Project 3

Project 3-Paint, Edit and Heal

This picture was taken in August in Antarctica where it is still winter. It is a self portrait taken after Doug hiked up the 700 foot high Observation Hill—used by the original explorers Shackleton and Scott to survey their expeditions to the South Pole. After reaching the top, Doug took his own picture just below the summit out of the wind. Hiking up Observation Hill was our daily exercise after a long workday at the American research base at McMurdo Sound and took about 45 minutes. It is about 40F below zero!

First I resized the image from 300 to 180 px. resolution and covered a dark spot in the sky above his head—dirt on the camera screen that occurred in all his photographs. I took the Elliptical Marquee tool, selected an area next to the dark spot, copied and pasted over the dark spot. Then I took the sponge tool to smooth the pasted part.

I kept going with the dodge tool over Doug’s face to get rid of the reddish tone, but it did not work. I could not see any changes. I changed the Exposure from 10 to 50, just to check if I can see the difference-I could not! I tried it again, after I went to dinner and back to the computer, and this time it worked. I also used the Burn tool and I did not like the result, so I deleted it.

Now, it’s grooming time… I changed from the magic wand tool to the lasso and selected the worst ice-glob on Doug’s lip and ‘circled’--after changing the feather option bar from 50 to 2 px and then I was able to select the worst of the ice from Doug’s mustache and moved this selection to his right and copied/merged it and pasted in front of his mouth! Well, while I’m at it, I’ll do the same for his nose and eyelids…..I whitened the teeth with Sponge tool, set the option bar to Desaturate and dragged it over the teeth. I also fixed a chipped front tooth with the Lasso tool, copy merge and paste. (With my training as a Dental Assistant, I could not resist!). I then switched the mode option to Saturate and clicked in the irises to bring out the blue eyes.

I also “smudged” the lips and did a little anti-wrinkle surgery under the eyes. Again with Lasso, copy merge and paste. Doug had a shiny spot on one of his front teeth I wanted to dim down. I took the eyedropper and selected a color in Doug’s front tooth, then I grabbed the pen tool and clicked on the pixels in the image I wanted to change.
I changed Doug’s eye color to the real color—Blue! I selected the iris with Lasso, changed to the eyedropper and selected the blue color from his fleece jacket. Then I selected the paint bucket and poured the color into the selected iris.
Again, Trial and Error with the Dodge and Burn tool, I played with the Exposure numbers.

Now I will start with the exercise “Healing and Patching” lesson in Deke’s book and I will keep going with Doug’s make-over afterwards.
I started right away with the Healing brush and Spot Healing brush on his nose, to “heal” the strong wrinkles away, with pressing Shift-key and clicking at 2 points between his eyes to make a horizontal line. But the result did not look too good, so I deleted it and then I took the Patch tool and selected the area between his eyes and dragged it slightly up and released the mouse! And Viola!

Then I stroked over the smaller wrinkles around the eyes (these are of course not wrinkles, it is just from the cold!!!). The bigger ice crystals on the beard had to go too. I used the Healing brush with a small size (6). The source was in the lower left part of his beard and the destination was all over the beard.

I did a lot of Trial and Error with the Healing brush, Spot Healing Brush and Sponge to make the color of Doug’s face more regular but it is still to blotchy.

Now I can take him out to dinner??!