Hello everyone! I'm hoping to cover some of the edits I did as well as a "tutorial" on how I did them. I plan on posting a summary/write up for both of my books sometime this week or at least before Monday.
Edit Example #1: Fake HDR
For my second book, I wanted to show off the cool neuroscience class I love dearly as well as my lego dinosaur set. The neuroscience class was on my laptop, and the dinosaur was next to it in a dimly lit room. This meant that my laptop was over exposed, and the dinosaur was under exposed. I know how to do HDR (it's where you set your camera to take three photos, one over exposed, one under exposed, one regular exposure; and then you have photoshop combine it to get full details) but since my aperture had to be so low I figured I would just combine the images manually instead.
This is what the two looked like (one focused on the laptop, one focused on the dinosaur)
You can see how we lose all information in the laptop.
So from here, I took a photo focusing on the laptop, selected the screen with the lasso tool, and copied it. After this, I used perspective warp to set it into place. Then, I took that layer and changed the blending mode to darken. I explain what these tools do below:
Lasso tool: You know when you highlight text to be deleted or copied? It's like that, but you can draw a line AROUND what you want to "highlight." This lets you copy a part of an image or move it. (as well as other things)
Perspective warp: It places a grid over your images, and each corner of the grid can be pulled or pushed into shape. It's easier to show then describe, but you can make parts of an image bigger or smaller.
Blending mode: A setting for a layer that changes the way it interacts with the layers below it. For example, "Multiply" doubles the amount of contrast and colour saturation of the layer(s) below.
Darken: This is my secret to avoiding masks. "Darken" finds the darkest parts of the layer, and "erases" the lighter parts. Lets take the detailed photo of the laptop. The text is a dark black, and the background is white. When we put this image on a bright surface and change the mode to "darken," the white background disappears. This is useful especially when you have many grey values, so you don't have to use many masking layers!!
Masking layers: It lets you erase things, but lets you erase what you erased. So if you erase something and want it back, you can bring it back.
The final result looked like this:
Edit Example #2: Fake Masking Layer
"Darken" mode has a twin-- "Lighten." Lighten does the opposite of the darken mode, it removes all the dark parts of the image. I use it here. This prevents me from overusing the eraser tool!
The photo of myself adheres only to the shaded parts of the eye photo.
As you can see, I'm also messing with tone curves, which is a tool that has gotten me through drawing 2010.
Tone Curves: Tricky to explain, but I will try. The line is a representation of the contrast in your piece. Higher = lighter, Lower = darker. As you can see, the left side of the line is the shadows, the right side of the line is the light parts of the image. The center is your midtones. If you place a point in the center and bend the line upwards, your mid tones get lighter. You can see this in the image below.
The reason why this is important, though, is because the darkest and lightest parts of the image remain the same. This is different than just lightening an image because it preserves the details in the lightest and darkest parts of the image.
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