? this does get easier as your hand and eye coordination improve. You will need to reduce the size of the Paintbrush to paint around the butterflyââ?¬â?¢s antenna any other fiddly bits

9...Almost their now! Click on Layers at the top of the page. Select ââ?¬Â Mergeââ?¬Â then click on ââ?¬Å?Merge All (flatten)ââ?¬Â from the drop down list. Click and thatââ?¬â?¢s it. Save your photo which shold look something like this now:



We could have improved things by rotating the butterfly so that its head was pointing upwards. We could also soften the edges of the butterfly t so that it blends in better. To do this, select the Soften Brush from the array of brushes near the bottom of the toolbox o your left. Set a fairly small brush size and gently stroke it along the edges of the wings.

You will use this technique over and over again and it gets easier the more you do it. Well worth taking the time to master it. It is also a lot easier when you can use the Magic Wand or Background Eraser tools.

 

You can remove your own thread postings can you not ?

 

If you really want a lot of excellent lessons on using all the Photoshop (and others too)programs, then take a look at http://graphicssoft.about.com/

 

Nice link Palustris, thankyou. I will go and see if I can work out how to do more inventive editing

 

Particularly if you don't want to repeat yourself...... There's quite a bit of duplication of info amongst all the creative art threads, and hard to find it in between the pictures. Maybe there's a better arrangement for this being organised? :rolleyes: