Edo’s Log • えどのログ

Currently listening to ‘I Sing For You’ by ‘Daniel Letterle’
Currently making myself busy

Wow, I haven’t made any guides for a very long time now. Been optimizing a lot of my photos ever since I relaunched Fleinair. I’m going to leak one of my tricks this time.

This time, I’m going to show you how to make an object in the picture to give more impact, or “focused”. I used a flower for this example doesn’t mean it’s limited to flowers only. You can use it on anything that you think is suitable. Your taste, you’ll be the judge.

This trick requires Adobe Photoshop CS3 since it uses the non-destructive Adjustment Layers. Similar functions are available in pre-CS3 versions but.. it does changes directly to the images which is not so good.

I don’t remember where I took the photo but I knew it was quite recent. The picture above looks ok, but it can be better. Open it in Photoshop.

Masking

At times, you don’t wanna enhance the whole picture using the same setting. You will want to apply specific enhancements at specific parts if you wanna go for the best results. Well, if you don’t care and wanna go for a quick enhance, you can skip this part and move on to the next part.

Make sure you selected the Image layer. Now, click the Quick Mask button.

Select the brush tool, make sure the foreground colour is black while the background is white. Now, start painting the part where you wanna select. It should appear like this:

Take your time. I know it’s quite hard using a mouse that’s why I use my graphic tablet ^_^;;

Now, click the Quick Mask button again. You’ll start to see the ‘marching ants’ showing part of the image has been selected. Here’s how it should look like:

The part where you paint just now are unselected. To select the part where you painted just now, choose the ‘Selection’ tool, right click on the image and choose ‘Select Inverse’. Since I wanna work with the background instead of the flower, I’ll leave it that way.

Adjustment Layers

While the selection is still active, go to the Layers panel and click on the ‘Create new Adjustment Layers’. From here, you can make non-destructive changes to your images because it acts as a filter and has it’s own layers. For pre-CS3 version, you need to use the Image > Adjustment option. :(

I like my images saturated, so I’ll add Hue/Saturation filter.

I choose Green channel and added it’s saturation level. Yeah, i know it’s TOO saturated lol. But it like it that way ^_^.

So far so good. Remember, set it to the way you wanted.

Now.. let’s make the flower more “outstanding”. Click the adjustment layer’s mask, right click and select ‘Add Layer Mask to Selection’ if you wanna use the same selected part as previous adjustments. Add another Adjustment layer and this time, choose ‘Curves’.

That might look ‘complicated’ but don’t worry, try to play around with it and you’ll do fine. I set my curves to make my flower background looks dark.

After that, I selected my flower and played around with curves again, but this time I intend to give the flower’s texture a bit more contrast. You can learn more about curves from here.

Vignetting

Vignetting gives your image a shadow border ( it gave the impression that the light didn’t fully fall on your camera’s sensor ). It can give the focus effect if done properly. While selecting your Image layer, Go to Filter > Distort > Lens Correction.

You’ll get a big dialog box. Just look for Vignetting controls and ignore the rest. Set the settings to your liking…

..and you should be done!

Here’s my final image. It looks better than the original, right? Well, it looks better to me. There’s are lot of Adjustment Layer tools you can play around with to get more powerful results. Go ahead and experiment, get your desired results ^_^.

Comment or ask any questions, I’ll try to answer:

PS: DAMN! Forgot to save the image. Now I have to do it all over again before uploading it to Fleinair. T_T
PS2: Noticed I liek taking pictures of flower? XD