This week, the Japanorama Photoshop Guru worked on a pic sent in by Peter Blake. See what he got up to…

Photoshop is not all about crazy effects. Sometimes it’s the subtle use of filters, colour-shifts and processing that are what is needed to bring out the best in a shot.

This week we received a pic from Peter Blake, which his wife took of their daughter. This is what Peter had to say about it:

“To my eyes there are a few things wrong with this: The background is quite distracting, being very bright; the point of focus seems to have been on the nose rather than the eyes, and, the photographer’s reflection can be seen in the pupils. The wife took it, with the standard 18-55mm kit lens. Framing seems decent enough, and there’s plenty of detail, and I do like the general quality of light on the face.”

Armed with this, a copy of Photoshop CS3 and some of their special magic, our resident Guru set to work……

The Original [click on the picture for larger version]

The Altered Image [click on the picture for larger version]

Peter’s response: “You’ve done a sterling job there.”

So, what did we do?

Here is the process list:

1. Slight tweak co contrast.
2. Cross process filter in Nik Colour Suite 3, faded back all the way to just 10% opacity. This change the skin-tone a little and upped the contrast slightly again.
3. Localised darkening and brightening of the shot: her left eye was darker than the other so we lightened that and darkened a little of the border of the shot, to give ta all a more even balance. We also increased the overall brightness of the shot.
4. Cloned out some of the distracting reflections from her left elbow and arm.
5. Cloned the bright patch out at extreme bottom, camera-right.
6. Tonal contrast filter applied locally to her eyes, hairline and where the drips of water are on her temples. This increases sharpness and puts more detail back into the textures.
7. Duplicated the whole shot and made a second layer, which we used the unsharp mask on, faded back to 80%. Settings for unsahrp mask were: 88%, 0.8 pixel dimension and threshold of zero.

Et voila!

Ooh, pimp my pic……please!!!

To get your picture ‘pimped’, just send an email to alfie[atmark]japanorama.co.uk and attach your source image, together with any instructions or suggestions. Please don’t send images larger than 2mb.

Thanks

To my eyes there are a few things wrong with this:

The background is quite distracting, being very bright; the point of focus
seems to have been on the nose rather than the eyes, and, the photographer's
reflection can be seen in the pupils. The wife took it, with the std 18-55
kit lens. Framing seems decent enough, and there's plenty of detail, and I
do like the general quality of light on the face.