Missing Person

As happens so frequently in old photographs, someone ends up getting something cut off, heads. limbs and legs were all subject to photographic eradication. In this photo a complete person was chopped off from the picture.




I have been working with scanning slides in of the family and noticed the rest of the above missing person in another photograph and decided to return her to the family shot she was cropped out of.

I selected and copied her into the correct spot and then had to blend in her skirt and top. I also copied her arm, flipped it horizontally and inserted it back into the correct position. After a little blending and color corection it was done. We now have a complete family photograph!

So Serious

When I looked closer at the original photo I realized I liked the look on Lilly's face and decided to do a close up of just her.


I selected an oval portion of the photo and copied into a new document. Using the magnetic lasso I traced the area of her uncles shirt behind her. Once I had it all included I applied a gaussian blur. With a little clean up this was my result.

Colorized Rose

I never know when I start playing with an image exactly where it will end up. At times I have a clear idea of what I want to do and at other times I allow experimentation to lead the way. Experimenting gave me the results on this image.

I first used the darken/lighten Nik filter to deepen the shadows in the background. I then applied the brilliance/warmth filter to increase the detail on the rose. I applied the old photo filter and reduced the opacity of the layer to 67 percent allowing the color below to peak through. This gave the effect of an old colorized photo. The last step was to apply the polaroid transfer filter to rough up the edges.

Roses

Spring is here in the south and my rose bushes are well on their way to supplying me with batches of beautiful blooms once again. This is one of last years blossoms gussied up.

I used the Nik Efex foilage filter and then the polaroid filter.

Another Composite

A friend asked me to if there was anything I could do with two photos that she had taken of her boys. She had set them in the sun when she took the photo so it took a bit of fooling to bring the color back to their sweet faces but I rather like the results once complete. I ran the Photoshop water color filter on them once completed. I think most of her relatives now have a copy of this picture.

Glass Globes

From the book Creative Photoshop Lighting Techniques by Barry Huggins I learned how to create the floating bubble below. The ocean photo is one that I already had taken and I borrowed the fish from a photo on line. Once I had finished the art I decided to try one for myself.

I looked for a base to water globe on line and removed the existing globe. I created the new globe, inserting a wedding photo that I had taken. I built the image over a photo of the wedding cake table instead of the ocean picture from the previous version.

Modifying Art

A friend asked me if I could help her with a piece of artwork for her genealogy research. She wanted to do some digital copies for her family reunion. She found a ship picture that she liked that was a became a bit grainy when the size was increased.

I increased the size to fit on an 8.5 x 11 cover sheet. I made a copy of the file in photoshop and then ran the rough pastel filter on it. This pretty much destroys all of the details. I next took the original image, placed it over the rough pastel image and reduced the opacity to 58%. This helps bring back the detail of the people on the boat and still allows the artistic image to show through. I do this trick with portraits that I want to apply an artistic filter to and still maintain detail. I added a contrasting color for the background and text for the cover page.

Composite Photography

Photography shops love to sell parents and grandparents combined photographs. This was very popular while I was growing up and very easy to achieve with a little effort. I took the following 4 photgraphs and combined them in a classic style.

After selecting the portions of the images I wanted and copy and pasting them into a new file I began playing with the composition. I increased the size of some and decreased others. After getting the arangement I found pleasing I used the high key filter and then selectively applied the vignette blur, painting it in around each headshot. I finally used the vignette blur, placing the center on the largest picture and allowing the remainder of shots to be slightly blurred.

Pop Art

Once I purchased my own photo printer things got interesting. I created a dozen different 8 x 10 pop art prints of family members for a graduates new apartment. I started with just a few and then the request came in so that she could fill a wall. One of my favorites was taken from this photo taken on a trip to the zoo.

I removed the background and used the Photoshop posterize filter. From a copy of the original I used the find edges filter and dropped it in on the top to give the image a bit of definition. I created a "mod" background and dropped it in behind.

I framed all of the photos in 8 x 10 plain black metal frames.