Some assembly required

 

These three diptychs were made from the source images found in The Proper Tool for the Job. This collection of images was taken over several month with both a DSLR and Android phone. They were different sizes, resolutions and most had a shallow depth of field; everything that makes them decent individual images but something that makes composites especially difficult. I used ten of the thirty images from last weeks post to make the three composites shown here.

 

My dinner with Ansel Adams

The assignment this week was to make a menu for dinner with someone who is no longer living that you are interested in sitting down and having a meal together. Certainly people quickly came to mind like De Vinci, Franklin, Tesla, Edison or Einstein. Boy wouldn’t it be fun to have Tesla and Edison at the same table, but I digress. After careful consideration the list, it seemed all wrong. Right off the bat, I don’t know Italian, so De Vinci is out. For Franklin, Tesla and Edison, I felt like I would be explaining current science to them more than them imparting wisdom on me.  While Einstein might be amazed at the progress, he is still way over my head. So this whole list is out. So then I thought to myself, maybe I would enjoy a campfire dinner with Ansel Adams the night before he shot El Capitan from Taft Point in 1936? Every thing fell into place in my mind.  This is our menu.

Assets include: Pictures I took of a 1954 Yosemite AAA map and of the Yosemite valley floor. Texture from the book Retro Style Graphics of the side of a leather suitcase and leather book cover and an image of Ansel from Wikipedia.

Blend Mode to give the graffiti a little attitude

So last week I posted some graffiti work and the more I looked at it, the more I thought it was missing something. The problem was it was just too clean. Since this weeks assignment dealt with blend modes I thought I would throw some more of that into this shot. There were already blend modes in play to get the wood slats to show through the graffiti. First I took an image of some rock that I shot last weekend at Big Basin. I mainly wanted it for the grain. I placed it on a layer with a copy of the same mask I used for a lot of the other shots.

Then I set the blend mode to difference, set the fill to 70% and added a saturation adjustment layer so I could fine tune the color to match the background a little bit better. To give the composition even more attitude, I wanted to add some overhead lighting and darken the sky, I mean really, who does graffiti in the day time. To do this I added three layers. The lowest was an exposure layer for the direct light set to multiply at 100% fill. The middle was another exposure layer to darken things that would fall outside of the direct light and the sky set to multiply at 100% fill. The third added a sodium vapor type feel with a little yellow tint, this was just a fill layer with some brush work at the top and an inverted mask from the direct light layer set to multiply at 41% fill.

 

Graffiti on the Street

The inspiration for this image was the bicycle shop. Fabber cyclery on First St. near downtown San Jose was someplace I passed on the way home from work many times. It has a large Schwinn sign panted on the side and I always thought it would be neat to get a picture with my car in front of it.

This assignment came up and I decided now is as good a time as any.

This was shot on First Street near downtown San Jose at Sunset. One of the first things to do was clean up the side of the car through the doors. For this I used the pen tool and drew in the contoured reflection based on what I remember it looking like.

Next the sign and wires were removed using the Content Aware fill.

Then the back wall was whitewashed to make the canvas.

The HyperSprite lettering was done in Impact font and then converted to a path and stylized using the anchor points and direct selection tool. They were then seprated out to their own layers so the drop shadow effect would work properly.

The Mini in the lower corner is the same image that resides on this site at the top of the classic mini section. I used threshold to reduce black and white. Created a selection based on that painted it in.

The Yosemite Valley and Cat were drawn by hand with the aid of images while the guitar and names on the left were freehand.

Lastly, I copy merged and pasted to a new layer, flipped it vertically and transformed it to fit the contour of the window. I then made a mask to exclude the rest and that’s about it.

 

Putting it all together

The assignment for last week was to put this assigned bird into a composition.  Something else shown in lesson videos for the week was the Photoshop Cloud filter.

The lighthouse was shot some time ago on vacation. Taking some clouds that were over San Jose last spring, I applied a perspective transformation and enhanced the color to give them more depth and to match the saturation of the lighthouse grass. I added  the bird to the foreground but it lacked blur the birds in the videos had so I made a copy on another layer and applied a motion blur and placed it directly below the clean bird layer.

Color Deepening and Contrast using Curves

Image 1 – Coyote Peak in San Jose in late afternoon. As shot this image does not convey what it felt like in person. Also, I believe that is a minimum security women’s facility on the right.
Image 2 – Using Curves, I added more contrast. Going into the blue I boosted the highlights a little more and dropped the shadows a bit. Finally I adjusted the red down to pull out a red tint that had shown up.
Image 3 – I created a new layer and filled it with black. Using the color range tool I made a selection of the blue in the sky. I then set the layer to Soft Light and 70% opacity.

Quick Mask and other selections

The assignments this week was to make use of Quick Masks, Pasting into selections and replacing backgrounds. I would say the most difficult thing about making selections is areas of soft focus with low contrast backgrounds. The colors look nearly the same up close, only when you view the whole picture does the separation become more clear. The bee composite is from two photographs from the garden this last summer. The sign composite is made up of a winter shot of Sentinel Bridge in Yosemite last February, 2011 and the fall leaves new Yosemite Village in November 2010.

Color Changes using Masks

 

These trains can be found in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan right alongside the F150 Truck plant. It contains all types of modern machinery.

To get this photo ready for processing the first thing I needed to do was a lens correction. The lack of pre-loaded lens data for Olympus in ACR and Lightroom is just another reason I had to leave the four/thirds platform. So a little time was needed to correct using the sliders and my eyes.

Next I used a duplicate of the green channel as a base for a mask for the passenger car behind the locomotive as well as the truck bed and barrel in the immediate foreground. I then used these masks on three separate Hue/Saturation Adjustment layers. The passenger car was originally a drab yellow while the truck and barrel were a distracting bright yellow.

Sub-Layer in Photoshop

Since this was posted, I discovered this is called a “linked layer” by Adobe.

If you want to apply an adjustment filter to a particular layer in Photoshop you can make it a Sub-layer. This is a great way to combine multiple bracketed images as layers and adjust each layer independently and non-destructively.

1. In the Layer panel, create the new adjustment layer.

2. With the new layer selected press Ctrl + Alt + G

A small right angle arrow will appear and the adjustment layer will be indented in the layer panel.

3. Now paint in the mask in the sub-layer to let the un-adjusted layers below show through.