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Cloning
Out Imperfections
This
picture was taken in the mountains outside Granite, Colorado, at an
altitude of around 9000 ft. The owner of this animal claimed it was a
Yak. It was late in the winter, the snow had melted off the meadow, and
the yak still had his winter coat. I got as close as I dared, but felt
relatively safe since the yak was behind a new barbed wire fence.
johndcloneb4.jpg
The
first fix to the shot was to clone out the partial head of the second
yak, at the top left of the picture. Then I cloned out the barbed wire
fence, to pretend I had a really expensive telephoto lens on my camera.
Although it sounds simple, the cloning took quite some time as I kept
the opacity of the clone tool at 70% to avoid dense patches of copied
material. I found that 70% lets me take several steps in applying the
clone tool to achieve a blending of the object (barbed wire) into the
background.
johndclone.jpg
During Janee's evaluation of this page, she gave
me a challenge to remove the red harness from the bull.
Unfortunately, the bull had wandered off the meadow. But I
was able to find his cousin, Homer, who is depicted below.
Homer
 Dodging
& Burning
This photo
of my wife's mother was taken last year at her 80th birthday party.
johnddodgeburnb4.jpg
The
first thing I did was add a Levels layer and readjust a little to
balance out the color intensity. Next I tackled the bright spot on the
left lens of her eyeglasses. I cloned from the nonglare part of the
lens to clean this up. Then I used the Burn tool to dim down the glare
of the metal frame just above her left eye. (I had to struggle to find
an application for the Burn tool, so bear with me on this.) The last
thing I did was to use the Dodge tool on her teeth. I was so pleased at
how easy it was to use this tool that I may have gone a little
overboard with the whitening. But I am sure she will not mind it. She
will probably ask me why I did not take out the wrinkles while I was
working on her face. Why limit myself to the teeth? Oh well.....
johnddodgeburn.jpg
Using
Blending Modes
I chose a
picture of my daughter, Michelle, and her nephew, Kian (my grandson),
for this next exercise. The original is shown next.
johndblend1b4.jpg
I
followed the instructions and created a Gaussian blur on a copy of the
photo layer. Then I selected Screen and adjusted the opacity down to
38%. I felt that the image was still too bright. If I lessened the
opacity further to reduce the brightness, I would eliminate too much of
the blur. So I experimented and used the Effects Palette, where I
selected a Soft Flat Color effect for the picture. This effect tended
to dim the brightness and induce more of the blur effect. I like the
result much better.
johndblend1.jpg
Special
Color Effect
I
am not too sure about this section. I really struggled to get something
I liked. The result of my gradient application was not as intense as
Janee's, but then I went a step farther and added a filter effect.
Perhaps I should not have done that, but I thought the picture needed
something additional. See what you think.
This photo is a shot of a gardening shed that my wife's unkle built on
his property in Southern California. It is located in an avocado
orchard behind his house.
johndblend2b4.jpg
To
arrive at this last image, I added a Gradient layer, and after many,
many futile attempts finally selected the Dark Spectrum gradient. I
left it in the Linear style mode and made the angle -90 degrees. I
toggled the blending mode to Overlay. I was reasonably satisified with
the result, but it still seemed plain. I tried different gradients and
although they created strong color effects, I did not resonate with any
of them. Finally, I returned to the Filter selections in the menu and
chose Filter > Distort > Ocean Ripple. To keep the effect
limited, I used smaller numbers of 4 and 3 for the "waves". I liked the
end result, although it may not have been the exact objective of the
lesson.
johndblend2.jpg
And
so we come to the end of the lessons for Photoshop Elements II - Part
A. I am looking forward to taking the next set of instructions for Part
B. See you all downstream. It has been fun.
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