continued from the previous page
Adjusting the mask to move the focus where we want it
Rather than repeating the process to move the gradient to take in more or less of the image, there's another way to achieve the goal. In this situation, we left too much of the image blurred, and needed to move the mask to the left.
Step Three: Adjusting the mask to blur less of the image
Remember the mantra:
"White reveals, Black hides"
Clicking on the little chain icon between the two thumbnails to breaks the link between the mask and the image. Once unlocked, or unlinked, the mask or image can be moved independently of each other. Simply click in the thumbnail for the mask and move it around in the image.
Below you see the results of moving the mask. Keeping the shift key down to constrain the move horizontally, I click in the thumbnail and drag it to the left.
Notice the arrow is pointing to the white area of the mask, which allows blurred image to be revealed.
We want to cover that up.
Keeping the mask thumbnail active (see double lines around the thumbnail) I make a marquee (Tap M) selection of the white portion in my image window, and fill it with black! (Option/delete, or Alt/delete) Presto, the blur is gone and the crystal clear image returns to that portion. Now the mask thumbnail should be black all the way to its right edge.
Finishing: Color adjustment, crop and save
Since the awards were lighted by auditorium lights, the whole scene has an overall warmness. Rather than fooling with a bunch of tedious curves, or tonal adjustments -- just like an old-time photographer -- we'll use a color filter. They're located under the Layers menu and so we chose:
Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Photo Filters and then "Cool"
A slight amount of cooling filter brings the light to the right temperature. We feel this is more realistic since the awards were not nearly as "gold" as the auditorium lights made them look. Click Here to compare the effects of the cooling filter.
This is the actual finished piece, after some severe cropping to "fill" the image with trophies. You'll notice that the quite distracting image of the person has also been removed with a little creative brush work. In reality, no one paid any attention to that until we were nearly finished! Amazing how sometimes your focus on one aspect of an image makes you ignore another -- which could be just as important.
That's it! Four simple steps turn a ho-hum image into the desired results for the awards web page!
Thanks for reading!
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from the Editor:
I was delighted that day back in 1989 when Peggy Killburn called to ask if I could handle one more speaker in my "Great Graphics Tips & Tricks" session scheduled for the 1990 Macworld Expo. "Yes" was my response to her request to add Russell Brown to my panel. After all, we loved Adobe's young "Illustrator" program, and were quite anxious to try out their upcoming new product called "Photoshop." After seeing his demo, I was convinced Photoshop would be big. So the next month we added "Photoshop Tips & Tricks" to our regular DTG Magazine uploads to Compuserve, GEnie and AOL. The rest is history.
I only regret that I didn't trademark the name.
Editor / Publisher: Photoshop Tips & Tricks, DTG Magazine.