Manipulated with multiple layers and textures with a gradient fill in Photoshop CS4. Colors are not as true as in photoshop.

Thanks to Pear Biter for allowing his image to be manipulated under Creative Commons www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/566128230/

I played around with the Seattle image a bit more from this post, adding an image I was able to get through the NASA website. This is a gold mine for texture images and other than for advertising, they are in the public domain.

Check out the NASA gallery and start adding to your texture library.

Tonight I was giving CS4 a good workout and thought I’d work on some portrait images just for fun. These both came out a bit better than I expected and you’ll see in the second image, I added a gradient to neutralize the skin tones as well as some textures on the outer edges. I was also going for a more creamier feel to the skin. Unfortunatly the web image just doesn’t come out with the right tone as a large .PSD file does.

I did a bit more work on the first image above, with Edna, shaping her nose and mouth somewhat but not wanting to make it look unrealistic. I also tried to maintain the skintone and pores when working with the skin which is always a challenge. This work can be tedious and there really is no way around it other than having a great makeup artist and lighting to get it right.

I have been driving around my Macbook Pro with my new version of Photoshop CS4, trying to learn all the little nuances hidden under the hood. Somehow I got sidetracked and ended up at istockphoto.com looking at textures. Don’t ask me how, it just happens when one has a period of boredom, followed by flashes of inspiration and then some temporary forms of ADHD. Anyway, so I did a search on textures as I wanted to work with some layers in Photoshop and play around with some images I shot over the weekend in Seattle. Not having any textures at the ready, I found this one of a tuscan wall that I figured would work perfect. Yeah I had to pay for it, but I wanted it now and did not have my Europe images close by and the time to spend hours hunting for a texture. Besides I I started looking at my old Europe CD’s, I’d end up on some other tangent and never accomplish my goal , so I bought it.

Originally I was going to use and image of Post Alley by the Pike Place Market, but felt that the Seattle image would work a lot  better. In the upper left corner, you can see the original texture file as well as the Seattle photo I used.

So, let’s see step by step how I created this.

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Had a chance to shoot in Seattle this afternoon and thought I’d try shooting some panorama’s. This is 12 images stitched together with a hand held shot at 18 mm on a wide angle Nikon lens. Shutter was at 1/180 with an F6.7 aperture.

When shooting a shot like this with the intention of stitching together, it is important to make sure you are set on manual mode for shutter and aperture. Since I mostly shoot aperture mode, I took a test shot and then read the settings and then moved my camera to manual mode. If I was to do this over, I would have probably shot 24 photos to make sure the lower part of the marina made it into the image.  The aluminum boat in the center was in my initial shots, but you have to crop about a 1/3 of your final results to get a panorama as the stitching is not aligned with the way the frames were shot. I also overlap about 1/3 of the frame to the next, to make sure I don’t miss any details.

Below is one of the original images, flat and boring, so you can see why I needed to add some tweaks.

In Photoshop CS2-CS4, this is real easy to create. Go to File>Automate>Photomerge and choose all the images you want to create the panorama. Click Ok and PS will do the rest. Once I cropped, I then did a few things to get rid of the muted tones as the light was real flat. I created another layer and ran Filter>Other>High Pass. I then set opacity to 30% and fill to 25% with a color dodge screen. This brings out a bit more of the detail in the image. Bumping up the saturation a bit to bring out the color, completed the image.

Photographer Bill Simone steps through some of his workflow in creating the above image. Though I think HDR can be a bit overdone and has become the rage for the past two years or so, but Bill really created a beautiful image without overdoing it. Also check out his Boxer post. This was a great composite image, taking you step by step through the process.

Seeing work like this convinces me I need to use more post processing. I have always been a minimalist when it comes to working my images, because I think the job needs to get done in the camera and not on the desktop. I also fought moving to digital from film and going back to film would be pretty tough at this point. My CS4 upgrade arrives next week, so I guess I’ll need to get to work and get some help from the masters like Bill Simone.