Improving Your Images Step 6: Adding a subtle vignette

Ok, if you have been following me so far well done - we are almost there.
I am now going to show you how to add a professional looking vignette to the image. The rationale behind using a vignette in some scenes is that the human eye is naturally drawn to light colours, so by adding a vignette we will subconsciously draw the viewer's eyes inward - clever hey!?

Here are the steps:
1. Use the oval button to create an oval around the image.
2. Locate the "select" option from the menu bar and scroll down to "transform selection". We use this to center and adjust the shape of the mask. Once happy press enter.
3. Now to select the space between the oval and the border of the image, go back to "select", then scroll down to find "inverse".
4. Now on the right hand panel, click the histogram adjustment layer and slide the black point on the histogram to the right. Immediately you will see the space between the oval and the border darken.
5. Once you are happy with the darkness of the vignette, we need to make it look seamless. We do this by selecting the mask icon inside the histogram adjustment layer we have added. Then locate the slider called "feather" and slide it to the right. The higher the resolution of the image, the more to the right we slide it. Stop when you are happy with the result.


that is it... pretty cool hey!  

Now the last step is to sharpen the image. Sharpening is always done last since it destroys pixels to do achieve sharpness. This will be covered in the next blog.


have fun! ☺

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Improving Your Images Step 5: Making the Image "pop"!

After 5 weeks of going through steps to clean up an image, we are now ready to get creative. There are many ways to enhance an image depending on your artistic intent. I will go through a quick method I first learned a few years ago.

1. Right click on the background image and make a duplicate.
2. Make sure the background copy is selected, then go to "filter" and find the "blur" option and finally the "gaussian blur".
3. Once selected, a dialogue box will appear, choose a setting (I went with 20 but experiment to see what works best for you). The image is now blurred.
4. Now select the blend mode and scroll down to "soft light".
5. To adjust the blending of these two images (background and the gaussian blurred copy) adjust the opacity until you are happy with the result.
That is it!

 In the next blog we will add a subtle vignette to draw the viewer's attention inward.
 

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Improving Your Images Step 4: Removing dead pixels

In the last blog we removed the noise in an image and opened the resultant raw image into the main Photoshop software. Since the raw image was in 16 bit, we need to make sure we work in 16 bit in the main software. To do this we click on the "image" tab, select "mode" then choose the 16 bit option.

Photoshop CS6 has a very cool feature. It will remove dead pixels quickly and easily without cloning, cutting, pasting and so on.

The steps are best seen.
Select the lasso button, enclose the dead pixel, right click to see options, choose the "fill" option, then click ok. Notice that the default is "content aware".

Hey presto - the dead pixel is removed and replaced with nearby pixels. Now we rinse and repeat to clean up all of the dead pixels. I also circled the boat located in the bottom right corner of the image to remove it. The content aware feature filled in the space beautifully.

In the next blog, we will go through a quick trick to make the image "pop".



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Improving Your Images Step 3: Turning off the noise

Now comes the magic, when shooting in raw we can turn off the noise in an image in about 10 seconds.

Noise is created in an image when a pixel registers a colour that is not present. This will occur when either the ISO setting is high or when we under expose an image and then boost the exposure in post processing.

To turn off the image:
step 1. Click on the third tab on the right hand panel.
step 2. zoom the image to 200%
step 3. adjust the luminance and colour sliders in turn.

remember the point is to remove noise but keep the texture so don't over do it or the image will looked very polished.

step 4. When you are happy with the result we will open the image in Photoshop and then learn how to remove the dead pixels. 

Notice how the noise has disappeared but we still retain texture. The higher the ISO setting the more noise present so the more tweaking we need to do.


In the next blog we will use the main Photoshop software to remove the dead pixels.





have fun! ☺

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