Slightly embarrasing (I blame my sister!)

Confession time. Ok, so my sister and I have a small crush on Wentworth Miller. So she asked me to do a little superimposing project for her. Don't judge us! This is totally just for fun. And, she's divorced so she's allowed.

The photo Amanda gave me to work with was difficult to say the least. That head angle?!!

I think she chose this one for it's steamy romance novel quality.

She actually sent me the challenge before sending me the picture so I decided to play with one of my own pictures first so I could have Wentworth's floating head all ready to go...

Click to enlarge

I promise I don't spend my days lusting after "Michael Scofield"! Eric is my one and only hunky monkey. :)

How it's done:

You can't see it very well, but I've outlined his face with the polygonal lasso tool (feather: 1 or 2px). Then, just cut-and-paste and do any necessary editing. I placed and re-sized the floating head by temporarily decreasing the opacity so I could see Eric's face below Wentworth's and tried to match the size and angle.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to re-create the quality and lighting of professional celebrity photos, but I tried to do a few alterations to make it a little less noticeable. For example, my original photo was too warm so I desaturated it a bit...Wentworth's picture was taken in a dark room with artificial lighting so, although I couldn't remove the glow from his face, I did increase the brightness (just on his layer) so it looks a bit more like he's outside. I also had to copy and paste small sections of the door in the area around his head to cover up Eric's hair.

Ok, I'm really spending too much time on this silly post. :)

Marquee tool (revisited)

I'm sorry! This post is about 2 weeks late, but I hope it's still helpful and demonstrates how ridiculosly EASY it can be to use the marquee tool. First, take a look at the screenshots below...

Simple, no? Here are a few extra tips:

1. To start, I usually create my marquee directly over the subject I want to "hide" (in this case, Brynne & pup). This way, you can make it the perfect size. Then, just move the marquee over to a similar area (typically right beside the suject), and use that as your copy area.
2. After you paste, it may seem like nothing has happened. That's because your pasted layer is directly on top of the original layer - it still needs to be moved. In this case, to the right. (Also, the new layer should appear in your layers palette.)
3. It may take more than one copy or edit to make your cover-up look realistic. For example, in my photo, you can still see Brynne's head poking out from the top the pasted layer. To hide that, I just copied and pasted a few more slices from the grassy area closest to her head. I also used the burn tool to darken the line between the tall and short grass.
4. Next, I cropped the picture to keep it simple...no roads and telephone poles, just Paige and the lush green grass. (see below)

5. Finally, I tried to enhance the photo itself (see final product in previous post). Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what I did, but I'll usually try out a few PS actions & some manual edits (hue/saturation, sharpness, selective color, etc.)

Making good pictures better...

I thought this picture that Amy took was absolutely adorable! As soon as I saw it, Paige really stood out to me. Nothing against Brynne and their new dog Tenny, but I just thought sweet Paige's little pure white outfit coupled with the tall green grass was too perfect.

Unfortunately, it's almost 1am here in Saipan so I'm off to bed, but, hopefully, I'll be back to describe how I edited this photo tomorrow/soon.

Which do you prefer?

Selective Color

Most of us have changed the hue/saturation of a picture, but have you ever wished you could edit just one color in your photo?

Swimming with dolphins last year in Bali was an incredible experience, but it was sad to see the murky yellowish pool water they were kept in so I decided to re-create the memory a bit by adjusting the water color to a cleaner, more refreshing hue.

Here's another awesome step-by-step tutorial courtesy of the very talented Amanda Taylor.

Pop Art!

This is actually really fun to do if you ever want to try it. And if you do try it, I'd love to see what you come up with! Unfortunately, I didn't have the best photos to start with, but, hopefully, you can create something much better with a higher quality photo. (I did this for Youth Conference last year)

Again, I'm going to save myself the time of coming up with a tutorial when there's a perfectly good one already out there> Melissa Clifton - Pop Art inspired by Lichtenstein

A touch of color...

I like to use this effect on photos that have fun dramatic colors.

Ok, so I LOVE this first picture of Eric in the man-pyramid. I couldn't help but bring extra attention to those little red shorts. (Don't worry, I plan to scrapbook the full-color shot too...it would be a shame to let that beautiful blue sky go to waste.)

I think, rather than try and explain the method myself, I'll just re-direct you to a couple of sites that explain it far better than I can...
Taylormade Designs
Digital Photography Schools

Not like I needed to draw any extra attention to their bright red hair, but I couldn't resist!

As a sidenote, there are actually several ways to accomplish this effect. In fact, I did it 2 different ways just in this post, and neither of them are the same methods used in the tutorial links provided. For the Ty and Tiff shot, I put a layer mask on the BW layer and just erased the areas where I wanted the color to show through. (Layer masks are probably the best option because they allow you to correct your mistakes...Maybe I'll do a later tutorial demonstrating what I mean). And for the pyramid shot, I started with the mask (demonstrated above), but ended up going back to the old-fashioned polygonal lasso tool. It took longer, but I needed it to be more precise (and I was having a hard time coloring (erasing) inside the lines. I would say 9x out of 10, however, that the mask is the better, more forgiving option.

Text paths

Text paths allow you to give your designs and journaling a fun, tailored look, and it's a piece of cake to do.

Be sure to use the "justify" paragraph style to really define the shape. You'll also have to adjust the font size and leading (*leading is the space between lines) in order to fit your content just right.

A lot easier than you thought, right? And you can do this with any basic shape you want (not just circles).

And always remember - when in doubt, right click!