Week 6&7
In this post I will show some technique that we were show for photo manipulation and using channels.
I used the desert image we had from the presentation and load it in Photoshop.
I wanted to isolate the landscape and replace the sky with another image. So I went to the channels tab and selected the blue channel, because it offered a lot of contrast. I clicked on the blue layer, selected the how image and copied it and pasted it as a new layer in the layers pallette. After doing that I used the Curves tool to increase the contrast level of the blacks in the image. I had some grey areas in the back of the image, so by using the colour pick tool in the Curves tool menu, I selected all the grey's, which added a point on my curve and by dragging it I got rid of the grey in my image.
After that I copied my original image and used the black&white layer as a mask for the duplicate. I opened the mask layer and inverted the image, so my landscape became black and the sky white, which led to erasing the sky from the original image.
I opened a new sky image, copy and pasted this as a new layer below the foreground layer. I duplicated my canyon layer and opened the layer mask to do some editing. I wanted to preserve some of the foreground colours, so I made a marquee selection of the lower part of the mask and use the gradient fill to fade the bottom from black to white. I went back to my original image and used the Matching colour function, which sourced my current image and the cloud layer I used as my source layer. However, because of the layer mask the Colour match is affecting only the middle distance. The effect was I little bit too strong, so I dropped down the layer opacity down to about 70%, which helped to blend the colours.
This is the final result I got:
I opened a new sky image, copy and pasted this as a new layer below the foreground layer. I duplicated my canyon layer and opened the layer mask to do some editing. I wanted to preserve some of the foreground colours, so I made a marquee selection of the lower part of the mask and use the gradient fill to fade the bottom from black to white. I went back to my original image and used the Matching colour function, which sourced my current image and the cloud layer I used as my source layer. However, because of the layer mask the Colour match is affecting only the middle distance. The effect was I little bit too strong, so I dropped down the layer opacity down to about 70%, which helped to blend the colours.
This is the final result I got:
I sourced another image from the internet, so I could try the technique with a different desert landscape.
The first image is the original and the image below it is the result I got after applying the same methods.
The second task we had was to do photo manipulation to transform a reasonably run-down alleyway into a grim and dark alleyway. For the task I used the image from the tutorial:
First, I wanted to get rid of the water marks. For this I used the clone tool and the patch tool copying textures from the image until they were erased.
The next thing I did was to paint over the chair in light purple, because the red colour was I little bright and I didn't find in appropriate for the image. After that I set the layer mode to colour.
I also added a few cracks to the edge of the garage door and between the bricks and using a layer effect set to bevel emboss.
After that I substituted the windows for broken ones, using the free transform/distort to line up the vertical edges with my original image.
I wanted to erode the ground a bit, so I found an damaged asphalt image from the internet:
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What I did next was to distress the brickwork using some photos of broken brick, scaling them down and fitting them, so they compared with the rows and lining them up.
I changed the colour of the original bricks by clone brushing the new bricks on another layer and setting the layer mode to colour. After that I added a rust texture to the door to give it a more worn look. The rust layer was set on multiply. Also I added mould to the chair using photo reference and setting the layer on overlay.
After that I decided to add a text to the door. To give it a more worn look, I made a layer mask and copied the rust texture into the layer mask, setting the layer mode to soft light.
Finally I have colour graded the image by adding a gradient map adjustment layer setting it to dark blue through to light yellow. I have set the gradient map layer to Overlay and added a levels adjustment. I also added a gradient vignette at the top to give the image more atmosphere and lowering the opacity to 60% so the black is not so strong.
The final result you can see on the image below. I also added the original image, so you could see the difference.