Digital Group Meeting February 3rd 2011

[peterjones]

Many thanks to you all for making yesterday evening a great success in Steve’s absence; there was an excellent turnout, nice to see and meet many new faces and thank you all for your input particularly to Malcolm for his help and to Cheryl for keeping me well hydrated. Thanks all for your patience as I fumbled around with Elements.

We certainly covered the toolbox in some detail and I won’t attempt a précis except to remember when you hover the cursor over the icon a pop up will identify the tool; where you see a small black arrow in the bottom right of the icon box a right click will reveal the various options of that tool.

I am indebted to Malcolm for revealing his method of creating adjustment layers within Elements Version 8; for example open an image copy it to a new layer (Ctrl J); create a Levels ( or any other kind of layer) layer between the background and new layer; then hovering the cursor over the line between the new layer and the levels layer left click; this will then combine the new layer and the levels layer almost as one and any adjustments then you make to the new layer can easily be adjusted or eradicated by using the black brush on the mask ( a white rectangle) on the levels layer.

We talked about layers a lot last night; why use them? If the image is saved as a PSD file it saves the layers and you can return at any time to adjust your image or you can go back and fine tune at any time during your processing; however the caveat always remains: what works for you works for you!

I demonstrated how to embed a Copyright symbol within your image; please see my post on this process within this forum; remember it won't guarantee your image won't be filched a copyright symbol will make plagarism more difficult.

I demonstrated how to reproduce the colours as seen in the film “300”: open your image then duplicate it as a new layer; between the two layers create a Hue and Saturation layer; within the H/S layer tick the colorize box and slide the Hue slider to 38; adjust the layer blend mode of the new layer to Multiply and you have a slight sepia contrasty image showing some colour; beware currently camera club judges don’t like or understand low key images; don’t blame me if you receive low scores!

Vic asked about removing highlight burnout; above the image I create a blank layer above the layer of background to be corrected; I use the eyedropper tool to select a colour near to the burnout or a colour that I would like to replace the burnout with; using the brush start with an opacity at 10% and the blend mode of the brush set to Multiply brush over the burnout building up gradually; if you go too far you can use the eraser set at a low opacity to gently erase the new colour back to what you consider satisfactory or use Malcolm’s method of creating an adjustment layer within Elements which is what I would do.

I am sure you were all suitably impressed with my funky clouds! For anyone who wants to have a go create a new image in black at whatever dimensions you set; above the black background create a blank layer and select it; ensure your foreground and background colours are set to Black and White respectively; using the elliptical selection tool define an ellipse set at a feather of around 85; then Filter ---- Render ----Clouds ; you will see Clouds within your ellipse; create another blank layer above your clouds; set two colours of your choice as foreground and background colours; staying put on the new top layer select the gradient tool, click and drag a vertical line on the top layer and you should be greeted by funky clouds; if you make the mistake I did last night with mono clouds ensure the little gradient window top left shows colour and not black and white.

Lastly if you have got this far and are still awake my method of burning and dodging is to create a blank layer fill it with 50% grey adjust the layer blend to soft light and then paint on the new blank layer with the brush set to normal mode and starting with 15% opacity use black paint to burn and white to dodge; again if you overdo it you can use the eraser or an adjustment layer to adjust to satisfaction.

Thank you all for reading and for your involvement last night!

Peter

[peterjones]

My (ahem) deliberate mistake has been spotted; I am grateful to SB;

I am indebted to Malcolm for revealing his method of creating adjustment layers within Elements Version 8; for example open an image copy it to a new layer (Ctrl J); create a Levels ( or any other kind of layer) layer between the background and new layer; then hovering the cursor over the line between the new layer and the levels layer left click; this will then combine the new layer and the levels layer almost as one and any adjustments then you make to the new layer can easily be adjusted or eradicated by using the black brush on the mask ( a white rectangle) on the levels layer.

is utter tosh, rubbish and nonsense as I omitted the bold phrase underlined and in italics:

I am indebted to Malcolm for revealing his method of creating adjustment layers within Elements Version 8; for example open an image copy it to a new layer (Ctrl J); create a Levels ( or any other kind of layer) layer between the background and new layer; then hovering the cursor over the line between the new layer and the levels layer hold down the Alt key and left click; this will then combine the new layer and the levels layer almost as one and any adjustments then you make to the new layer can easily be adjusted or eradicated by using the black brush on the mask ( a white rectangle) on the levels layer.

My apologies to anyone who was fiddling for hours trying to make it work.

Peter.