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Starting point for today's tutorial. |
Today's "exercise" is going to be rebuilding the missing pieces of the pump. The upper and left tips of the star need a little help, obviously the bezel needs some major reconstruction and the left side of the pump body could use some sprucing up. The first step is to straighten up the pump (more artsy shooting). That way we have an axis to base all the work off of. With Adobe Photoshop CS5 where's an easy button you can push to Straighten and crop an image. Well, we really don't want to take more information away from the shot and have to rebuild that much more. CS5 does have a handy dandy modifier key to straighten and not crop a image. Just hole down the Alt key when you hit the Straighten Button and you get a straighten, full image with not cropping. Kind of like what you'll see as the first image once you hit the "read more".
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You can see the word Texaco is reversed in this image. Add a Layer Mask to the upper layer and mask out the reversed lettering to show the proper orientation. You'll find the those points of the star are pretty pesky. It's easier to let them fade and fill them in later. The way to do it is to use the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) And extend the angles of the star to create the point. With the selection made it a simple matter of using the Clone Stamp Tool (S) to fill in the tips. Because you've made a selection of only the tip area you don't have to worry about "coloring outside the lines". The selection will constrain anything you do to within the selection.
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By now the sky looks rotten. Don't worry about it, it’s a pretty bland sky and we'll be replacing it near the end. Next step is to get rid of the backwards sign on the left. Just take the Rectangular Marquee Tool and select the sign using the vertical pole as a guide. You can fill the selection with just about anything you want. Just make it something that will be able to be easily picked up by the Quick selectio Tool (W) later. (In other words, don't fill it with the red of the pump.) Again use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) to select the piece of the left pole that has the mounting bracket for the sign that was just removed. Use the Clone Stamp Tool (S) to clone out the bracket.
At this point we're just about done, but the sky still looks like crap. What this image needs is some drama in the sky. Find a sky you've taken and have in your "cloud folder" and bring it into the Layer stack. Turn off its visibility for a moment and use the Quick Selection Tool (W) to make a selection of the sky. Don't forget the areas between the upright poles and the glass gas meter. Right click on the selection and pick the Save Selection option. Relight and chose the sky Layer. Hit the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel and the sky should pop right in. If, by some chance, the sky fills the pump area, simply invert the Mask by tapping the Ctrl I (eye) combination.
That's as far as we're going today. The build is complete. Now we have to "finish" the image. We'll do that on Wednesday. See you then.
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