Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘photoshop fun’ Category

I am calling this week, photomontage week., where I will post one montage a day for 6 days. All of these were entries into photoshop competitions.

The first is spider.

Created from a rock, a spider, somebody’s leg, a fly and sunset was added at the end. The spider was altered to hold the thread which was also added. The perspective is from the spiders nook looking outwards.

Note: All images for the montage were obtained from free stock photos.

Another one tomorrow…

Sorry to everyone who has been following me on photoshoptalent.com, their website has been down for the last week “under maintenance”, any links I have to them are broken. Hopefully photoshoptalent will sort out this problem soon. If not I will upload all the images on my photo restoration blog so I no longer have to rely on them.

Update: They are now up and running again under pxleeyes.com All data was lost so none of you would have seen all the entries. I have listed them below.

Acorn made from brass fixings

Birdhouse made from bits of a birdhouse

Jet, foreground and middle ground added to a snow scene

Same scene as the previous one but hole and foreground added

cracked paint texture and lightning added to snow scene

Snow added, it was summer before I added snow!

Lengthy removing of trees and moss, added lizard leg and head and new background and cloud smoke

Made from a chrome spoon and spatula.

I am sure I have missed a few. If I find the original images that these were made from I will add them in.

Hope you like them

A never ending staircase.

I had another crack at the never ending staircase and this is the result.

See the link for a larger version of the never ending staircase

Once you have developed a set of photo restoration skills you can use them to create a realistic photomontage.

In the following photoshop tutorial I will help you create a never ending staircase.

Never ending staircase

Photo restorations are my speciality but today I thought I would create a tutorial on making a never ending staircase from PhotoShop, Textured with wood, stone, grass or whatever you choose. Sometimes when you see photo restorations, you wonder how they were done, its the same for illusions. Here is how to make your own photo montage illusion.

Step 1

Create a document in photoshop around 4000 x 2000 pixels. File / new / and fill in the pixels width and height.

Step 2

In order to be able to draw the staircase we need to show the rulers and change the measurements to centimetres.

To do this view / rulers, then right click on the now visible ruler and select centimetres.

We need to show the gird now. Select view / show grid, this is to enable us to draw accurately and evenly to produce the correct angles for the steps.

To help us do this go to view / snap to / grid, to make sure the lines we draw are all consistent and the cursor locks onto the intersections of the grid.

To check that your screen settings are the same go to edit / preferences / unit and rulers and copy these settings in the image

copy these settings in the above image

Step 3

Back to the image.

Make a new layer, select layer/ new / layer from the top toolbar. On the new layer, draw a diamond shape with the polygon lasso tool from the tools palette. Use 5×3 squares per quarter to draw your diamond shape. This gives us an angle of just about 30 degrees which is very important for this to work. See image below for help. Draw the two side of the step as well and fill using different coloured greys to give the step some depth.

Step 4

Now copy the single step and layer as it is shown in the image below. To do this copy the step to a new layer and drag this layer under the previous one in the layers palette to stack the steps. Repeat until you have the image below.

Step 5

Repeat this process copying the step to a new layer and dragging the layers behind or in front of the previous layer untill you create a full set of steps as shown below. Once you are happy it is best save your work at this point as a .psd file using the save as command from the file menu drop down at the top of the screen.

Now merge the layers by selecting the layers in the layers palette and merge them using layer / merge layers from the top, drop down layer menu.

Step 6

Now let’s use something to make to the steps look more real.

Find a picture of a stone slab or a piece of wood, plastic, metal or even grass and cut it out into the shape we first drew, (the diamond and its edges). You can do this on a separate layer and change the opacity of the layer in your layers palette so you can see the original diamond step underneath. Using wood this can be achieved fairly easily. You may need to use the warp or scale tools, or liquefy.

On the layer with your piece of wood, select the wood by pressing the Ctrl key and clicking in the wood layer on the layers palette. This should select the wood and display your selection in the main image window.

In the top drop down menus select edit / transform / warp. You will see grid on screen divided into 9 boxes with selection points around the outside. Click and drag these points to warp your wood till you fit it to the shape of our step.

Step 7

Now repeat the steps 4 and 5 we used to create the stair case and position your steps above the others, copying to new layers as in steps 4 and 5 and you will have your new wooden staircase. Save again as a new file with a new file name just so we have the stairs if we need to use them again. Merge your layers together as in step 5.

You can experiment with amount of steps just by shortening the sides of the staircase using the grid we first set up.

Step 8

Using an image from pxleyes.com stock and thanks to “mqtrf” for the use of the image, and using a paving slab instead of wood the staircase can be slotted into the scene by opening the two images, Select the staircase image and copy using, select / all from the top selection menu and then edit / copy from the top edit menu. Switch to the image of the beach and then paste in the stairs using the top edit menu, edit / paste.

In the case of this image the stairs fit better when they are flipped around.

Using the edit menu choose edit / transform / flip horizontal
Duplicate the staircase layer and use from the top menus, image/adjustments/hue and sat sliders to desaturate and darken them till they are black. Slide the saturation slider all the way to the left and the same for the lightness slider, then click ok. Use the opacity slider in the layers menu to reduce the opacity to make the shadow transparent. Then use the warp tool to start to shape our shadow, using the same process as in step 6

Step 9

To add more to the shadow, paint on the shadow layer with a black brush, and to delete from the shadow, use the delete tool.

Step 10

When you have finished tweaking your shadow, convert the whole image to black and white by first flattening the image. From the top menus choose, layer / flatten image. This will help with the blending of textures and make the image more convincing. Now we can clean up any artefacts with the patch tool, such as the joins between shadows. Select the patch tool from the side tools palette, it’s the one that looks like a plaster. Draw a long shape around the join between the shadows and click and drag the selection to the left to sample the sand texture and tone, then release the mouse button.

Step 11

Crop and sharpen and you are done! With your version the stairs could be anywhere at all, on a rock, in a rock, made of grass on a hill, or hovering in the sky!

Here is another one in stone! I created this myself with some stone slabs and some clever cloning and shading.

Or another version on beach.

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial brought to you by A quality photo restoration service www.image-restore.co.uk restorations of old and damaged photos.

Rather off topic of photo repair today, but still interesting and to do with Photoshop, I have been entering PhotoShop talent Competitions, you can see my entries below. I have had 2 seconds and one 4th place so far. I am now hooked so keep looking for more entries.

4th place – created from a stack of cups and a Bonsai tree

2nd place winner – frost and deer and extra sun rays added to a woodland scene.

EDIT: PhotoshopTalent website has now been renamed pxleyes, so please visit Neil Rhodes photo art portfolio for all my entries. Check back regularly to see more entries

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