January 9, 2010

Clone/Edit of photo of little girl

ORIGINAL

EDITED

EXIF Data:
Canon 30D
Tamron 28-200 XR Di LD Aspherical (IF)
f/16
1/640 sec
ISO 3200

I really liked this image of this little girl, but wanted to isolate her in the image and make it all about her.

The ISO on this image was unintentionally set to 3200, making the image much lighter than we would like, and the green colors very bright. I intend to do some kind of black & white conversion of this image to offset the impact of the colors.

1. Duplicate image (CTRL-J).

2. Add a new blank layer by clicking on the "Create a new layer" icon (icon with "folded corner") at the bottom of the layers palette, and rename "Clone".

3. With the clone layer active, I select the "Clone Stamp" and begin to clone out the arm of the woman next to the little girl. I use the grass, trees and bushes from the left side of the photo to clone the areas that I need removed.

4. After I am satisfied that I have covered the area that I need to cover, I merge the clone layer down (CTRL-E).

5. Duplicate layer (CTRL-J).

6. I zoom in on the image and take a close look at the cloned area. If I see any areas that have repeating patterns, I use the Patch Tool to patch any areas of repeating patterns, and give the area a more "uncloned" look.

7. Once I am completely satisfied with the cloned area, I flatten the image. I flatten the image at this point because I want to use an action on it that requires that the image be flattened.

8. Crop to size using the Crop Tool from the Tool Palette.

9. I run the Duotone Dreams action Duotone Dreams Action - listed under Black and White actions on the image. This is one of my favorite actions - it gives a beautiful soft glow to the image and creates a duotone color that I can tweak to my liking. I often use this action when the color of an image feels "off" somehow, and cannot be adjusted to suit me. You can also delete or uncheck the Inner Shadow and Stroke layer if you do not want it.

10. I go to the Layers palette and double-click on the left icon of the Hue/Saturation layer (the one that looks like a little slider), and using the Hue slider, I adjust the slider slightly to the left to adjust the color to my liking. You can also slide the saturation slider all the way to the left to make the image black and white.

11. Save file as a .psd in case you need to work on it again.

12. Flatten image (File->Layer->Flatten Image), and save as .jpg.