Photo Restoration Blog

Archive for the ‘photoshop techniques’ Category

It been a while since i showed some of my other work besides photo restoration. So Ive decided to show a piece i did i called organic glasshouse.

photo retouching for adverts

You may be interested to see the process behind this image, its quite simple but very effective. these are the three images i used

Photo retouching for advertising Step 1

Base leaf structure. I  used a copy of the image and used  glowing edges and inverted the image. Then merged it with the original and set the blending mode to difference

Photo retouching for adverts step 1

Photo retouching for advertisements step 2

This image was then merged with a tomato plant to get the final result. I added some text and the final result is at the top.!

Sometimes images are too big to scan in one piece especially the very long panorama photos that can reach well over 30 inches and bigger than 50 inches sometimes!

long panorama school photo

What can you do? You can scan this type of image in pieces and then use PhotoShop to stitch them back together.  I will use and example of a photo around 56 inches long of some windmills. It was scanned in five separate sections with an overlap or around 25% per photo and with all your scanners auto exposure setting turned off. This is to ensure that all the separate scans are exactly the same. If you leave your scanner to auto correct each one then they will all end up with slightly different tones and contrast which wont match well when photoshop comes to stitch them together. Once your image is scanned save the files off to a folder called panorama or something useful to you.

Below is the place to find the photo merge or stitch menu to start the photo stitching process once we have our scans saved.

Finding the "photomerge" option in photoshop for stitching large photos together

Next, browse to where we saved the images.

Pointing the photo merge where to open the separate scans ready for stitching

Select the “Auto” option from the radio buttons and select “blend images together” from the check box below the list of files you browsed for just now. Then select OK.

panorama layers once stitched

In the finished result above after PhotoShop has finished stitching the layers, each one will be on a separate layer allowing you to fine tune them in case the stitch was not 100% accurate.

You can see here that I have switched off one of the layers so you can see how photoshop has blended the image. Its done in a nice, seemingly random fashion which is the best blend route and so that it cannot be seen when you zoom in and inspect it. Which is of course the way we want it, totally invisible!

There are not many occasions when it gets it wrong. I have had 2 or 3 instances when stitching school photos with many people together that two or more heads get replicated. Its very rare but can be corrected by manually painting over the masks on the layers. To do this you click on the black mask of the layer that wasn’t blended properly and paint with black or white soft brush, to add or remove the offending or misaligned part of the image.

To see this image restored, see can panorama images be restored or to see another example of stitching images try the post on flaked emulsion on large images

Retouching eyes is a way to improve a portrait. This is a technique I picked up along the photo restoration and retouching road.

Above are some eyes from a portrait from Michael Herb at 204Studios. They have a round studio flash reflected in them. Some say this is attractive and softens the eyes but this is a matter of opinion. Maybe you want to add your own reflection in the eye that suits your style? I have included a layers snap shot of a process to change them.

The bottom layer has the reflection removed. The layer above “whites”, is a soft white brush sprayed in the whites of the eye and then reduced in opacity and masked. this softens the whites.

The “reflection” layer is a single dab of white masked to make a triangular shaped reflection.

Above that is a small white dot, which simulates the main point of light.

Next up is a colour layer to add more of a warm hue to eyes with the centre pupil masked out.

Finally a splash of red also reduced on opacity in the corners of the eyes to remove the grey look and warm up the eyes some more.

The very top layer is just the original so we can refer back to it to see the changes we made.

You then set about retouching the face and skin in your usual way. I hope this retouching eyes article helped you.

Neil