Photoshop Practice

Enhancing some of my photoshop skills by fixing old photographs. Also did a leaflet design as a small job from my brother which I am quite proud of. I had to change the date on an existing poster with the same font and colours. Quite straightforwards, I used a website called Fontspring which came up with loads of similar fonts so I downloaded a few. Also used a simple colour picker. Came out with this.

Left is the original, right is mine

I also started experimenting with repairing and recolouring old photographs. I found one in an album which was discoloured from being in a frame and had a stripe of original colour on it. First, I had to repair the stripe so I used the 'stamp' tool and picked a colour and essentially coloured it in. 

After that, I used the Photoshop 'auto colour' tool which brought it back to its original colour. I tried to recolour black and white photos but this was very time consuming (the auto colour tool didn't work as there was no colour information whatsoever). I might come back to this later. But now at least I can say I can repair old and discoloured photos!

My friend sent me one of his very damaged pictures so I experimented on one and it turned out very well. I might start this up as a business on Fiverr.

Mostly just used the stamp tool for this one, I used content aware for some of the bigger bits. It was quite time consuming hence why I should start it as a business, so I can put more effort into it.

Photoshop Lessons

On Thursday afternoons, we now have basic Photoshop skills lessons. This is very good news as I only know how to edit RAW pictures, rather than looking at editing, adding text, making posters, etc. I won't be including the very basic and common sense side menu which is pretty straightforward and I already know where most things are.

I was the only person from my course that turned up which was a shame (plus a few Production Design students). We looked at making business cards as well as the basic tools like the magic wand, text, layers, etc. The history tool is particularly helpful so you can see where you have made a mistake and delete it. 

Holding shift while drawing using the pen tool draws a straight line. The layer tools can also edit text by adding outlines (edit then stroke) and also a nice embossing effect (bevel and emboss). You can also drag documents from the tab menu and put them into other documents. Holding the shift key while selecting can make you select specific areas. 

Going into select then transform will bring up the resize options. Free transform will resize the image and holding shift will keep the dimensions. 

Next week we will be looking at images and editing them which will be useful for everyone in our year for making posters. 

Photoshop

With Minor out of the way, I am focusing on getting the wedding photos edited. A lot of them were quite noisy so I looked into how to get rid of it and it was life changing. Since I took pictures in RAW format it was a lot easier too. The CR2 menu comes up automatically on photoshop so it was quite easy exploring through the options and the "noise reduction" tool.

Before

After

There's also a few lights that are over exposed, some sadly too far gone where it just darkens the white. Some I could save such as this one below. The phone was very overexposed, so I used the Adjustment Brush and made a new correction and brought the exposure down.

Less overexposed

I also experimented with the spot healing tool for a spot someone had, but most importantly on this picture. It's not very flattering at first so I was hoping this button would smooth out the bones. After time it did! And I am very happy with the results.

Before

After