Adobe Photoshop CS5 Refine Mask Rocks

I’m still playing with the new features of Adobe Photoshop CS5. Every time I turn around I find something else to mess with. Today it was the updated “Refine Mask” dialog box. Today’s image was “interesting” but we were there on a day with a slightly overcast sky that was nothing to write home about. There was enough there that I couldn’t do a quick and dirty Darker Color Blend Mode and get away with it. I went with the old standby of using the Image/Calculations dialog box and had a decent mask in less than a minute. When I looked a wee bit closer I noticed it could use just a little help on some fine edges. I’d seen NAPP’s newest Photoshop TV episode and heard the guys extolling the virtues of the Refine Mask feature improvements. Right clicked on the Layer Mask and opened that sucker up. Really, really nice set of controls there. Slide all the sliders from max to min to see what the effect of each one was before I settled in to using a lighter hand at the controls. Pushed and pulled until the mask was pretty sweet. To get an idea of some of my observations about CS5 so far, hit the “read more”. Read more!

I'm No Artist, But Adobe Photoshop CS5 Helps

If you were to flip back a couple of month’s worth of posts you’d see an image that looks remarkably similar to today’s image. The big difference is the fact that I’ve tried another of Adobe Photoshop CS5’s new features. The Mixer brush. It took a couple minutes of playing to get an idea of how it works. I’ll freely admit that I’m a photographer, not a paint and brushes type of artist. Therefore, I was starting from ground zero as far as how to produce some sort of “painting” from a photograph. I’m sure several people I know could start from scratch and come up with a better representation of a sunflower than what I’ve done. I certainly wouldn’t go entering today’s image in any sort of “art fair” as a digital painting, but I do see the potential of one of Photoshop CS5’s new features. In the past, if you grabbed a brush tool you did have several options, but they all involved either single colors or previous states of your image. With the Mixer Brush (B) it’s possible to select multiple colors and have them interact with each other. Again, if I were an “artist” in the traditional sense, I’m sure I could “build” an image. Being feeble of mind when it comes to size and proportion, that ain’t happening. On the other hand, John Nack, of Adobe, has an example and video of painting in CS5 as a function of modifying a photo of an apple versus painting an apple from start to finish. In the example, both come out looking like an apple. (Here’s the link) According to the video it takes approximately the same time either way. I really don’t care how much time you give me, I wouldn’t come up with something, from scratch, that would look like an apple. It’s not in my DNA. To find out how today’s image “evolved” using the Photoshop CS5’s new Mixer Brush, hit the “read more”.
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Just Goofing

Some days you just feel like goofing around. Today was one of those days. It’s raining and sort of dull outside, so I dragged out a tripod, speedlite and an idea I stole for a buddy of mine. Ernie did a masterful job of shooting a multiple shot sequence in his painting studio. It’s a wide shot, covering about thirty feet or so. He had the luxury of a wide area, so his shot has space between each of his personas. I don’t have the same luxury in the offices, so I’m overlapping myself all over the place in today’s image. The shoot itself only took a half hour, maybe a little more. I wasn’t going for commercial grade, just a goof. The most interesting shot was the one where I’m up checking something out in the lights. I almost took a header over the back of the rolling chair I was standing on. Standing on a rolling, “tippy” chair is probably not the brightest thing in the world to do. The ladder was at the far end of the studio, about 75’ away and adding a ladder to the space in the room would have been a wee bit rough. I figured, no problem, I’ve done this a hundred times. This time was the closest I’ve come to taking a tumble. I’m reminded of my aunt. She was a teacher of first or second graders and before school began one year she was on a chair, putting up decorations and wound up breaking both wrists. Think about it. Think of all the personal things you wouldn’t be able to do with two broken wrists. It’s not pretty. Ask my uncle. If you’d like to see how the “mechanics” of the image was done, hit the “read more”.

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Using Groups To Simplify Life.

Today’s image could be called “fun with bevels”. Just about every element in the image has been given a Layer Style (Double Click on the Layer in the Layers Panel) of Bevel and Emboss. The net effect is to have turned each piece of the derailleur into a graphic component. Each piece is on its own Layer and is capable of being altered. This made for quite a number of Layers and lead to using the Group Layers (CTRL G) function to make things a little more manageable. The spokes are a good example of putting things into groups. The spokes that pass in front of other spokes are in one Group. The spokes going behind others are in a second Group. One of the biggest advantages or putting closely related objects in Groups is that Groups support just about all the modifiers that can be applied to individual Layers. Rather than using a Mask on each spoke Layer, a single Mask was applied to the “Full Spoke” Group. Groups can also be used to control runaway Layers. On each image worked on here at the gallery the colors are saturated individually using Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers. (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta) Once they are brought up to the point where each color is at its peak saturation and any masking applied to the individual Adjustment Layers they are put into a Group to minimize clutter. Groups do not disable alteration/correct of those layers within the group, but also make it possible to do universal changes to everything in the Group. It’s a very flexible piece of Photoshop that often overlooked. One only has to look at some of Bert Monroy’s work to see extensive use of Groups. His work, “Damien” is made up of more than 15,000 layers. Without Groups and Groups within Groups he would have had a terrible mess on his hands. To view any of Bert’s tutorials is to get a lesson in image management. He’ll make elements in multiple Layers and then Group them for ease of handling. The elements become objects and the objects are put into Groups. The objects become pieces and the pieces are put into Groups. And so on and so on, building reusable Groups to set in pattern after pattern to make the complete image. To see how many groups were used in today’s image, hit the “read more”.

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Image Within An Image -- PhotoShop CS5 Not Required

Anyone who’s been reading the blog for the past couple weeks has read about images that could only be made using Adobe Photoshop CS5. Other than a tiny sliver of door jam on the left hand side of today’s image, this is, pretty much, a straight image that can be done with any recent version of Photoshop. Any recent version meaning CS3 or CS4. Sure it “could be” done using older versions, but the heartburn would have been too much for me and I just wouldn’t have bothered. In one respect today’s image looks like a classic composite. One layer over another. It could be done that way. I’m sure someone like Corey Baker or Bert Monroy could make individual elements from scratch and have the result look just like this shot. But, it is a digital image, out of a camera and brought to life in Photoshop. We can count the “layers” of the image (not the layers used in Photoshop) from front to back. We have the doorframe, the gate, the featured horse, the band around the center of the carousel and the sunset reflected in the glass. Each element was treated as a separate area. A word has to be given as to how the shot was taken in the first place. You can just barely see my elbow above the horse’s rump reflected in the glass. My wife was to the right, holding a Nikon Speedlite, triggered wirelessly using Nikon’s Creative Lighting System (CLS), aimed at the white horse. I saw the reflection and had a Polarizing Filter in my pocket (just in case). The reflection was what caught my eye, so using a polarizer to cut the reflection wouldn’t be what I was looking for. To find out about how this image was “finished”, hit the “read more”.

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A Mask As Its Own Image

Today’s image might look a little familiar to some. If you flip back to the March 24th write up you’ll see it in that post also. I had just finished an image for today’s post and was going through the folder looking for it. It’s there, you’ll probably read about it next week sometime, but as I pasted the image of the mask I pulled up short and did a double take. I liked what I saw. The mask makes a pretty darn good image on its own. It’s very graphic in the presentation of the scene, but it works. Back in the “good old days” of film and the smell of fixer I used to do a fair number of images like this one. It was thought to be something a little special, even by the “good printers”. The reason was that you had to have the right subject (we do), you had to have the material to create the negative (Kodak Kodalith cut film), and you had to have a little knowledge of how to work with the stuff. Today, it’s easy. You still need the right subject, but with Photoshop, and a little knowledge, we can make the same type of images that were thought to be slightly special “back then”. One of the things I like about today’s image is the slight hint of grey to the right of the right hand tree, indicating some clouds. Just as making this type of image in a wet darkroom required some degree of knowledge, getting a mask with as much detail as today’s image also requires “knowing the trick”. If you’d like to learn a little more about “the trick”, hit the “read more”.

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More Fun With Adobe Photoshop CS5

Overnight I was trying to think of another way to demonstrate the power of one of Photoshop CS5’s most talked about new features. You may have seen it demonstrated at a Photoshop World video out on Youtube. I think I’ve come up with a different way to show just how powerful a tool is coming our way. Take a look at today’s dual images. They’re both the same panorama, shot on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina or southern Virginia. I did some finishing on the top image, boosting the color saturation of each color (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta), but that’s not the story here today. Look at the vertical size of each image. Which one makes the more dramatic pano is a matter of taste, but the freedom to use more of your shots is amazing. Are the two images representative of the “same” panorama? As close as possible. I took the thinner image (we’ll refer to it as “image one”) and copied it over onto the thicker image (“image two”). I did the initial alignment by lowering the Opacity of image one to about 45% and, using the Move Tool (V), matched up the sunlit hill just right of center in the background. Then I inversed the colors of image one (CTRL I) and changed the Blend Mode to Difference. That way, whenever pixels matched, the result was black. Next I used Free Transform (CTRL T) to nudge image one into an overlapping scale of image two. Are they matched? I’d said about 98%. There were a few cracks of light showing through the black, but it was darn close. Image one was the best that could be gotten using Photoshop CS4. The Crop (C) was at the absolute top and bottom of what could be cut out of the blended panorama. In fact, I’ve been known to squeeze a sliver of empty space into the image and use the Clone Stamp Tool (S) to fudge in the very top and bottom. Here’s a “real world” example of what Adobe has in store for us with CS5. I don’t think “rocket scientists” or “brain surgeons” have anything over the folks at Adobe. They keep doing hard to believe stuff. To find out more about the details of this matchup, hit the “read more”.

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