Category Archives: Photoshop

Photoshop is my main tool for working with both photography and graphic design. I often start my designs with hand calligraphy which is scanned and then colorized, modified, and laid out into a design in Photoshop.

Wailin’

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I’m just starting to shoot people shots with my new 85mm portrait lens, and I was practicing this past Sunday by shooting a rehearsal of our Joyful Noise praise band as they prepare for an upcoming concert. The best shot turned out to be this one of Tom, who was wailing away on the harmonica. I decided to process it in black and white, to hopefully give it a little of a “blues club” feel. I tried a couple of versions, but this is my current favorite, done with Photoshop and the Nik Silver Effects Pro plugin.

Wailin'

Shot on the D800 with the 85mm f/1.4g lens at ISO 100, f/1.8, and 1/60 sec., using an SB-800 flash mounted on-camera with mini-softbox. Right-click and choose “Open Image in New Window,” and you can see it at a much larger resolution.

[Aside: I just bought the Nik plug-in suite, as Google has recently acquired Nik, and is selling the software for a bargain price. You can get information here . Note that additional discounts are available.]

If you’re in the area, the concert will be Sunday, April 7, at 4:00 PM, at the First United Methodist Church, Freehold, NJ. We’ll be celebrating the installation of a new sound and video system for the sanctuary.

Winter afternoon on Crow Hill

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The winter has been mostly dreary and cold since we returned from our Christmas travels, and I haven’t been doing much photography. But a couple of days ago, we had a touch of passing sunshine, and I decided I’d take a photo walk around the neighborhood with the D800 and my Tamron 17-35mm zoom. Nothing much was catching my eye, even though the walk was about three miles, but when I got home and did some post-processing, I really liked the way this shot came out after a conversion to black and white:

I think this just says that I need to make the effort to get out and shoot more. A good resolution for the new year.

Merry Christmas 2012

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I have probably been designing our Christmas cards for at least 30 years now, and just finished the design, printing and envelope addressing for 2012 (possibly excepting a few last-minute additions to our list).  I usually struggle with picking a text until it becomes clear that I have to make a decision and get on with it. After the devastation of Tropical Storm Sandy (the U S Weather Service apparently has decided it was no longer a hurricane when it hit us), my dominant feeling was simply gratitude – for having come through with no lasting damage or injury, for friends who helped us so much when we were without power, water, and heat, and for our family, who let us know we were cared about. After a lot of searching for a quote that had notes of both gratitude and Christmas, I again found myself up against deadlines, and decided to go with a traditional set of words for the Advent season – Hope, Joy, Peace and Love. These are usually the themes represented by the candles of the Advent wreath. Our adult class at church had been doing an Advent study centered around these themes, with the title “Christmas Gifts That Don’t Break,” so I wove “family” and “friends” into the background of the card design, and Anita and I decided on the inside text of “Wishing you gifts that last.”

Here’s the final design:

 As I usually do, I began the card design by doing the main lettering in black and white. When I first started thinking of the Hope-Joy-Peace-Love theme, I tried a number of different styles and layouts of letters, but none of them were working for me. So I took a break and started reading a recent issue of Letter Arts Review, which had some very fine examples of Blackletter and Fraktur. Seeing those, I knew immediately I wanted to do the words in some form of Blackletter, and for some reason, I knew they would run across the entire bottom of the card. I really had no idea at that point as to what the rest of the design would look like.

Using Blackletter was for me an unusual choice, as I don’t do much of it. I had taken a multiple-day workshop on Blackletter styles with Julian Waters several years back, though, and he’s one of the best in the world at this hand, so I felt reasonably confident that I understood enough about it to make it work if I took the time to dust off some of my cobwebs. I went through probably a dozen or more renditions before I got one that I liked. As I started to close in on getting all the letterforms more or less the way I wanted them, I marked up each draft with corrections and laid a sheet of thin layout bond over it so that I could adjust the next draft to correct the deficiencies of the previous one.

I did the lettering with a large Automatic pen (that’s a brand name, not a description of some magical powers in the way the pen works) and black gouache, which is my favorite writing fluid. In this case, the original letters were more than an inch high. Working large makes it much easier for me to see where I’ve made mistakes, which is important when I’m using a style I’m less comfortable with, and when I finally get the letters right, reducing them in size for the final reproduction makes them appear sharper and smoother than they were actually written.

Here’s a sample of near-final headline letters at close to their original size:

I next quickly wrote a couple of versions of the words “friends” and “family” in my usual Italic style, thinking that I would work them into the piece somehow, but with no specific idea of where they’d be used.

I needed a background, and I didn’t have an idea for an illustration, so I decided I’d just try to invent a texture. Going through my stocks of papers, I came up with a couple of unusual handmade Japanese papers that seemed like they might work. One was a brilliant red with a sort of radiating pattern of ridges and wrinkles, and the second was a translucent white with circular patterns of opaque white dots. I stacked the second paper on top of a sheet of pale green, just to make the white dots stand out more, and scanned the paper designs and the lettering into Photoshop. Once I had them stacked as layers in Photoshop, I decided the red was too brilliant, and would be hard to reproduce in print, so I toned it down with a touch of brown and orange.

After playing around with “family” and “friends” in the layout, I finally decided to bleed both words slightly off the page and orient them diagonally, so that neither was entirely revealed. I also cut back the opacity of these words so that they became only faintly visible – mostly I was using them as additional texture, and I wanted people who noticed them to think a little about what they said, rather than being able to immediately read them.

After I finished the design, Anita suggested that we add a small rhinestone on top of the diamond shape in the “P” of “Peace,” and I thought that touch of sparkle and dimension really added a lot.

The envelopes were addressed in large red letters matching the card color, and coincidentally, I was able to find a Christmas postage stamp that had some of the same red-orange tones in it. Here’s a shot of some of the completed envelopes along with the cards – if you look closely, you’ll see the rhinestones I mentioned above:

 Here’s wishing you all gifts that last this Christmas and throughout 2013!

 

Sunflower Serendipity

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Late August to early October or so is usually sunflower season in New Jersey, and there are often large fields of these huge flowers in the more rural areas of our county. This year, though, I noted with pleasure that one of the local farmers had planted sunflowers in a field normally used for raising sod grass, right on the road into Freehold, just in front of a former glass factory which is now used as a document storage and destruction facility. The owners of the field have planted a mix of sunflowers and various wildflowers, and the overall effect is spectacular.

Since I finally broke down two weeks ago and bought the Nikon D800 that I’ve been lusting after since February, I decided the sunflower field would make a great test subject. So I got myself out of bed before sunrise, and headed over to the field with the new camera with a couple of my lenses, just to see how each would perform on the D800. I was very pleased with the results, given that I don’t yet have enough experience to understand what lens to use when on this new tool, or whether I may yet need to purchase one or more additional new lenses to take full advantage of the 36 megapixel resolution (that’s three times the number of pixels of my D300, or about 80% higher resolution). I’m pretty sure the answer to that last question is “yes.” But since there have been so many Internet posts talking about how the D800 demands absolutely top-rated (i. e., expensive) glass, I was pleasantly surprised to see how well my 7-year old Tamron 17-35mm lens (probably worth about $250 on the used market) performs. Here’s an example from the morning shoot:

For those who care about such things, the image above was shot at f/7.1, 17mm, ISO 100, and 1/6 second, in Nikon’s raw NEF format, developed in Adobe Lightroom 4, and given some final touches in Photoshop 5.1.

I’ve been giving the D800, the Tamron, and a new lightweight “travel” lens (the Nikon 24-85 f/3.5-4.5 VR) a shakedown in Italy for about a week now, and will start posting photos from that series after I return home. But so far, I really love the new camera, and I’m really happy I went ahead and got it in time for this trip. And I’m delighted that I had these sunflowers available as my first subject.

Hamilton Watch Font

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One of the hazards of being interested in lettering is that you sometimes find yourself looking more at form than content. We recently went to see the movie The Descendants, and during the opening credits I found myself looking at the form of the lettering and the backgrounds, and asking myself “How would I do that?” I have no idea what the credits actually said.

Similarly, when I was doing my recent post about my grandfather’s watch, I kept looking at the engraved lettering on the works of the watch and wondering “What does that alphabet look like?” and “What can it be used for?” You can see part of the lettering in the photo montage in the previous post – the full text on the case reads “Hamilton Watch Co., Lancaster PA., 21 Jewels.” Just for grins, I made a sketch of the letters one evening a week or two ago, and then started to imagine what some of  the missing letters of the alphabet might look like. Here’s a quickie Photoshop composition based on one of my sketches:

I started out by just sketching the letters above as black outlines. After scanning them into Photoshop, I filled them in with a solid color, and then touched up the edges to remove some of my pen bobbles and other irregularities. I then added the beveled debossed effect as a Layer Style, and generated a wavy background pattern to echo the fancy decorative milling on the actual watch works (again, you can see the authentic decorative milling patterns in my original post). Finally, just to add a little more interest and texture, I layered in one of my closeup photos of the actual watch.

As with many of the things I show on this blog, I don’t have any immediate application for this lettering, but I think the font could be useful someday as a titling font when I want something that suggests antiques. I’d have to clean it up, of course, but that is pretty straightforward to do (though tedious) using the vector drawing capabilities of either Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Here’s an example of what the letters look like when I start to clean up my sketches a little:

If I were really going to develop the full font, I’d need to look carefully at all the letter proportions relative to each other – that “D” looks a little wide to me right now compared to the “R,” for example – and I’d have to figure out the full set of decorative caps, as well as the lower case letters; but I may do it, if I find the right project that calls for an old-fashioned feel to the text. Can you think of any applications for these letters? I’d love to hear from you.

Before and after: photo restoration

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In my earlier post about my grandfather’s watch, I promised to make a future post showing the “before and after” of my photo restoration work on Grandma Bourne’s picture. My purpose here is not to give a detailed “how to,” but simply to give an illustration of what’s possible these days, as this photo was one of the most badly damaged pieces that I’ve ever worked on. Here’s what the photo looked like when it fell out of the watch:

As you can see, Grandma suffered a lot from 90 or so years in the back of Granddaddy’s watch. That photograph has just about all the impairments you’re likely to encounter in restoring old photos: foxing (the brown stains), scratches, bends, wrinkles, and rips. But as I discussed earlier, it was a unique photo, in that it showed my grandmother as young, smiling, and playful – a totally different view than any of the other family photographs I’d ever seen. Grandma worked for the Post Office in Washington, D. C. for a couple of years around the WWI timeframe, and I’m guessing this photograph was probably done during that period.

Photoshop CS5, which I am currently using, has several tools which help in this kind of work. The Healing Brush can be used to paint across blemishes – it looks at surrounding areas of the photo and replaces the painted-over area with a sort of average of the surrounding area. The Clone Stamp can be used to copy a texture from any arbitrary location; you can then “paint” with that copied area onto any other area; areas larger than the copied area will be painted with a repeating pattern. Both the Healing Brush and the Clone Stamp have been around for a long time, and have appeared in many past versions of Photoshop. New in CS5, though, is a tool called “Content Aware Fill.” WIth this tool, you can select an area of the image, hit “Delete,” and then choose from several options as to how to fill in the deleted area. One of these is “Content Aware,” which looks at the surrounding area and tries to make a good guess as to what the area being deleted should contain if it’s to look consistent with the rest of the image.

The Healing Brush is particularly effective on small blemishes surrounded by relatively smooth, undamaged areas – for example, it’s great at replacing a small scratch on the background curtain, or a pimple on an otherwise beautiful face. The Clone Stamp is good for working with areas that have some kind of texture, provided the area to be replaced isn’t too large (the pattern repetition of the Clone Stamp gets to be noticeable once the painted-over area becomes a lot larger than the original sampled area).  Content Aware Fill can be almost magical, but particularly when working with portraits, it also has its hazards – you can easily end up giving a person a third eye or an extra nostril, or hair in the middle of their cheeks, if you’re not careful.

The key in doing this restoration work is just to work patiently, trying the various tools to see which works for each blemish, and using the History palette when necessary to back up to the previous state when something unexpected and unacceptable happens. Careful adjustment of the brush size (for the first two tools) and the selected area can make a huge difference in the result.

I used all three tools in working on this particular image. Because the edges of the photo were irregular, and partially cut off her arms anyway, I decided to crop the final restored image into an oval shape. After giving it a Bevel and Emboss effect to simulate a cameo, and a drop shadow to emphasize the 3-D effect, and a textured background, it came out like this:

You can still see things wrong that I could work on further if I chose to, such as changes to the tone of the skin of the face and neck, due to folds and wrinkles in the original that made the light from my scanner hit different areas from a different angle. But I usually stop on restoring old photos before everything has been smoothed away – I want the image to still look old. I’m happy with this result.

It’s still only a small image: the original was only a little bigger than an inch across, and this final version came out to something I could probably print at about twice the original size. My experience in scanning old prints tells me that it’s seldom worthwhile to try to print a copy bigger than 1-2 times the size of the original. But it’s a new addition to the family archives, and from my point of view, it was definitely worth the effort.

 

You never know what you’ll get

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I really didn’t have Forrest Gump in mind when I wrote that title line. We had a light dusting of snow last night, and since there has been so little snow this winter, I decided I needed to make an early morning photo trek at Monmouth Battlefield State Park. I had my tripod set up on the hillside, overlooking the battlefield and the apple orchards, and was staring intently through my viewfinder framing the scene, when suddenly a red fox appeared, walking through my shot. Foxes aren’t really rare in our area, but I’ve probably only seen them four or five times in the last 30 years here, so this was pretty exciting for me. Unfortunately, I had the camera set up for a landscape shot, rather than wildlife, and I only managed to get off two shots before he saw me and ran away. Great light, but not a very sharp image due to the slow shutter speed, so I decided to make it more useable by giving it a drybrush painting effect. Click the image for a larger view.

Here’s another shot from the same trip:

You know it’s art, because the sign says so.

Apache Wedding Blessing

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I feel like I should be doing a “Happy New Year” post today, but I don’t have any material on hand for that at the moment. What I do have is a piece that I’ve been wanting to share for about a month. I was waiting, though, until after we had given a framed version to our son and daughter-in-law. We finally got to share a belated Christmas with them, and so now I’ll share it here.

Apache Wedding Blessing

This blessing was used at our son and daughter-in-law’s wedding seven years ago, and they had asked me to do a version of it “when I got around to it,” so we see once again the hazards of not giving me a deadline. The text is very popular, but is usually not attributed, and in the piece above I have also omitted an attribution for now. From my Internet research, I’ve learned that it probably is not an authentic Apache blessing, but may have been created around 1947 for the novel Blood Brother by the author Elliott Arnold. That novel was later made into a very popular movie, Broken Arrow, starring James Stewart. I understand that versions of the blessing may appear in both the novel and the movie, but at this point, I haven’t had the time to research that. I hope to chase it down in the next month or two, so that I can ask for copyright permission to use the text, if that turns out to be necessary. Both the novel and the movie have received praise for their treatment of Apache culture, so hopefully the blessing is at least in keeping with the spirit of its supposed source.

The artwork here, as in many pieces posted on this blog, is a Photoshop composite from photographs. I found the two beaded pieces on display in 2003 in the David T. Vernon collection of American Indian Arts, which is normally exhibited at the Colter Bay Visitor Center in Grand Teton National Park. I understand, though, that the entire collection is now undergoing conservation and restoration treatment, and may not return to public display until funds can be raised for a suitable new museum to be constructed. I had made a separate photo of each of the pieces, and overlaid one on the other in Photoshop. Prior to this piece, the photos have just been sitting in my files, unused, for 8 1/2 years – a good argument for the “don’t throw anything away” school of digital photography. The rest of the background is a scan of a piece of calfskin vellum.

As I often do when I combine photos and calligraphy, I turned the beadwork photos into more of a painted effect, this time by using Photoshop’s Dry Brush filter. Here’s a close-up of the result of that filtering:

Part of my reason for using the filter in this case was that the original photos had been taken in relatively dim light, with no flash or tripod, in the museum, and so they were not particularly sharp or contrasty. The Dry Brush filter exaggerates the contrast and color saturation, and converts somewhat blurry edges into sharper features. When I did the headline lettering for the text, I decided to continue the beadwork motif, and decorated the caps with dots of color sampled from the beadwork photos:

The style of the Italic calligraphy was deliberately left a little rough, as I felt that was more in keeping with the artwork, background, and the supposed Apache roots of the text than a more polished style would have been. I may play a little more with that in the future.

Here’s a photo of the piece after personalizing it for Adam and Tez and having it matted and framed:

Angelic Details

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I thought I’d share some of the details behind the design of the 2011 Christmas card, as I know there are at least a few readers who care about such things, and I usually enjoy sharing nerdy details, myself.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I usually start my designs from the text, as for the majority of cases, the text contains much of the message, and I’m usually trying to support that message with the artwork. In this case, for example, the text brought in the idea of angels, and I then remembered that I did have a nice angel photo in my personal stock library. Here’s the angel I used for the 2011 card, as I found her hanging in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague:

The first step was to extract the angel from her surroundings, as I wanted to use the angel alone, without the rest of the cathedral There are lots of ways to do this, but what I did was to duplicate the photo to a second layer, then use Photoshop’s Quick Select tool by clicking and dragging across the angel, and finally, I created a layer mask.  I then used the Refine Mask command to paint in (or out) those parts of the edges that were incorrectly selected. This extraction process probably took 15 or 20 minutes of work to get just what I wanted. After I was satisfied with my selection of the angel, I moved on to the problem of altering her appearance. The photo itself is pretty sharp and detailed, which is highly desirable from a photographic point of view. For my card designs, though, I’m often trying for more of a “painterly” effect, so I wanted change the photo to something that looked more like a drawing. I’ve talked about how to do that before, but for now, I’ll just say that I used Photoshop’s filters to do the job. Specifically, I used Filter>Sketch>Graphic Pen, which then gave me an angel that looked like this:

I wanted to set the angel against a night sky, partly because of the “angels’ footsteps passing in the night” phrase in my text, but also because I usually think of night when I think of Christmas. Christmas Eve services have always been a favorite part of the Christmas experience for me, and a night sky and a “star of Bethlehem” often find their way into my cards, as they did this year. I started by creating an inky blue background layer, and then laid my extracted angel on top of that. The colors in the angel sketch above were now wrong, so I started by inverting the colors to give light on dark instead of vice-versa, and then I added a color overlay to make the angel drawing more compatible with the blue of the background. I also wanted to take advantage of the fact that the angel is looking over her shoulder. I noticed that the strongest light in the cathedral in the original photo was coming from the upper right, which happens to be more or less the same direction she’s looking (a happy coincidence), so I decided that she would be looking towards a “heavenly light” coming from the upper right corner of the card. I created that light by adding a radial gradient fill above my background layer. As I further critiqued my work, I decided the plain blue background was too sterile and artificial-looking, so I decided to add some clouds (Filter>Render>Clouds), and I also added some random stars here and there with the Pencil tool and my Wacom tablet (you can use a mouse – it’s just not as easy to draw with). At this point, my background art was nearing completion, and I just needed to do a little adjusting of the blending of the various components to make everything fit together.

The final step was to add the calligraphy. I started with a couple of pencil sketches, just to give me a feeling for how the text would lay out in a couple of styles. Here’s a piece of my pencil drafts, just to give you an idea of how rough things were at this stage:

I originally imagined I might do the card text in a sort of modified bookhand (or “Foundational,” as Edward Johnston’s disciples called it). Here’s a detailed crop from the first draft of that idea:

In my first paste-up of the entire card, I just put the text into a rectangular block. I was totally unhappy with the way this looked on the card, though, and immediately began playing with other approaches, finally settling on having the text follow curves which worked in to the curves of the angel’s pose. I made my first stab at that idea by using Photoshop’s Warp tool to add curves to my rectangular text block. Of course, just warping a block of text doesn’t give you very nice-looking letters, but it did give me a feeling for what the layout would look like, and I decided curved lines of text would work if I re-did the calligraphy; this time, because of the curved lines, I thought Italic would work better. You can see the final calligraphy fairly well on the photo of the full card (see post here), but here’s a slightly larger version of the text alone:

As always, I can still see lots of details that could be worked further, but at this point, I was happy enough with the card to print it and send it, and I was up against my deadlines for addressing and mailing, so for this year, the card was done. For those who are familiar with Photoshop, here’s what the overall design structure looked like once everything was assembled:

Each of those layers has a slightly different Blending Option, to change the strength of the effect and how the layer looks against the surrounding layers. Some of the duplicate layers were only added after making test prints, and deciding that some part of the design was printing too light or too dark.

And here’s the final card, sitting on the dining room table on top of a pile of the addressed envelopes:

 

Smiles, Sunshine and Light

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Almost all the Christmas cards finally got addressed and taken to the post office yesterday, so I’m ready to post our card online. I’ll share some of the background details of the design process later, but here’s the final result for this year:

Christmas, 2011

I’ve mentioned before that I’m always late in getting my annual Christmas card design done, and that I never get anything done without deadlines. One reason is that I’m always looking for just the right text to express what I’m feeling, or to go with other things that I want to share on the card. Because I was struggling with my feelings this year, I was having a hard time picking the text, until I found this little poem.

According to that highly reliable source, The Internet, these are “words on a church wall in Upwaltham, England,” though my attempts to track them down did not locate any Upwaltham source that acknowledges their existence there. But they still spoke to me, and as soon as I found them, I felt they were the words I needed this year. Anita put her finger on the reason as she wrote our Christmas newsletter to go with the card. She said that my mother had been a person who spread smiles, sunshine, and light all along her path in life, and I knew immediately that she was right.

So after finally finding a text last weekend, I felt ready to design the card, and it came together relatively quickly, at least relative to how such things usually go for me. The angel on the card (Mom loved angels) is from a photo I took at St. Vitus Cathedral, in Prague, during our visit there in 2009. She was a metal sculpture, hanging suspended in the air; unfortunately, I don’t know who the artist was. I’ll show the original photo in my follow-on post. I extracted her from her surroundings using various Photoshop tools, and turned her into more of a sketch appearance, which I often prefer when combining photography and calligraphy. I created the background night sky and “heavenly light” painting from scratch, and overlaid the photo and my scanned calligraphy, adjusting the blending of the layers to get the overall mood right, preserving the dark of the night sky while bringing out some of the detail of the misty clouds. I re-did the calligraphy a couple of times before I was satisfied with how the image and calligraphy worked together.

I still have a few more cards left to send to calligraphy colleagues. I have hundreds of “Internet friends” in calligraphy through Cyberscribes, as well as calligraphy friends I know much better through intensive workshops we’ve attended together. It’s not feasible to mail physical cards to all of them, of course, so I usually try to pick a dozen or so names not-quite-at-random to share a card by “real” mail. For the rest,sharing the card here and on the Cyberscribes graphics board will have to do. I hope  this greeting finds you all well, and that you, too, may find and spread smiles, sunshine, and light wherever your path may lead you in the coming year.

Please click on the image above, so that you can see the card closer to actual size.