So I've been putting this off for a long, long time. I've been using Adobe Lightroom for a while to alter levels, cleanup, and make limited alterations. A skin blemish here or there, popping the whites, crushing the blacks, etc. But I let myself avoid Photoshop because diving into the vast array of tools seemed impractical when I could just move some sliders and make my photos sparkle.
So now that I've bit the bullet I thought this space might afford me a useful place to document and reflect on my journey through Photoshop. In Each entry I'll be providing a before/after shot, as well as a list of techniques and tools I used.
So without further ado:
This is a photo that I took at one of the post Trump inauguration protests that took place in Downtown Los Angeles. This shot features a protestor documenting the low-key but very noticeable police presence at the event.
In the original photo, I was happy that I captured the slightly paranoid flavor of the event, but I didn't like the tree in the background. It was too organic, too mundane and it detracted from the urban nerviness of the rest of the photo. So, I decided to finally take it out so that I could have the streamlined composition I wanted. In the finished product, all vectors point towards the police helicopter; the protestor's body and phone, the sign, the palm tree, and even the traffic signal all create a nice compositional pyramid.
For this photo, I used:
- Quick Selection Tool
- Paint Brush Tool
- history brush
in a second round of touch ups, I also used:
- Select and mask
- Stamp tool
This was when I was still feeling my way through the basic tools of Photoshop, so this took a lot of trial and error. My first attempt saw me trying to first extract the tree because I didn't realize that was adding steps and it would be easier to simply paint over the thing.
After that, I had trouble forming a clean selection of the subject. I was able to select him and fairly quickly paint out the tree, but there were bit and pieces of him missing on the borders. To remedy this, I used the history brush to restore the chunks of hair and shirt that I took out of him with the first pass.
On my first edit of this, I left in a portion of a building located in between the traffic signal and the palm tree. Much of the building had been taken out with the tree, but I felt that the remaining portion of the building look alright as a stand alone structure. I have since reevaluated my view on that, and decided to take out the leftover building right before writing this post.
Since my understanding of Photoshop has improved, I was able to work more efficiently. I used the quick selection tool once again, but this time a I also used select-and-mask to clean up my edges before I made my alterations. Instead of using the paintbrush tool, I used the clone stamp tool which allowed for a more even hue that better matched the surrounding color. It was a simple alteration, but I still could tell the difference in technique from my initial pass.
This was a pretty basic task that gave me a nice confidence boost and spurred me on to more adventurous tampering.