December 5, 2009

Photo of owl in woods

A friend sent me this image to try to give it a little "pizzazz" and to make the owl the focus of the image. The image was shot through a window and a screen, so the original image is a little "soft" because of that.

ORIGINAL

EDITED

Canon 30D
Canon 75-300 f/4-5.6 IS USM lens
f/5.6
1/60 sec.
ISO 1250


1. Duplicate image (CTRL-J).

2. Crop image to bring the focus in to the owl.

3. Adjust Curves to brighten image (bottom of layers palette, Create new fill or adjustment layer - choose Curves).

4. With top layer active, merge down (CTRL-E). then make new Layer (CTRL-J).

5. I want to sharpen the owl, so I use High Pass Sharpen (Filter->Other->High Pass), and set the blending mode (top of layers palette-drop down arrow) to Soft Light, and adjust the opacity to so that it is sharpened, but not too much.

6. Merge top layer down, then make new layer New Layer (CTRL-J).

7. Add Layer Mask (bottom of layers palette, third icon from left), turn off bottom two layers, the using a fairly soft brush set to black, paint out the background, leaving only the owl.

8. Turn bottom two layers back on, then hide top layer (click on "eye" next to layer), click on the second layer to make it active then apply Lens Blur filter (Filter->Blur->Lens Blur) and adjust opacity.

9. Show top layer (click on the "eye" again to show layer) , which will put sharpened owl on top of the lens blur layer.

10. With top layer active, merge down (CTRL-E) then make new layer (CTRL-J).

11. Apply Filter-> Distort-> Lens Correction, under vignette, move sliders all the way to left on Amount and Midpoint

12. Apply mask filled with white. Choose large, soft-edged brush with black as the color, and opacity set fairly low, then brush over the owl to remove the dark vignetting, and make the owl the focus of the image. Once you have a nice soft vignette, change opacity of brush to 100%, make the brush smaller, and paint over just the owl to remove the remaining vignette from owl.

13. Adjust Levels a bit to brighten image a bit more (bottom of layers palette - Create new fill or adjustment layer - choose Levels.

14. Merge down (CTRL-E), then make a new layer (CTRL-J).

15. Choose a small black border for framing the image (bottom of layers palette - "fx"->stroke).

16. Flatten image (File->Layer->Flatten Image), save file.