We were also given our Photoshop workshop brief which is in at the same time the 405 module deadline is - 8th February 2012.
The aim of the brief is to produce a set of 5 postcards that explore your given colour. The colour is a colour I'd pick from the OUGD404 Design Principles photography workshops. In the end, I chose Red. The postcards must be based upon photographs I've taken in the colour theory photography session and must work in CMYK mode.
The workshops are designed to introduce me to a range of tools and procedures available to me in Photoshop that will help me fulfil the brief successfully.
I'll need to have deliverables of a set of five A5 double sided postcards, so in-depth research into postcards and techniques and existing styles will be needed. I'll need to think about my audience, the purpose of the postcards and how they'll work.
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Right off the bat we learned about masking in photoshop and creating adjustment layers for things such as levels, brightness/contrast and hue/saturation. It all works surprisingly well and shows just how powerful Photoshop can be.
Here are some examples of photo manipulations we did.
Levels
Here on this photo, it's all a bit dark the shadows and mid tones need brightening up abit to make it more lifelike.
Here you can see the levels adjustment layer and the quick mask where I masked out the windows as they ended up too bright, so in effect the only part of the photo that had the levels adjusted was the walls and ceilings etc. I ended up with this...
Which looks alot brighter and lifelike as if you're stood there, the windows seem to let in more light, as they would if you were physically there looking up.
Shadows/Highlights
This photo of a sculpture is simply too dark, you can't see the details on the sculpture, the shadows and contrast is too strong. This can be easily altered in Photoshop as we found out. A mask and a levels adjustment layer. It went from this...
via this..
To this...
Levels & Hue/Saturation
As you can see, this photo is again quite dark, it doesn't seem as vibrant and light as it should be. So again I masked out the ceiling windows and adjusted the levels to brighten up the shadows and midtones and highlights. I got this...
I then experimented with creating hue/saturation adjustment layers, as you can see I changed the colour of the ladys top in the bottom left and also the colour the tree plants at the bottom of the photo from green to purple! I also changed the colour of the ceiling decorations.
To give you an idea of how I did it, here is the layer panel showing the masks for the hue/saturation adjustments.
Notes
Also Simon made lots of great points and shared many tips. For example, the median filter, how to create contact sheets and how to save for web in the most efficient and quickest way, using Photoshop to it's correct functionalities rather than doing it yourself and leaving yourself room for error.
Here are some notes I made.
File Automate> Photomerge, is good for creating panoramas. Piece photos for panorama, piecing photos together, vignette removal/analog cameras get dark corners which is what vignette removal is for but with digital cameras you shouldn't have that problem.
Tolerance 1 = 1 colour tolerance 1 pixel
Tolerance 2 - 2 colour tolerance.
Out of Gamut = Out of printing range.
Photos come in RGB > light
Converting to CMYk seems to dull everything down
View>Gamut warning>Grey
Manually bring colours into range by adjusting the photo colour range.
[ ] = brush size.
When you can't print vibrant >specify spot colour > different libraries > e.g. metallic etc
To delete bits that move from a static image you can do this by using the median filter. The more photos you have, from a tripod or something, the better the filter will work as it has more material to work from.
File>script>load files into stack. Loads all files into 1 file as a smart object. Smart objects are very powerful and one of the best and most useful features of photoshop.
Create smart object>merge layers
This works best if you set a tripod and take a photo like every 30/60 seconds.
Median filter>Average Result
- Anything moving won't be there unless they walk really slow
- If someone's sat then they'll still be there. This can create really ghostly stuff, if you sit somewhere where people are constantly moving, you can look alone in a really dead out place.
- Clouds will move and become blurry, you'll have to mask some back in from one of your source images that have nice clouds you like
File>script>load files into stack. Smart object of all layers
Filters.. Layer>Smart objects>Median
To get sky sorted, File>place>layer mask it off
Places it as a smart object, so you'll have to rasterize before you can delete bits
Use magic wand and use select similar to select sky>select inverse>delete.
To create contact sheet, File>Automate>Contact Sheet.
Always add filenames to contact sheets for sending onto clients, as it's easier and more professional for when they're picking work from it.
Creating actions is incredibly useful, especially if you have loads of files you need to resize and save for web etc.
Do once and record what you do. and then you can apply the action to anything. Click on default actions folder and 'create new set'
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