Photography for Artists & Designers

Art & Design 265

Week 9:

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STRAY NOTE:
not yet ready for prime time...

 

Collections of Free, Downloadable Photoshop Actions:

Actions perform complex tasks for users. Basically a series of steps are "recorded" and then played back. In effect, Actions are mini computer programs. The good news is you can record and store any common sequence of steps that you perform in Photoshop. Also good news is that other photographers have saved their actions for you to use — you can download them from the web. Some are free. Some are not. Quality varied. Alot.

Automate your Workflow with a Droplet

This video tutorial explores one way to save effort by creating a Droplet in Photoshop — a little "program" that allows you to drag and drop your image to invoke an action.

 

Understanding Adobe Photoshop: Richard Harrington
249   #66 Creating an Action
***
Saving or storing processes can be a powerful timesaver.  You are effectively writing a macro, a sot of very small computer program that can be executed whenever you want.  This is a good way to repeat special effects without having to manually step through each task along the way.
The tutorial walks you through an example.
Essential stuff for advanced PS users.

 

Understanding Adobe Photoshop: Richard Harrington
251  #67 Batch Processing
Often you have a lot of photos that need the same type of processing or editing.  Batch processing allows you to select a collection of images and have each one altered by the same editing steps.
You can select Actions that you have saved, and apply them to many images.
File: Automate: Batch
File: Script: Image Processor (preferred?)

 

Understanding Adobe Photoshop: Richard Harrington
253 #68 Image Processor Script
Allows you to quickly alter a collection of images.
File: Script:  Image Processor
Select an image folder
Select destination folder for resulting images
Select final file type – convert to TIFF or PSD in most cases.  Consider image size adjustment
Select action to apply to files
Apply copyright info

Batch Rename Files With Custom Strings in Bridge CS5:
"...how to take advantage of a NEW Adobe Bridge CS5 feature that allows you batch rename just the part of the file name that you want and leave the rest of the name intact."

 

 

 

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-photoshop-cs5/contentaware-filling-and-healing/

 

Useful Photoshop Tips And Tricks For Photo Retouching

Photo Retouching Tips And Tricks In Photoshop

The Ultimate Guide To Cloning In Photoshop

Unknown Tricks and Time-Savers

 

Photoshop Top 40 with Deke McClelland:  Photoshop CS5 Top 5 Tip #5: Common Sense Enhancements

 

The Adobe Creative Suite Podcast:  How To Use The Photoshop CS5 Patch Tool To Fix Things In Portrait Retouching

Patch Tool
Portrait Retouching

Create separate image layer and make edits to that layer.  Later you can adjust Layer opacity to revise the degree of influence of your retouches.

Select problem area.  Drag toward “clean” area.

Clone Stamp Tool:   Mode: Lighten   Opacity: 40

 

 

 

The Adobe Creative Suite Podcast:  What to do When Content Aware Fill or Content Aware Scale Doesn't Work

Content Aware tools are impressive…and can be tricky.  Just when you expect them to do magic, they do odd things.
Here are some particular examples of things going wrong, and how to anticipate and prepare for them.

 

The Adobe Creative Suite Podcast:  Fix a Family Photo using Photoshop CS5

CS5 Retouch tools are presented here…the Magic Healing tools are quite an upgrade over prior tools.
Retouching a couple of typical tourist snapshots with not-quite-right details.

The Adobe Creative Suite Podcast:  Retouching old photos

CS2 Retouch tools to recover an all photo with stains, color-shifts, tears and missing fragments
[compare to CS5 tools]

 

 

 

 

Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcasts:
How To Use The Photoshop CS5 Patch Tool To Fix Things In Portrait Retouching  12.36
Good intro to image corrections using the Patch Tool.  Both the benefits and the limitations of the tool are illustrated…some unintentionally.
Patch Tool:    
1) draw a selection around the problem area
2) drag that selected area towards an area with similar, but correct color/texture.
3) Watch the dynamic preview of repaired area… release when good.  
work with several small patches rather than trying to cover a large area with a single correction.

As with most detail-corrections, you must think like a realist painter.  Many details can be corrected easily, but the forms, colors and shading on fleshtones is very subtle.  Many minor adjustments create odd or awkward subtleties. 
Note:  compare these techniques to non-destructive tactics using two image layer and a mask controlling impact of edited image on the original image.

Clone Stamp Tool:  Lighten Mode  -- enables you to only lighted shadow areas

 

PodCast: Adobe Creative Suite Podcast: What to Do when Content Aware Scale Doesn’t Work
10.22
Content Aware Scale
Content Aware Fill
Content Aware Scale attempts to stretch images without distorting details within the image.  It sometimes work well…sometimes not.
When Content Aware Scale does NOT work, what can you do to help the software work?
Select the key subject area.  Save selection as channel.
Then do a CAS with Protect applied to the saved channel.  PS now scales the image without disturbing the protected area.
Content Aware Fill
Sometimes
Select the area to delete.  Use Shift-Delete (or Fill)
To declare areas to NOT use for CAF, select

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Week 9

Images are never perfect.
Someone got in the way.
There's an odd glare over there.

Digital tools make it possible to repair some pretty severe image problems... sometimes.
The current generation of Photoshop (CS5) offers outstanding repair tools that are, frankly, pretty mind-boggling.

 

Content-Aware Filling and Healing/Harrington/Understanding Photoshop

This video covers the basics of the new image-repair tools.

Explore these tools in CS5 and find some less-than-perfect images. Watch out of imperfections introduced by these tools. These tools are impressive, but they rely on many existing traits within the image, and they make assumptions about what improvements are to be made. But they can't read your mind, and they can't revisit the site of the photo --- these tools just "guess" really well.

 

 

You might review these links/articles/videos for still more ideas on how to recover/repair images

Useful Photoshop Tips And Tricks For Photo Retouching

Photo Retouching Tips And Tricks In Photoshop

The Ultimate Guide To Cloning In Photoshop

Unknown Tricks and Time-Savers

 

For Next Week

Required:
— Find 3 of your images that have problems that can be corrected using cloning or healing tools.
— clean them up using a variety of repair tactics, and show us the before-and-after versions.

The articles linked/discussed above deal with correction-repair techniques.
Those are the key skills you'll needed.

Goal: Create 3 different images with problems and make them presentable.
Select images that need repair...images that you'd like to reshoot, but can't.

Your full-size, Photoshop image should be at least 4mpix.

Create a lower-resolution version of your images for uploading to DropBox.
Follow the steps illustrated here to create a 2-megapixel version of your image for in-class viewing.


Save those images to your DropBox Art265_Photography folder.
Create a folder called: Repairs
Save...
a) the three low-res versions of your original images saved as JPG
and
b) the final 3+ repaired images, each as low-res JPGs.

 

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