Project 2 Editing and Selecting

After completing Lesson 4 and 5, I was ready to Rock’n Roll (just kidding!) with a new Project. The two pictures are taken in the Dolomites, Italy, where we spent a wonderful ski vacation with excellent snow conditions. I selected the polygonal lasso to define the church and I dragged it over into the Dolomites. I then corrected the color with Auto Color and only the church changed. Very interesting! I played with the Color Overlay in the Layers palette – gave the church a reddish tone and dropped a shadow. I attempted to change the color of the church roof but after lots of trials and errors (and paint buckets!), I left it in the original color.

I also had a white line on the roof, from selecting too generously from the original image. After selecting with the polygonal lasso I copied (copy merge) and pasted the background and dropped it above the white line. A black shadow appeared. Now what to do? I found the eyedropper and selected the colors with which I wanted to fill in the black shadow. I then switched to the pencil and changed the dark pixels one at a time for the best effect.

I then looked for a tool to get snow on the foundation under the church. Trial and error again and after sampling most of them, I found the Spot Healing Brush Tool and wow!—looks and works like a bandaid (no, a backhoe)….just great! This was experimentation as I piled snow up against the church to cover up the (unseen) foundation.

Contrast and Brightness was next as I increased these values in both Layer 1 and in background. Then I cropped the image and scaled the crop boundary and rotated it slightly. And, of course I had to add a mat with the Canvas Size command.
And now it happened-my Computer went down and I lost my last changes cropping and matting which I had not yet saved!

I started again, cropping and rotating a slightly different boundary than the first time. The next step was to click on Layer-New-Layer via Copy, then opening the Canvas Size dialog box under Image in the menu bar. I changed inches to pixels and the width and height box to 50, like in Deke’s lecture. I then clicked on ‘other’ to select the color of the frame. I choose a bright orange and saw that I have a white line vertically on the right side--I had not check the crop boundary after rotating! Back to my picture #3 and I repeated again every step like I have described above, but this time I made sure not to have a white line!

I played with Bevel and Emboss by clicking on the “f” in the Layer palette, Outer Bevel, Inner Bevel, changed depth and shading, but I could not get it to duplicate to my image. For a better overview, I created a contact sheet at this point.

After all this work, I did some ‘landscaping’ with the pencil tool and removed some dark blobs of snow in the foreground. Sure beats shoveling snow! I also remodeled the building wall by selecting some background trees (lasso again) and dragging it over the angled wall. One final change was made to the roof—by sliding it to the right (same lasso/copy merged/paste procedure) so snow won’t avalanche on the skiers! I will leave this picture now for good and hope everyone will have the chance to enjoy the Italian Alps sometime.

Project 1: Katahdin in Fog

I chose one of my favorite photographs of our tugboat in the fog at Kake last year. It turned out to be a hard photograph because first, it was taken in the fog which gave some images blurred edges and some very sharp edges. Second, it was hard because of the contrast. I think the results were good, though.

The first step I took was import the image through the Adobe Bridge and corrected the colors with Auto Color. I then played with the Curve but did not like the results and reversed this changes. Then I tweaked the Hue/Saturation to +10. I then went to Levels/Histogram and raised both the Red Channel and the Midtone Values. The netfloats became too red and bright; also a glare in the sky. I then went to Window/Histogram and and tried to make changes from this window but couldn't. Next I tried the Shadow/Highlight command--this is a very good tool because it allowed me to raise the midtone contrast. But now the sky became too purple for my taste now so I went to variations and increased the Cyan. This I liked better but it still had too much blue (after I clicked OK--this is when I realized that the thumbnails are much too small). I then adjusted the slider to Fine and added back a little more red. Finally, I went back to Image/Adjustments/Auto Color to get slightly more contrast but the sky was still too red. In Hue/Saturation, I decreased the red saturation a few points.

I then tried to Fade "Fog #3" picture with the Edit/Fade Command but it was grayed out--this I discovered was because I had not selected a change command. To prove this, I made several lines with the pencil tool in yellow on another photo and the Fade command became active but I could only fade the last pass with the pencil. Interesting! So now I know how the Fade works--it only obeys the last command!

Last, I tried out the Gradient feature and made some interesting discoveries. I used a black/white photo and experimented with all the buttons. I then made a final change to the Katahdin in the Fog which looks like the Northern Lights on an old brown tone photograph.

One frustration is the copyright feature. I thought I had copyrighted all four photos but the original photo would not copyright; it showed a screen "This property cannot be modified."
I am not sure if I like picture 2 or 3 better. But it is definitely better than the original!