Giving an old photo a facelift

Approximately 40 years ago, my mum and her dad sailed from England to Australia on a 26 ft yacht.*  They have quite a lot of photos from that time, but unfortunately some of the photos look like this:

A photo out the window of the cabin (I think)

Note: You'll probably need to enlarge the image by clicking on it to see how bad it really is.

This is probably the worst of the lot. It's pretty hard to work out what we're even meant to be looking at here. So I decided to see if any of the stuff I'd learnt in Photoshop class could be used to help improve this photo.

The first thing to do was to try to reduce the graininess of the photo and remove all of the little white flecks. I used two of the filters under the Noise heading - first I used "Despeckle" and then I used "Dust & Scratches". After that the photo looked like this:

Heaps better!

...but still room for improvement. I used the spot healing brush tool on any little white flecks that hadn't been picked up by the two filters.

After that I made a selection around the window frame. The colour and contrast adjustments I wanted to make to the window frame were completely different to the adjustments I wanted to make to the view of the ocean. Drawing a selection around the window frame allowed me to direct the changes at one area at a time.

The window frame had a fair bit of colour into it (ugly looking greens and browns) so I used Hue/Saturation to decrease the brightness and desaturate the colour of the frame.

I'm not exactly sure what I did on the view through the frame. I remember adjusting the colour balance because I wanted to bring out the colour of the ocean more, and I probably played around with the brightness and contrast too.

(Basically I did the interior by trial and error: I opened one of the adjustment windows and played around with the settings a little. If I thought there was an improvement from my playing around I kept it - otherwise I just hit cancel. Then I went and tried a different adjustment).

This was the result:

While it is still clearly an old photo, it's a lot better than the original. All the white fleck have gone and the graininess has been much improved. I couldn't work out how to make it look any better than above so unless someone drops me some magic tip I haven't heard of yet, I'm going to leave it at this...

What do you think? Do you have any old photos that could benefit from a facelift too?

Jess


*You can read my mum and grandpop's story here: http://14000milesacrosstheocean.blogspot.com.au

The most useful Photoshop keyboard shortcuts

Photoshop has literally hundreds of keyboard shortcuts. There's a keyboard shortcut for just about anything - but as a casual user of Photoshop I haven't tried to learn most of them. If I ever get to the point where I'm using Photoshop all the time then it'd be worth the effort to memorize them. For now I've just learnt couple of general shortcuts.

But these shortcuts are - in my opinion - the most useful ones. I use them every time I use Photoshop. In fact anyone with some experience with Photoshop has probably already discovered them. But if not, enjoy...

1. To zoom in or out - hold the control key and hit the = key (for zoom in) or the - key (for zoom out).
2. To move around the canvas when zoomed in, just hold the space bar down. Your cursor will turn into a hand, now just click and drag.
3. To change your brush size, just hit the [ or ] keys until you get to the size you want.
   [ decreases the size of the brush. ] increases the size of the brush
4. Have a selection you no longer need? Ctrl + D will deselect it for you.
5. Too big? Too small? Use Ctrl + T to bring up Free Transform mode
   (In Free Tranform mode) hold down Shift to resize while maintaining proportions
6. And, of course, Ctrl + Alt + Z will allow you undo your past actions until you get back to the point before you accidentally stuffed it up. (Ctrl + Z will undo the last action you took, but no more).

There are a couple of other shortcuts that I remember, but the six above are the most useful ones I've found. I use them all the time regardless of what kind of project I'm working on.

So, did you already know these shortcuts? And what are your most used Photoshop keyboard shortcuts? Teach me something new!

*For more Photoshop keyboard shortcuts this website has a great image of a keyboard which shows the Photoshop shortcuts for each key. Alternatively Google will undoubtedly be able to bring you thousands of hits on this topic.

A postcard from Paris

For our first assignment we had to make a postcard or a series of postcards. We weren't given any direction on what we had to do on the postcard - just that it had to be standard postcard size. 

For my postcard I decided to do a tourist postcard of the kind you could buy while on holiday in Paris to send home to your family or friends. I chose to do a large letter style postcard because I particularly like this style of design. Large letter style postcards - so I am told - are where the images are inside the letters of a word.

This style of postcard could easily be adapted to a different theme; I picked Paris for practical reasons. The word Paris is short (only 5 letters) and fits easily on a postcard, while still allowing the individual letters to be large enough to see the images inside them. Additionally, it was easy to find suitable images of Paris as it’s such a well known and popular tourist location. (All images used in this assignment are from Wikimedia Commons and are credited below).

Initially I made the postcard on a white background and after doing so thought that it might look as good or better on a black background and so I made a second version of it.

In both postcards, each letter of the word Paris has a photo attached to it with a clipping mask. I wanted to make sure that my postcard would contain some highly recognizable images so I started with the Eiffel Tower and then followed that with the Arc de Triomphe. Once these two were happily matched to a letter that worked for them, I found other photos to fill the remaining letters.

I have chosen different text effects for the word Paris on the second postcard because the effects I used on the white postcard would not have been effective on a black background. Switching the font (for the "City of Lights" line) and adjusting the layout slightly was simply to try something different.

Originally I couldn't decide which version I prefer, but I've finally decided that the white versions wins (by a hair).

But what do you think?  Do you agree with me, or do you prefer the black postcard?

Jess :-)

ps. Click on either of the two images above to see a larger version of them.

Image Credits

1. Pont Neuf at Sunset by Steve, CC: BY-SA, sourced from Wikimedia Commons 

2. EiffelTower from north Avenue de New York, Aug 2010 by Julie Anne Workman, CC: BY-SA, sourced from Wikimedia Commons

3. Arc Triomphe by Benh LIEU SONG, CC: BY-SA, sourced from Wikimedia Commons

4. Sacre-coeur-paris by MykReeve, CC: BY-SA, sourced from Wikimedia Commons

5. Le Louvre – Aile Richelieu by Gloumouth1, CC: BY-SA, sourced from Wikimedia Commons

A multi-photo layout using clipping masks

Here's the flyer I made in week 13's lesson which was on how to do a multi-photo layout using clipping masks.

 

Each of the flower photos is attached to a clipping mask to hide the parts of each photo I didn't want showing on my flyer. We were given the photos and guided through a tutorial on how to create a series of four clipping masks across the top of the layout.

Then we were left to our own devices to decide how much of each photo we wanted to show though each clipping mask and to come up with some text that suited our layout. The first thing that occurred to me was that it looked like a flyer for photography lessons so that's what I went with. If it were a flyer for a real business, it'd probably have more details about the class on the back.

This layout could easily be adapted for a different purpose, just swap in different images and text. (I believe our lecturer got the idea from a baby announcement card).

*The photos used were supplied by our lecturer (and I'm pretty sure she said that she had take all these photos) which makes the images (c) Sandra Motteram

Welcome

 I've been doing a weekly evening class on how to use Adobe Photoshop, and I've created this blog to share the things I've learned and show examples of the work I've done.

I will be posting about the stuff I learnt in no particular order. However I will try to make sure I tag each post appropriately so that you can more easily find posts you may be looking for.

I'm going to start off with some examples of things we've done recently.

Hope you enjoy.

Jess  :-)