The July Tutorial Discussion-Retouching Images

**Gare** · 20 July 2012, 05:33 PM

Don't be daunted; that wasn't the point in my creating the image.

It's got layers to it, so your first step has everything to do with learning and nothing to do with editing.

Just move the pieces in a copy of the file to see what I did.

Once you know the "whats" and "whys" by mere observation, you can create variations on what I did.

And you're very creative so you should have fun while exercising new knowledge, in fact, I hope everyone who downloads the file will.

-g

**angelize** · 20 July 2012, 07:15 PM

Something about my first sunflower image was bothering me, after taking a close look I realized the side branching stems looked a bit too stiff there should naturally be a bit of bend to them. So my solution was another under used live effect, liquid colour. One thing I do when working with live effects is once I am happy with the effect I lock it while I'm doing further edits to the image. It was a small change but I think it made a difference. I added the faux depth of field by cloning the image and adjusting the brightness of the clone down just a bit and heavily blurred it, then I just used the eraser tool with a very soft large nib and erased out the areas where I wanted the sharper brighter image to show through!

For the zinnias photo I decided to fill the empty space so I used a few copies of the sunflowers and scaled them down did some colour change work on the centres and positioned them on the zinnias and used the eraser to erase out portions of the stems to make it appear that they are growing up through the foliage below. I did do a colour change on one of the red flowers, if you look closely there is one pink one. When doing colour changes on flowers my thoughts is to keep the changes soft and natural looking by dialing back the strength. I gave this one a slightly different back ground effect this time I grouped my photos and cloned the group and gave it a stained glass transparency, I used the slider to dial back the transparency and then I again used the eraser to remove the transparency from the parts of the photo I wanted brighter

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**Gare** · 21 July 2012, 02:39 PM

@Frances, post #62—

You did recolor the centers of the sunflower, didn't you?

Because if you didn't, this just reaffirms that we're using different monitor calibrations and colour profiles for images. Xara always uses sRGB; Charles told me that a while ago.

Tip: if you're working between Photoshop and Xara, you MUST use sRGB for the color profile in Photoshop or you're going to get an incredible brightness and saturation difference.

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—gary

**angelize** · 21 July 2012, 06:15 PM

Is this zoomed in enough?

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**Gare** · 21 July 2012, 06:16 PM

The pixels are clearly smooth.

We win.

Thanks!

—gary

**stygg2003** · 21 July 2012, 07:44 PM

That's a good tip using the 3D extrude Gary, couldn't resist a quick try

Also finished the second flower image, looks a bit washy so I think I will have a check on my monitors display settings but I'm sure it's set for sRGB.

Stygg

**Gare** · 21 July 2012, 08:22 PM

Send me the file if you care to, Stygg. But I'm pretty sure you're not "pounding" the Levels enough. Brightness, Saturation and Hue are all inter-related. If you adjust Levels, you might get a stronger image. It's not your view, not your monitor, I don't believe.

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See my attached file based on your image.

-g

**stygg2003** · 21 July 2012, 08:35 PM

Originally Posted by Gare

Send me the file if you care to, Stygg. But I'm pretty sure you're not "pounding" the Levels enough. Brightness, Saturation and Hue are all inter-related. If you adjust Levels, you might get a stronger image. It's not your view, not your monitor, I don't believe.

See my attached file based on your image.

-g

One file Gary, I noticed right away your levels was set at 96 for dark where mine is on 65.

Stygg

**Gare** · 21 July 2012, 09:03 PM

Take a look toward the end of this month's video to see which dial does what on the Levels dialog.

Attached I only did a few petals, not all of them. Open Levels and see the values I was toying around with. Use your eyes to see when the adjustment is right for you, Stygg. Given specific numbers won't do here, sorry.

But you will see that a brightness adjustment—Levels (of brightness) changes apparent saturation.

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**angelize** · 21 July 2012, 09:25 PM

I decided to take what we have been practising here and use it on a photo I took one day of a butterfly in my garden. Mr butterfly happened to land on some geraniums that were in need of deadheading, and the sun washed out some of his lovely yellows. So I did some cropping and then went to work with some cloning, some magic erasing and some colour adjustments. I edited this photo once before but I think it came out better this time