Eight Steps To Using A Complex Mask Tutorial

This is the image at the start of the process.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 has this great new tool called the Quick Selection Tool (W). There have been a lot of tutorials done showing how well it does, when used with the Refine Mask dialog box, to select wispy hair and other complex "solid" objects. One place I haven't had much luck with it is on complex objects that look like Swiss Cheese. Something with lots of open space within the outline of an object. Today we start out with an image that has possibilities, but a rather bland sky. The Quick Selection Tool - Refine Mask combination can't figure out the internal lattice of the trees. In order to make an accurate selection and come up with a Mask we'll take one step back to take two steps forward. The one step back is using the Calculations dialog box (Image/Calculations) to come up with a good Mask. The rest of this tutorial is all visual with captions to walk through the "two steps forward".


One of the things I like to see in tutorials is what's going on "behind the scene. So, each image will show the whole screen so you can follow along easier. " Hit the "read more" to follow the steps.

1. The first thing to do is to take a look at the Channels Panel and determine which Channel (Red, Green or Blue) has the greatest contrast to start with.  In this example it's the Blue Channel.  Select the Blue Channel.

2.  After selecting the Blue Channel, open the Calculations Dialog box (Image/Calculations).  You'll see that the Blue Channel is set up (based on your selection of the Blue Channel) as Source 1 and Source 2.  You can walk through the Blend Modes to come up with the mode that best darkens the blacks and lightens the whites.  In this case it was the Multiply Blend Mode.  The Result (the last selection dropdown at the bottom of the dialog box) should be set to New Channel. 

3. It time to start filling in the Mask leading to a strict Black and White Mask.  Since the entire bottom (treeline on down) needs to be filled with black, an easy way to fill it is to use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) to select as much of the area as possible.  To the left of the image we can see that the foreground color is set to black.  Use black to fill the selection made with the Marquee Tool (in this case - Alt Backspace on a PC).  Then Deselect (Ctrl D).



4.  Bring both pointers (the black and the white) toward the center.  This will deepen the blacks and brighten the whites.  The center pointer can also be moved to increase the contrast.  In this case it was moved toward the black pointer.  Care must be used not to push the sliders too far so as to block up the blacks or push too much white into the fine details.

5.  The Brush Tool (B) cn now be used to cleanup the Mask to its final, usable form.  Take a soft Brush with the Mode set to Overlay and its Opacity set low (25% - 30%).  This will limit the Brush to affecting only the Black areas or only the White areas.  Set the foreground color to Black and paint over the image.  Reset the foreground color to White (X) and repait over the image.  The Black paint brush will deepen the Blacks and the White will ligten the whites.  When finished, go back to the Layers Panel.





6.  However you typically do it, bring the sky into the Layer Stack.  Use the Move Tool (V) to position the sky where you want it.  To the sky is too big or too small, use Free Transform (Ctrl T) to adjust size.  You can't go nuts and make a little tiny sky into something usable.  Once you have the sky in place go back to the Channels Panel and CTRL click on the Mask icon.  This reselects the Mask we just worked on.  Now go back to the Layers Panel.  With the sky Layer selected, click on the Create New Layer Mask at the bottom on the Layers Panel.  Magic happens.



7.  Here's today's image ready for any finishing you might chose to do.  All it took is two Layers and nothing was done destructively.  Anything can be modified as needed.  I'd probably increase the color saturation in the tree portion of the scene using Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers.  If the sky needed to be deepened I'd make a copy (Ctrl J) and change the Blend Mode to Multiply.  If that was too much I'd pull it back down by decreasing the Layers Opacity.  I'd probably add a reflection of the sky in the water and Blur and Fade it's intensity.  I'd sharpen only the tree area (using the same Mask to limit what was sharpened and then put a vignette on the overall image.

10 Minutes - Start to Finish - Nothing But Net

Okay, the "nothing but net" is an add on.  The title just reminded me of one of those commercials with the basketball players from a few years ago.  A friend of mine saw today's image and said something like "that must have taken you a long time".  I asked him for a estimate of how long he thought it would take to complete the image.  His reply was "oh, hours I'd guess".  I told him it was closer to ten minutes.  Also being named Thomas, he was a doubter and challenged me to produce a similar image.  Today's post is the result of that challenge.  I started from scratch, set a timer on my second screen and did a screen capture every one minute.  The entire process took far longer than the ten minutes, doing the screen capture, cropping it to show what was going on, saving it,  So, it was work for one minute, spend two minutes documenting what was done during the one minute, resetting the screen and going for the next minute.  The result is today's post.  To see what my screen looked like, minute by minute, hit the "read more".



Minute eight.  Image sharpened.
Mask applied to sky.

Minute nine.  Vignette applied.
Image complete.



Images in Adobe Bridge

 The process started from Adobe Bridge with image one. I have the images combined in one folder because I'll be using this process for a live class I'll be teaching. So, during the first minute I opened all the images in Adobe Photoshop CS5. The clouds (being a jpg) went directly while the other six opened in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). I did a select all in ACR and had it Open Images into CS5. Once open in CS5 I went to File/Automate/Photomerge. I clicked on Add Open Files and all seven images opened into the dialog box. I clicked on the "cloud" image and hit remove. The shot of the bird wasn't in the same sequence as the five shots for the pano, so it was removed also. The dialog box was set to Auto and Blend Images Together. I hit okay and sat back while CS5 did it's thing.



Screen shot after minute one,
5 images being blended.

 After the merge completed, the image was straightened using the Ruler Tool (i). The straight line used was the right edge of the center building. The five images making up the pano were converted to a Smart Object (right click on the stack and select Convert to Smart Object). The Crop Tool (C) was set without any constrained dimensions, at 150 pixels per inch and pulled out to create the portion of the image needed for the final print. The crop looks pretty severe, but the after crop size was still 40 MB. Plenty to make a good sized enlargement.



Screen shot at minute two.
Ready for cropping

 The next step was to make a Selection of the sky area using the Quick Selection Tool (W). After making the selection a little time was spent at reasonably high enlargement to go around and pickup any signification areas missed by the Quick Selection Tool. Once the Selection looked good I right clicked in the selected area and picked Save Selection to create an Alpha Channel.




 

Minute three. Sky being selected
to create Alpha Channel

 Next the sky was brought into the scene. The Layer was duplicated (Ctrl J) and put into Free Transform (Ctrl T). A right click presented the Transform option and Flip Horizontal clicked. Using the Move Tool (V) the top Layer was slid to the left, overlapping the copy beneath by 20% or so. A Layer Mask was added and the seam between the image softened using the Brush Tool (B) on the Mask. The two sky Layers were Merged (Ctrl E) and put back into Free Transform (Ctrl T). In order not to have a mirror image of the sky the size of the sky Layer was increased and Rotated to give a different look across the scene.

Minute four.  An Alpha Channel
has been added to the
Channels Panel

The Image of the bird was brought in and the bird selected using the Quick Selection Tool (W). Right clicking in the selection and choosing Save Selection produced an Alpha Channel of the bird. Adding a Layer Mask with the selection active dropped the sky around the bird out of the scene. The stack of Layers was selected (Click the top Layer and Shift Click the bottom Layer) and (using a Right Click) made into a Smart Object.









Minute 5.  Clouds brought in,
duplicated, flipped & moved

The Smart Object was copied twice (Ctrl J - Ctrl J), the lower Layer activated and the visibility of the upper image turned off. Sharpening was done using a High Pass Filter (Filters/Other/High Pass). Sharpening clouds is not a favorite of mine, so the Sky Alpha Channel (Channels Panel - Ctrl Click on the thumbnail) was selected. The Blend Mode was switched to Overlay. A New Layer Mask was applied with the Selection active, applying the Mask to the Sky area only/ Oops, Ctrl I (eye) Inverted the Mask, sharpening the scene and not the sky. The last step was to apply a vignette. The visibility of the top Layer was turned on (clicking on the eyeball icon). Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) a Selection was made leaving a border around the entire scene. Shift F5 opened a Feather dialog box and the radius set to 200 pixels. A New Layer Mask was applied and the Blend Mode changed to Multiply.

Minute six.  Sky in Free Transform,

enlarged and rotated.

Minute seven.  Bird brought in and
selected using Quick Mask

That finished the image and left every part accessible to make possible improvements. As I said at the beginning, it took twice as long to capture and setup the images as it did to do the work. It then took more than six times as long to write it up. Fast Photoshopper, slow typist.

A Simple Photoshop Blending Mode Tutorialreflections under the cup, just to the left of the plate.

The shot of the cup, roll and flower needs a little explanation before we get into the tutorial.  One, there's too much image.  It needs some cropping, in from the right and left, down a little from the top.  We don't "need" to show the handle, the viewer will "know" that the cup has a handle somewhere.  The right edge of the plate can go also, it doesn't add needed information.  The exposure for this shot was about 20 seconds.  The light came from an LED flashlight played around the setup.  The "setup" was a plastic panel over a black mountboard.   Nothing was needed for the background since the falloff of light was enough to render the wall black.  The first thing to do (after cropping) is clean up any distractions.  There's a couple of reflections under the cup, just to the left of the plate.  The easiest way to fix them would be to create a new Layer and use the Spot Healing Brush (J) to quickly remove them and any other stray light in the lower left of the shot.  I can sit and tell you all day that the cup is full of hot coffee, but there's nothing to indicate that's the case.  There are images all over the web (such as in Flickr) of people playing with smoke.  Many come from taking shots of burning incense smoke.  Many are colored and manipulated into very interesting shapes and patterns.  To learn how a shot of incense smoke provides to "steam" coming from the coffee cup, hit the "read more".

This ends up being very simple. Select the smoke image (Ctrl A), copy it (Ctrl C) and Paste it (Ctrl V) into the shot of the coffee. Using the Move Tool (V) bring the smoke over the mug. Change the Blend Mode to Screen or Lighter Color (either will work in this case). Fine tune the positioning of the smoke with the Move Tool (V). Add a Layer Mask and, using a black Brush (B) paint on the Mask to eliminate any extraneous smoke. We now have a steaming hot cup of coffee to go with our roll and flower.

Here's the finished image. No one ever said things had to be hard in Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop's Secret Weapon

Here's a quickie for a Friday.  We'll take a look at an extremely under used tool available in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and several preceding generations.  To start with we have a well exposed shot of the moon and a shot of a church scene in late autumn.  If we were looking for a simple shot of the moon in the clear space of the sky we'd have a one click for that.  Just change the Blend Mode.  There's several options, such as using a Screen Blend Mode or a Lighter Color Blend Mode.  Either will do a pretty good job of dropping out the black of the moon Layer.  Our Background Layer would be the shot of the church and the upper Layer would be the moon.  That's all well and good, but it makes a rather uninteresting image.  More interesting would be the moon behind some of the branches of the tree.  If we were to simply move the moon over the branches with the straight Bland Mode switch the moon would appear in front of the branches.  That wouldn't fool a three year old.  The church with the branches is one image, yet we want to slide the moon behind the branches.  There's a hard way and there's an easy way.  To find out what the two methods are, hit the "read more".

 The first thought might be to make an Alpha Channel Mask.  Reasonably easy to do.  Go to the Channels Panel and flip through the Red, Green and Blue Channels.  The best contrast comes from the Blue Channel.  Drag the icon drop to the Create New Channel icon at the bottom of the panel.  Next, let's go to one of Photoshop's scariest dialog boxes, Calculations (Image/Calculations).  There's plenty of options to chose from in this dialog box.  We can pick which Channel we want to start with and which one we want to match it up with.  The first option presented as we open the dialog box is the Blue copy channel as Source 1 and the same Channel as Source 2.  Scrolling through the Blend Modes results in not that great a Black/White possibility.  Changing Source 2 to the Green Channel and scrolling through the Blend Modes again gives hope that we can create a high contrast Alpha Channel to work with.  The best bets are Linear Dodge (Add) and Add.  They're the same result in this case but that won't always be true.  Make sure the Result is set to New Channel and click OK.  We can't use Adjustment Layers on Alpha Channels, so we'll use a straight Levels adjustment (Image/Adjustments/Levels).  Boosting the Blacks and White increases the contrast until we have "almost" a complete B&W image.  Further clean up can be done by getting the Brush Tool (B), setting the Brush Blend Mode (in the Context Aware Bar at the top of the page) to Overlay.  Set the color to the Defaults (D) and switch back and forth (X) as needed.  Paint over the branches.  With the Brush in the Overlay Mode, painting with Black will only affect tones from midrange to Black.  Painting with White will only affect tones from the midpoint (128) to White.  Going back and forth (X) between Black and White will allow clean up of any remaining grayscale.  We finally have a mask.  We can apply it to the moon image and then uncouple it from the moon image.  That way we can move the moon independently from the mask and place the moon wherever we like.

Now, let's use Photoshop's Secret Weapon and simplify things from a ten minute build of a Mask to a thirty second fix with total flexibility.  If you've ever used a Drop Shadow, an Inner Glow, Outer Glow, Bevel and Emboss you've probably open the Layer Style dialog box.  Easiest way to open it is to double click on the Layer you're interested in applying a style to.  It will open to the default screen or Blending Options.  Down at the bottom of the box is the secret.  It's the Blend If sliders.  You can control the relationship between the upper Layer and the Bottom Layer.  Since we want to drop out the Blacks in the moon shot, just move the Black slider for "This Layer" to the right.  The Black goes away.  If you need to find tune the edges the slider can be split.  Just hold down the ALT key and pull the tick mark away on one side.  All done!  You can move the moon "behind" the branches at will and end up with an image that looks more like today's final image.



"Finishing" The Gas Pump From Monday's Tutorial

Here's where we left off on Monday.  It's a complete image, but it still needs some work.  The pump is sort of lifeless and can use a little spark.  The ominous clouds in the background do add some drama, but it would be better if the storm was just past and the pump had a little sunshine on it.  It's an old pump, so we can make the assumption that, other than the glass, it's all metal or some sort.  The bezel looks like a stamping and the crown of the body appears to be a casting.  Each would react to sun shining on it differently.  Getting the appearance of directional light is as hard as you might think.  Hit the "read more to find out how to "light" the pump.

Here's the same image that's been lit using Adobe Photoshop CS5's lighting effects (Filter/Render/Lighting Effects). First thing to do would be to break the image into the parks we want to work with. In this case that's the bezel, the casting and the face of the shield. Using the Quick Selection Tool (W) it's easy to pick up each piece. In this case, rather than duplicating the Background Layer and using a Layer Mask it was just easier to put the pieces up on their own Layers. (The problem using this technique is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). If your selection is off at all you'll end up with miscellaneous bits that can't be added easily. The safer method would be to use Layer Masks. When "lighting" each piece the Lighting Effects dialog box presents a wealth of options. There's more than a dozen types of lights, you can make the surface dull or reflective, you can make the beam wide or narrow, you can adjust the ambience of the area not directly hit by the light, and a half dozen other features of the light. The same type of light was used for all three pieces. The bezel made Shiny and Metallic, the crown not quite as Shiny and slightly less Metallic, the star in the face is generally brighter and Shiner. The Lights were all set to be coming from the upper left.

The coloring looked pretty good, so individual colors (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta) didn't need to be adjusted using individual Adjustment Layers. So, the next steps were finishing the image. By "finishing" I mean cropping, sharpening and vignetting. Step one is Cropping. What I do (and there are a hundred possibilities on this step) is chose the size and resolution of the final print. In most cases (for me) this is 16 x 20 @150 ppi. This will give plenty of detail and lower the overall file size to be sent out to a service.

Here's an interesting version of the image. This is the sharpening step we use here at the gallery. It a High Pass filter (Filter/Other/High Pass) and it makes any image look like some sort of weird, gray scale line drawing. What's going on is that it's picking up the sharp edges. We use a Radius of about 10 on most images. Once you're satisfied with the edges, click OK. Then change the Blend Mode to Overlay. If that looks too far gone, try Soft Light. With either choice the Opacity slider can be used to "fine tune" the level of Sharpening. Clouds appear unreal when sharpened. Go back to the Alpha Channel Mask called Sky (Channels Panel then Ctrl click on the Sky icon) and add it as a Layer Mask. As is it's the opposite of what we're looking for, so tap Ctrl I (eye) to Invert the Mask. We end up with the pump sharpened and the sky as it was.

Every print needs some vignetting. Typically not enough to call attention to the vignette, but an amount to just tint the edges to hold the view in the shot. The easiest method of doing this is to use a Layer Mask. Select the upper most Layer. You can see that the entire image goes back to its unsharpened state. Hit the New Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel to add a Layer Mask. Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) select the center of the image. Leave an equal space around the image. Feather the selection (Shift F6) to about 200 pixels. Fill the selection with Black and change the Blanding Mode to Multiply. Adjust the vignette to taste by sliding the Opacity slider lower.

Here's the final image, ready to hang.

A New Step By Step Tutorial

Starting point for
today's tutorial.

Okay, before we get going, another confession. A buddy of mine, when he saw today's finished image asked, "why didn't you just take a picture of the whole pump?". I explained that I was being "artsy" when I snapped the shutter and didn't give a thought to wanting an image that showed the whole pump.


Today's "exercise" is going to be rebuilding the missing pieces of the pump. The upper and left tips of the star need a little help, obviously the bezel needs some major reconstruction and the left side of the pump body could use some sprucing up. The first step is to straighten up the pump (more artsy shooting). That way we have an axis to base all the work off of. With Adobe Photoshop CS5 where's an easy button you can push to Straighten and crop an image. Well, we really don't want to take more information away from the shot and have to rebuild that much more. CS5 does have a handy dandy modifier key to straighten and not crop a image. Just hole down the Alt key when you hit the Straighten Button and you get a straighten, full image with not cropping. Kind of like what you'll see as the first image once you hit the "read more".


Now that we have a straighten image with no loss of information we can start the rebuild process.  First thing is make a copy of the Background Layer (Ctrl J).  Use the Free Transform Tool (Ctrl T) and select the Flip Horizontal option to reverse the layout.    Reduce the Opacity of the copied Layer to about 50%.  Use the Move Tool (M) to nudge (use the up, down, left and right arrow keys to nudge an image) the upper Layer into as close alignment as you can.  It is possible that you'll need the Free Transform Tool (Ctrl T) to rotate the top Layer just a little bit to get the matchup.  Within the Free Transform Tool you can use a combination of rotate and nudge to move the top Layer.  Once you've done the best you can (spend a little time, it'll pay off later)return the Opacity to 100%.  You'll have something that looks like image #3. 

You can see the word Texaco is reversed in this image.  Add a Layer Mask to the upper layer and mask out the reversed lettering to show the proper orientation.  You'll find the those points of the star are pretty pesky.  It's easier to let them fade and fill them in later.  The way to do it is to use the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) And extend the angles of the star to create the point.  With the selection made it a simple matter of using the Clone Stamp Tool (S) to fill in the tips.  Because you've made a selection of only the tip area you don't have to worry about "coloring outside the lines".  The selection will constrain anything you do to within the selection.

Next comes rebuilding the top of the dome.  We really don't have anything that matches the way the left and right side matched, so we have to grab something and bend and shape it to what we need.  Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) to select the right side of the bezel.  It's no problem to take a chunk of the face with you.  We'll mask it out later.  Use Ctrl J to put it up on its own Layer.  Use the Free Transform Tool (T) to move and rotate the section up to the top.  Right clicking within the selection will bring up the options for the Free Transform Tool (T).  Chose the Skew option and push and pull the handles to bend the thicker portion to the right size to fit the bezel.  You'll need to be careful not to distort the curve of the bezel.  You'll probably have to do a little push pull dance to get it just right.  Stick with it and it'll get into the proper spot.  The bezel, where you picked it up from has a bit of a lip to it.  Don't worry about the lip.  Once you're happy with the positioning of the bezel you can use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to isolate the lip and easily clone it out.



By now the sky looks rotten.  Don't worry about it, it’s a pretty bland sky and we'll be replacing it near the end.  Next step is to get rid of the backwards sign on the left.  Just take the Rectangular Marquee Tool and select the sign using the vertical pole as a guide.  You can fill the selection with just about anything you want.  Just make it something that will be able to be easily picked up by the Quick selectio Tool (W) later.  (In other words, don't fill it with the red of the pump.)  Again use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) to select the piece of the left pole that has the mounting bracket for the sign that was just removed.  Use the Clone Stamp Tool (S) to clone out the bracket. 

At this point we're just about done, but the sky still looks like crap. What this image needs is some drama in the sky. Find a sky you've taken and have in your "cloud folder" and bring it into the Layer stack. Turn off its visibility for a moment and use the Quick Selection Tool (W) to make a selection of the sky. Don't forget the areas between the upright poles and the glass gas meter. Right click on the selection and pick the Save Selection option. Relight and chose the sky Layer. Hit the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel and the sky should pop right in. If, by some chance, the sky fills the pump area, simply invert the Mask by tapping the Ctrl I (eye) combination.

That's as far as we're going today. The build is complete. Now we have to "finish" the image. We'll do that on Wednesday. See you then.

Part Two Of The Complete Baltimore Harbor Pano Tutorial

One caveat before we start with part two of the Baltimore Harbor tutorial.  I was so concentrated on making sure I had the individual JPG images of each set that I forgot to save the PSD file.  So, I had to rebuild it from scratch.  One of the things that surprised me was that it took less than ten minutes to not only get to where we were on Wednesday, but to complete the image completely.  This may look like a complex build of an image, but it's really not that many steps.

Here's the closest I found to our end point from Wednesday's "part one".  There's no gull in the image yet, no working of the "hot" areas, no sharpening and no vignette.  These will be the steps we'll go through today.   The first thing to do is add our friendly little gull.  Gulls, or any flying birds in range are another database I've built over time.  You need to thing in pieces of possible images.  Would birds look realistic in the scene you're trying to build.  Having sets of files of "pieces" comes in very handy.  The gull doesn't take up much of the original shot.  That's okay, we don't need the gull to be particularly big.  It's an accent, not a feature of the scene.  In the case of the gull I used the rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and isolated the bird.  I copied (Ctrl C) and pasted (Ctrl V) the selection into the scene.  Using the Move Tool (V) the gull was positioned in the approximate location I thought it would look good.  Using the Quick Selection Tool (W) the sky was selected.  Right clicking in the sky brought up a dialog box.  In the dialog box the Save Selection option was chosen.  It really doesn't matter if the Alpha Channel Mask is of the sky or of the gull.  Once it's used, the Mask can be flipped using CTRL I (eye) to get to the Mask needed.  You can either use Refine Edge as you make the selection or use Refine Mask once the selection is converted to the Alpha Channel Mask to clean up the edges.  Here's what we have with the gull inserted into the scene.

We now have the image "assembled", so it's time to tweak it to make it easier to view.  That is, to tone down the bright areas and, if needed, bring up the areas we'd want the eye to go to.  A friend of mine once said there's twenty ways to do anything in Photoshop.  I agreed, but added that of the twenty ways, nineteen were hard and one was easy.  To tone down the hot spots we can use the Dodge and Burn Tool (O) in Photoshop CS5.  I say in CS5 because D&B has been greatly improved there.  Make sure you have the "Protect Tones" check box clicked on.  It works very well and infinitely better than previous version.   If you're "old school" you can use a Layer filled with 50% grey, with the Blend Mode changed to Overlay.  In either case you need to set the Range to what you're working on (Shadows, Midtones, or Highlights) and bring the Exposure of the Brush way down and build up the dodging or burning.  Another, easier technique was used on today's image.  A copy was made (Ctrl J) of the base scene Layer and a Black Layer Mask was applied.  The Blend Mode was switched to Multiply.  The Quick Selection Tool (W) was used to pick the areas needing adjustment, such as the tent on the right, the boats, areas of a couple buildings, etc.  Once the areas were selected (and they can either be selected all at once or in individual steps) they were filled with White.  That allowed the multiplied Layer to show through.  If the effect is to much the Opacity Slider can be use to make any needed adjustment.  Compare the image above the paragraph with the image below.  You can see the shading in the tent on the right and in other places.

That's it for adjustments on this image. I didn't think it was necessary to adjust the individual colors. The overall tone and tenor of the image looked about right. Therefore, all the Layers were selected and made into a Smart Object (right click on any Layer and pick from the dialog box). Two copies of the Smart Object were made and the upper on was turned off (click on the eyeball). With the middle Layer selected a High Pass Filter (Filter/Other/High Pass) was applied and the Blend Mode changed to Overlay. The Radius setting on the High Pass Filter was about 10 pixels. This sharpened up the entire image. I really don't like "sharp" clouds, so the sky Alpha Channel was selected (open Channels panel, Ctrl click on the "Sky" Alpha Channel) and a Layer Mask applied. This resulted in sharp clouds and no sharpening in the buildings and harbor. With the Layer Mask selected it was inverted (Ctrl i) to produce a sharp foreground and soft clouds.


The last step was to put a vignette around the image. With the top Layer turned back on a Layer Mask was applied. With the rectangular Marquee Tool (M) a selection was made leaving a border about 1/8 in from all sides. The selection was feathered (Shift F6) by about 200 pixels and filled with black. The selection was deselected (Ctrl D) and the Opacity adjusted to taste. Here's the final image. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

A Full Blown Tutorial In Adobe Photoshop CS5

Got an email the other day from a reader saying they liked the tutorial portion of the posts, but could do without the anecdotal stories in the first paragraph.  So, we're going to try something new.  A highly expanded tutorial focus, with lots of pictures showing exactly what's going on in each step of building an image.  To kick it off I'm going to "rebuild" the scene of the Baltimore Inner Harbor and explain the thoughts behind each step.  To get to the end result may actually take a couple of posts, so hang in there.

These five shots will be used to make the final image.

We'll start with the general scene by taking the four vertical shots and making a panorama from them.  The shots were taken "hand held".  If you have enough light, a firm stance, a steady hand and a good eye, hand held panorama component shots aren't really a big problem.  Naturally, the lower the light the more the need to put the camera on a tripod.  I think most people's first thought about making a hand held pano is to stand in place and twist around you waist.  Actually, (I learned this after shooting this set of images) if you keep your eye in the viewfinder, composite your next shot and then shuffle your feet to get straighter toward the subject, you'll end up with a better series of images to use for the panorama.  You won't get as much of a bow to the final composite. 

Hit the "read more" to follow along with the building of the final image.

Here's an image of Adobe Photoshop CS5's Photo Merge dialog box.  The images were open before opening the dialog (File/Automatic/Photomerge).  The "Add Open Files" box was checked, as was the "Blend Images Together" and "Vignette Removal" boxes.  As far as which "Layout" to choose, "Auto" seems to work just fine.  I've looked at other selections and, again, "Auto" works fine. 

This image is the result of the photomerge.  You can see the "wings" flaring up on each end.  Depending on the composite image, the wings will either need to be trimmed or, thanks to CS5's Content Aware Fill, filled in.  (We'll work another image where we'll fill the missing information rather than trimming it.  In today's image we really don't need as much water as is available.  First things first, let's make sure we have "something" that's straight.  Today, that happens to be the "shoreline".  Nested with the Eye Dropper Tool (i) is a Ruler Tool.  Select the Ruler.  Click on a convenient starting point and drag to an end point of what you feel needs to be straight.  It can be horizontal or vertical, either will work as long as it's something that should be on the "X" or "Y" axis.  In CS5, on the content aware options bar, there's a "Straighten" button.  Clicking it will rotate whatever you selected to whatever axis is closer and crop off any blank areas.  Adding the Alt Key will straighten and leave the blank areas. 

The next step is to make your crop selection.  For today's image most of the water was lopped off.  On the left side, the two tour boats were eliminated.  They didn't add to the atmosphere of the image, so they would have been an unnecessary distraction.  Most of the sky was also not needed to tell the story of the inner harbor.  If the shot was taken as one frame, cropping so drastically would have resulted in a very low pixel count.  Probably too low to make a 30" print.  By starting with a four shot pano we have plenty of pixels we can carve away and still have a ton of information left to make a print. 

The sky looks pretty sucky.  It has no drama and this scene cries out for drama.  I keep a database of clouds.  Any time the clouds look "interesting" I'll grab a camera and shoot a dozen (at least) variations of the sky.  Bracket a little bit, shoot left, right and center, include a little land, no land, vertical, and horizontal.  File 'em away, ready to be used to jazz up a bland sky.  For today's image one of the more dramatic skies was chosen and brought into the Layer stack above the merged panorama.  Just to get a quick idea of what will work and what slice of the sky looks best, the Blend Mode was changed to Darker Color.  This overlaid the sky above the scene.  Because there are light (white) areas in the scene there was some bleed through in parts of the scene.  This is "no big deal" because the Darker Color blend mode is only used for positioning.  Once the sky looks good the Blend Mode can be switched back to Normal.  The best position, in this case, left a sliver on the left side that had to be dealt with.  The sky didn't reach the edge of the image.  With the sky Layer selected, the Free Transform Tool (Ctrl T) was activated and the left side of the sky pulled over to cover the missing area. 

In this image you can see that the sky is much larger than the panorama scene.  It won't be seen, but it does add to the file size unnecessarily.  Once you got the sky in its final position the excess sky can be cropped off to reduce the file size.

Turn off the visibility (click on the eyeball) of the sky revealing the scene.  Use the Quick Selection Tool (W) to select the sky in the original scene.  Use the Refine Edge button to bring up the dialog box to adjust the selection.  Once a good selection is made, right click within the selection and choose Save Selection.  This will create an Alpha Channel that can be used wherever needed to make a Mask.  Because masking the sky from the scene portion of the image is the next step we can leave the selection active and click on the sky Layer.  At the bottom of the Layers Panel the Layer Mask icon should be selected.  The result will be that a Layer mask will be applied with the sky and the scene both visible.

So, here's where we at right now.  There's quite a bit more to do to get to the final image, but that's probably enough for today.  Stop back on Friday and we'll continue building the image.