Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for July, 2008

Instead of my usual photo repair posts I have decided yo have some fun. The usual Photo repair posts are before these fun tutorials.

Eyeball. Colour Pupil and Iris

This is a texture that I found to be very effective for the Iris of an eye.

Start by creating a new file around 1000 pixels square.

Your colour palette should be set to Red foreground, white background or

You can use Red foreground, black background if you want flecks of red in your iris.

Filter/render/clouds
Filter/texture/stained glass/ cell size 10/ light intensity 4/ border 3
Filter/blur/radial blur zoom/distance 80

Image/Adjust/Invert
Image/adjust/exposure (adjust for more contrast)

New Layer. Draw circle on a new layer. Almost filling the canvas. Feather 1 pixel and fill with black.

Next from the drop down menu, Select, modify/contract/ set to 6.
Feather the selection by 5, delete. You should now be left with a dark ring.
On a new layer draw a new circle for the pupil, not too big and fill with black.

In the Layers pallet, select this layer and add outer glow. Choose a green that compliments the blue textured iris. Make it wide and diffused, just play with the setting until you are happy.

On a new layer create the highlights by drawing a circle and filling with whit, but use the graduated fill set to colour to transparent. Shape the catch light how you like, but bear in mind you should be following the curvature of the “ball” of the eye.

On new layers add more catch lights or reflections as you so desire and vary the transparencies of the layers to get varying degree of reflections.

To finish, select with the magic wand the outside of the larger circle. Keep the selection active and create a new layer and fill the selection with white.

A final burning in of the mid-tones around the edge of the eye should create a further illusion of a bulge in the eye.

Update

I made the iris outer glow a bit brighter. Added another outer ring underneath the existing one with a thicker and heavily feathered dark green. Then on the “iris rays” layer, i used the smudge tool to create the dividing line between the green glow and the outer colours. I added a more convincing highlight!!

Back to photo repairs and restoring in the next post.

Down load the action below if you want to automates most of this

• Download 1 – Eyeball Action from the create an eye tutorial

 If you are looking for the restoration posts you can jump to the latest one here

Making waves in Photoshop

Start by creating a new file around 3000 pixels square.

Your colour palette should be set to white foreground, black background

Choose filter/render/clouds then Filter/blur/motion blur angle 0, around 350

At this point I though the contrast was a bit lacking for the effect I was trying to create so I hit the auto levels button

More blurring. Filter/blur/motion blur around 350

Smooth out the blur effect slightly with filter/noise/median. Set to around 20

Select all and use the Edit/transform/perspective to crunch down the perspective so it looks like the waves are heading off into the distance. You will then need to use the “scale” from the same menu to squash this down vertically to stretch out the waves even more. And then scale it wider for more stretching.

Another quick auto levels to adjust the contrast again.

Now we add some lighting effects to bring in some enhancement of the waves.

Convert image to RGB mode if not already.
Use filter/render/lighting effects single spot and have a play with what give the most pleasing contrast enhancement to the waves. Something central and above gives a moonlight sea effect. Crop the image to encompass the best bits of the sea.

Please take note here. The waves are completely random and you will end up with different looking waves to me.

Add new layer
Select text tool and white text
Type your word slogan or company name
Enlarge so that the text is a good size.

Duplicate this layer
Set the top layer of text to blending mode “overlay”
Set the bottom layer of text to blending mode “exclusion”
bevel and emboss text of the top layer using the layers pallet.

Add reflection, by duplicating the text layers and selecting them both. Rasterize these layers and merge them together.

Edit/transform/scale and drag from the top through to the bottom to scale the words upside down, about two thirds height of the original text.

Edit/transform/perspective and widen out the words to give a slight perspective.

In order for the next bit to work we need to scale down the whole image to around 400 to 600 pixels wide.

Make a rectangular selection around the lowest part of the perspective text and feather to around 10 pixels and delete. This is to fade the text into the water. You may need to adjust the levels or brightness to get the effect you like best.

Now from the filters menu select distort/ripple/ -100
Finally adjust the opacity till you are happy with effect.

If you like you can add a colour overlay layer to blue.

More to come in the next post…