Tips and Tricks: Photoshop

Fixing a bad photograph

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Sometimes you may get a photograph that is so bad you have to decide whether to hack it in Photoshop or not use it at all. In cases like this one, you might have a poor photo that you have to use for your project.

Objective: Fix this photo for use in a judging competition

This picture has a massively green cast, there's no sky at all, and there are several distracting elements. The objective was to use the photo as an example of outdoor advertising that could be entered in a national competition.

I first took the original negative and had a photo CD scan made, with as much preliminary correction as could be done (fig. 1). Once I got the CD back, I opened the Base64 (18mb) version to make corrections on.

Getting rid of unessential elements

Since the sky was uniformely gray, I used the marquee tool to select a small (60x60 pixels) area of sky and option-dragged this selection over areas of tree and building I wanted to eliminate. Where I couldn't get too close for fear of erasing the billboard, I made new, smaller sky selections, and continued.

When I had removed most of the trees, I used the clone tool to reconstruct small areas where tree branches obscured the billboard. I filled in any gaps with the airbrush tool. The billboard was now isolated against the sky.

Selecting the billboard

Next I used the magic wand tool to select the sky. I added and subtracted to the selection with the lassoo tool, and for straight but oblique angles (the sides of the board), I used the pen tool to make straight paths, then made the paths into selections and added them to the current selections. There were some elements to the board like the little propellers on the top which were partially selected, and since they were small enough, I added them into the sky selection so I could remove them later. Once the entire sky area was selected, I saved the selection as a new channel.

Creating a new sky

With the sky area selected, I copied it, created a new document, OKed the size, but didn't paste into it. This gave me an empty document the same size as the billboard photo. I clicked on the foreground color tile on the tool palette and selected a medium blue color. I then clicked on the background color tile and selected a very pale blue color. These colors would be used to create realistic clouds.

I selected the entire window. With the Clouds filter (included in Photoshop 3.0x, available widely on the net and on AOL in their Photoshop forum), I used Clouds II to get nice wispy effects. I copied the entire window and moved back to my original image.

Inserting the clouds into the scene

Since the sky area was still selected, I chose Invert from the SELECT menu. This selected the billboard. Under EDIT, I chose Paste Behind to drop the clouds into the scene. Also under Select, I chose Defringe and selected a value of 2. This blurred the point of contact so the transition from one to the other would not be jarring.

I could still see white areas where I had made my billboard selection, so with it still selected, I used the eyedropper tool to grab a blue value near one of the billboard edges, and under the EDIT menu, chose Stroke. In the Stroke dialog box, I used the value 2 pixels and clicked "inside" for the path. This painted a blue line around the billboard, masking the transition to the new sky.

Fixing the color cast

Under the IMAGE menu, I chose Modify-Levels to lighten and correct the colors in the billboard. I boosted a lot of red in midrange and highlight values, and cut some blue and green. After bumping overall contrast, the colors in the graphic looked far better, though mottled. I zoomed in on the illustration and one by one, used the magic wand to select each primary color, choosing Grow from the Select menu to ensure I captured all the pixels.

Once I selected all the orange, for example, I used the eyedropper to select a median value for that color, then I option-deleted the selection, replacing it with the pure color I had chosen. I repeated this step in the skin, magenta and blue areas. Finally, to clean up the white of the board itself, I changed the setting of the wand to have a 1-pixel feathering, and I selected a large area of white. I used the Similar command to find additional areas. I then used Levels again to lighten the highlight values until it was nearly white.

Finishing touches

The last change I made was to select the blush area on the girl's face, feather it 5 pixels, and apply a Gaussian Blur of 2 pixels, then I restroked her hair with black. This gave it the airbrush look of the original. I then cropped the image and saved it as a CMYK tiff file for output (fig. 2).

Total time: about an hour.

Image was finally reproduced with a 3M Rainbow dye-sublimation printer at a finished size of 5x11 inches at 220 DPI.

Toolkit for this project:

Apple Macintosh IIcx with Diimo 50mhz accelerator card
Storm Technologies twin-DSP Photoshop accelerator card
540mb internal hard drive, 20mb RAM, 44mb Syquest drive
Apple 600e 4X CD-Rom player
Apple 14" 24-bit color monitor
Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1
Kodak Precision PhotoCD calibration tables
Clouds filter plug-in
Daystar Charger Suite (accelerated Photoshop filters)

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