Images Assignment
I started out on this assignment by figuring out how to have Photoshop make thumbnails. I found that under Files > Automatic > Web Gallery, Photoshop would make a complete web page of all the photos in a directory. This is cool. Of course the web page generated does not follow the guidelines we are using in this class but when I am done playing with all of my photos I will make that web page and upload everything to see what can be done automatically.
Cropping
I started with the easy task, cropping and resizing an image. I took the picture of General Wolseley during the Diamond Jubilee ceremony and cropped out some of the background noise.
Coloring
Coloring was very challenging to me. I started with a black and white photo of a barn, and a hand-colored version of the photograph. I wanted to see if I could do a better job at coloring with Photoshop then someone who actually painted on a photo. All three of the photographs can be seen at the Barn page. But I think overall it turned out pretty good.
I showed my son what I was doing and he showed me three different ways to get the effect I wanted. Unfortunately, I did not save the results. I was too anxious to get started on my assignment. The first way he showed was very interesting and I think resulted in the most realistic representation - but it really was recreating the scene, not coloring a photo. My son is in landscape architecture and he looked at the trees in the picture and could tell what types of trees they were. He went into Sketch-up and made a three dimensional model of the tree line with the exact trees. Since he was in Sketch-up he was able to have the trees represented in the correct perspective that the photo was taken. He then copied this as a picture and superimposed it on the photograph. This resulted in a beautiful rendition of the tree line. Of course he did this in about 15 minutes. It would have taken me about 5 hours. The next technique he showed me was just grabbing pictures of trees, wood, windows and superimposing them on the photograph. In essence he was "coloring" the photo with dabs of other photographs. I ended up using this technique for the sky, but the I made the sky a layer.
I finally ended up making different copies of the picture and making layer masks with them. I would color the image on the layer and the layer mask would only show through that area that I had erased. By having the selection for the layer mask run over between the road and the grass, the door and the building, etcetera, I was able to blend the right amount at the intersection of the layer masks. I only ended up having to paint the barn red and put brown trunks on some of the trees. I then flattened the image and cropped it to get rid of the outside edges where some of my layer masks were not exact.
Matting and Restoring
I combined the matting and restoring requirements into restoring a picture of a torn and damaged pamphlet with and engraving and restored it and matted it. I began by using the magic lasso tool to select everything that wasn't text or the engraving, and cleaned that up with a review of everything that was selected. That was very time consuming. I then did a select inverse and moved all the text and the engraving to a different layer. I then spent quite some time with the eraser to clean up some areas of the engraving that were too dark. The next challenge was the restoration of the upper-right corner which took some time with the clone tool and the selection and transformation tool. When it was all done I had a pamphlet that was not water damaged or ripped.
Vignette
My last project was a vignette. I took my favorite lady, Queen Victoria and made a vignette out of her Diamond Jubilee photograph. If I took this and put it on a background image for the background it could make for an interesting web page.
