punkysmonky asked for help on making this photo better. As you can see the background is a bit cluttered – the black should reach all the way up the frame, or the white should reach to the floor. That aside, it’s a lovely family portrait, so it was worth half an hour of my time in an effort to make it into something that could go in a photo frame.
High-key photos, particularly of children, are quite common these days, so, as that meant blending the people’s hair in with a white background would be easier, that’s what I aimed for. The following instructions are for Adobe PhotoShop CS2, but they won’t be too different for Adobe PhotoShop Elements 6 or PaintShop Pro. It refers to commands in CS2 for Windows XP, and I don’t know what the options under the various flavours of MacOS are.
I started by loading the original image into PhotoShop CS2. As I had a copy of the image on the clipboard I just chose “File > New” from the menu and accepted the defaults. When image data is in the clipboard CS2 uses those dimensions for the new image. I then pasted the image in using “Edit > Paste”. This gives a PhotoShop file with a single layer. I renamed this layer to “Original Image” for easy reference.
The next step is to create a duplicate of the layer that you can work on. I always try to leave the original layer intact so that I have something to go back to later if I screw things up. Do this by right-clicking on “Original Image” and selecting “Duplicate Layer”. Name this new layer “Mask Layer”, or something that will make it easy to identify later on.
Select the new “Mask Layer” and click the “Add vector mask” button. This is the layer that you’ll use to make dealing with the background easier without destroying the original image.
When you click the “Add vector mask” button a new thumbnail appears alongside the layer’s first thumbnail. It’s the white box in this image. Click on this white box to ensure that it’s selected, the select the “Brush Tool” by pressing “B”.
Set the foreground to black, and the background to white. When using layer masks painting in black removes content from the current layer, and painting in white puts it back. It’s similar to the eraser tool but it doesn’t actually destroy any of the content in the layer – it just makes it see-through. This is useful when you want to make repairs later, whereas the eraser tool is destructive and changes it makes can only be undone while they’re in the undo history.
Set the “Master Diameter” of the brush to a size that suits your image, and set the hardness to about 80%. Start painting, in black, over your mask layer. As you paint you probably won’t see any change in your image, so switch the original layer’s visibility to off by clicking the “eye” next to the layer. This will help ensure that you’re removing the appropriate parts of the mask layer. Click the mask layer’s thumbnail to ensure that it’s selected. I usually go around the edges first, picking out the detail, before using a larger brush to remove the bulk of the layer.
If you make a mistake and mask part of the image you wanted to keep, switch the foreground and background colours around by pressing “X” or by clicking the icon next to the colours. Paint in white, using the Brush too, to repair the layer.
Once you’ve masked off the detail, select the layer thumbnail (next to the layer mask thumbnail) and set the brush colour to white. Paint over what’s left – the background – until the clutter has been removed and you’re happy with the colour. You’ll be left with something like this.
For this image I’d already decided to go for a monochrome high-key image so that I wouldn’t have to spend too much time masking the hair, particularly of the little girl on the centre-left.
I added a “Channel Mixer” adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Channel Mixer). Ensure that the “Monochrome” checkbox is selected before you make any changes with the slider. For this image I used +20, +20 and +70 respectively on the RGB channels. Note that the values don’t have to add up to 100%, and if you swap the same values to between channels the result will be different.
The photo still didn’t have the result I was after, so I added a “Curves” adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves). This image has two points on the layer, one at 71/122 and the other at 172/221. This blows the highlights even further while retaining some of the darker areas around the eyes and mouth.
At this stage the photo looks a bit flat – there’s not enough contrast between the tones, so I added a “Brightness/Contrast” adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast). Setting “Brightness” to -20 and “Contrast” to +10 gave me what I was after for this photo.
I also used the “Dodge” and “Burn” tools to make local corrections to some of the shadows and highlights.
Here’s the finished result. When producing this sort of stuff make sure you spend enough time on the mask layer. You can see that Dad’s hair is a bit fuzzy around the edges, and Mum’s hair has a dark line on the right-hand. I was pressed for time, so didn’t put much effort on this time. However, with a little bit of care, and an hour or so spent on the photo it’s possible to produce some really stunning photos from what was a rather average original.