The grass is always greener…

19 YEARS ON…A REUNION!

Wedding present

The cartoon mold thing FINALLY ARRIVED!!! I’m giving it to my cousin and husband as a post-wedding thing now. It turned out ok…they sorta captured the likeness…although Lutao’s face is a bit round and my cousin doesn’t quite look like her. But its not an uglified version like the caricature at least hehe.

here’s the pics…

PHOTOSHOP TIPS #1 - Colour correction (brush, clone, dodge)

Well I thought I’d start doing some Photoshop tips for all you aspiring designers and photographers. I am by no means a professional at Photoshop. For the real thing you should check out Bert Monroy’s great “PixelPerfect” video tutorials @ http://revision3.com/pixelperfect/ and see a master in action! This “tutorial” is instead simply a sharing of information where I tell you guys tricks and techniques I’ve picked up from here and there which may help you in your own projects. Enjoy…

Well let’s start with a photo I took on my trip to Tibet last year.I really like this shot of Yuen here (even tho she doesn’t like her expression hehe) due to its angle.

Unfortunately, as you can see, there were a lot of “streaking” from the overexposure of the direct sunlight. I began the repairing process with the Clone Stamp Tool, cloning the sky around the areas of streaking and then covering them with the cloned parts. You should always take care with this you’re usually zoomed right into the image and may forget to check whether your cloned areas match the rest of the image. Remember the sky is never a constant tone of blue…its more of a gradient. After cleaning up the general areas of the sky, I went into the harder to get bits buy turning down the opacity of the cloning stamp and decreasing the size to more accurately clone areas.

Now the tricky part begins. The sky was simple in that there are no detailed textures and remained relatively similar in colour tones. The parts of the streaking that goes over Yuen’s hat and clothes, however are more complicated to fix. Luckily for us, Photoshop has a great feature in its brush tool…COLOR MODE!

To begin, select the colour you wish to use to replace. As you can see from the image above, I used the eyedropper tool and selected an area of the grey hat. Next you simply switch to the paintbrush tool and select COLOR in the mode selection. Begin painting! You will noticed that the tones will adjust according to the image and return the same colour. However, due to the streaking, the problem areas are darker than it should be. To correct this, choose the DODGE tool (50% opacity) and carefully lighten the dark areas.

Finally I corrected the levels, adjusted the colour saturation and fixed the contrast…VOILA!

Please let me know what you think. If you have a better way to achieve the same results TELL ME!

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