LJ's (Imagine) Photoshop Tutorials

Right... i said this a few weeks ago, put it on my todo list... and then promptly forgot
(nothing new.. my todo list is over 4 pages long with 94 items going as far back as 1998, before you ask that one says this:
[05/05/98] Finish creating News Wars Demo [News Wars was a game i made.. think starwars with paparazzies])

anyway .. in the course of these releases ill go in this order :

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Raw Remastering
Taking a raw image and increasing its apparent quality, usefull for small images being made large or photos

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Raw Seperation
Taking a remastered image, and taking the bits you need

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Source Replication
Taking the peices you need, and then filling in the peices that were missing (think a person hidden behind a wall.. this means you will fill in the hidden parts

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Source Touchups
Taking you competed peices and removing compression artifacts/blocking plus making it look more refined

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Final Mastering
Putting everything together to create your final image

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or atleast... i hope to, :P first one will go in the next post.... have fun reading, trying and post your results back sometime..

LINKS TO TUTORIAL POSTS
Colour Curves Tool
Raw Remastering Walkthrough

Ok in this tutorial .. i will teach you the virtues of... the Colour Curves Tool...
[BTW.. i had 3 bottles of smirnoff before writing this xD not to worry.. dont think im drunk, i can still write)

course i never use this myself, but its usefull for photos.

Ok a brief rundown on what it DOES..
it is a graph, it shows the representation of what colour it reads, and what colour you SEE
so effectively you can make a certain hue of red appear to be a lower hue, or less saturated (read less colour, more gray)

for photos it means this :

Before...............................................................................................After

See, the yellow wash caused by the light has been removed, and it looks more realistic...

to do this, we start with our base image:


then we select the colour curves tool, this can be found under Image/Ajustments on the Menu Bar
(Please note at this point, there is another.. and better way, however i never use it mostly due to lazyness... if you do this for real.. do it:
Go to Layer/New Ajustment Layer/Curves)

you will see this:

or something like it, i messed with it whilst writing this.. the straight line means what goes in, comes out
by moving the dot arround (the position of the dot indicated which Hue of red we are editing, adding more points allows you to limit the range of hue's being changed)
by moving the dots you can make a hue that goes in... come out lighter or darker, also you can edit each of the colours using the combo box at the top)

this demonstrates my point :


now..this is where it gets annoying, this image is too yellow..dont you think
HOWEVER there IS NO YELLOW CURVE.. which is a pest, thats because we are working with RGB, each secondary colour is linked with its opposite primary colour, to keep it short i have a list here :

Red : Green
Green : Magenta
Blue : Yellow

now this means, to reduce any of the colours (green, magenta or yellow) you need to INCREASE the colour curve of its associated curve.. completely pointless but true.. here this helps :


increase blue = decrease yellow

and thats basicly it, this will get interesting later on :P but.. basics are always tedious (besides you guys always use asda SS in your pics, so it could help sorting out those over saturated colours)

Second Tutorial.. i got seriously bored

anyway, this wont be a concept tutorial like the last one (eg.. how to use this tool)
this will be a walkthrough.

In this tutorial i will take this low resolution image:


and make it larger + increase its quality (this is the all included under the "Raw Remastering" area
because this image is direct from the internet and un-edited it is refered to as the 'raw',
when the image is remastered and ready to be used in one of your works it is refered to as a 'source')

Right, to begin ill load it into photoshop


i want to make it say.. twice as large.. so we go to
Image/Image Size

then we make sure the Constrain Proportions box is ticked (this means we dont need to work out both dimentions, just change one and the other will increase to keep it the same shape)


im gonna change the width to 1000 (screw the 499 ill round it)
this is the result:


now.. we can see the problem... edges are blured, and the colour areas are filled with artifacts.
So, fixey time

Start off with the edges, it helps because areas are constrained (contained) within edges, and the second tool we use needs areas to work with.

Ok so, we will use the Smart Sharpen tool first, it can be found in Filters/Sharpen/Smart Sharpen, this is unfortunately.. guess work, each image is different... so you need different settings, heres a quick rundown to give you a boost:

Options
Amount : This is how much sharpening to apply, usual values range from 70% ~ 120%.. if the values to high you end up getting sharpening artifacts, they look like areas of white and bright dotty colour.

Radius : this is the area it works with, sharpening works by selecting an area, and then using that area for averages.. in short large area = less effect, small area = also less effect, medium area = more effect, this should be about the width of your edges.. 2~4px probably)

Remove : this is a specific option for different types of sharpening, when you enlarge an image it ends up looking like gaussian bluring, so just stick to that

Angle : this is for the above option when its set to motion blur, motion blur.. blurs in only one direction.. so you need to tell it which direction .. etc

More Accurate : this option increases the number of calculations.. aka slower but more correct use if you want.. not much difference

so after messing with sharpen, we have (hopefully) something that looks like this :


next up is to remove the artifacts, and sort out the crappy sharpening screwups (everyone ends up with a screwed up image after sharpening it enough to compensate for resizing)
to do this.. we shall use the godly... Surface Blur Tool
now THIS is an amazing tool... usualy blur takes the image, samples it and then makes it go all.. blury
THIS tool, makes the block areas of colour go blury.. meaning the edges are left untouched, and the artifacts and other rubbish are blured out
to find this tool look under
Filters/Blur/Surface Blur
... so we have this :


course.. its trial and error again, but the settings are basicly the same,
radius controls the area it samples (large radius means it takes a large area and blurs it.. kinda goes all screwey)
and the threshold is the level at which it starts to blur, its 'sensitivity' so to speak.. high values mean more blur.

So now we have.. the remastered image.. behold :


Course.. you are all looking at this and thinking 'this looks BAD'.. true enough, thats because THAT is only a remastered image.
Meaning its still a RAW, the next step in the chain will allow us to refine it even more..
Ill also use this image as a base for the next walkthrough tutorials so you can see the progression.

Have Fun