Part 7 Creating Snazzy Effects
With the invention of the electronic calculator, schoolchildren are the only ones who fret over doing arithmetic by hand. Similarly, you might be surprised at how many commercial artists don’t draw from scratch anymore. Many of them earn their daily bread using computer graphics software such as Photoshop Elements to make photos look like fine art.
When you’ve worked through the tasks in this Part, you’ll know many of their secrets. You can make greeting cards and party invitations look as if they were hand-drawn by a skilled sketch artist, create photorealistic illustrations for flyers and newsletters, and add expensive-looking graphics that give a professional touch to your personal Website.
Photoshop Elements helps you achieve artistic effects by way of filters that can transform an image with a click, but in complex ways. The program comes with a wide variety of filters, and you can download even more of them (called plug-ins) from www.adobe.com and other vendors’ Websites. There are far too many filters to cover them all here, but you’ll see enough to show you how easy they are to apply—and to start you thinking about all the creative possibilities.
Before It helps to start with a photo that has an interesting composition, and some bright colors and contrasts.
After Here’s some “fine art” that took less than a minute to make. It’s the result of adding both the Palette Knife artistic filter and a Sandstone texture, and finally adjusting Hue for brighter greenery.
A frame is just one example of the wide variety of custom, prebuilt shapes available in Photoshop Elements. To make the frame even fancier, this example applies a Craquelure filter to give the frame a rich, dimensional look.
With the Editor in Full Edit mode and an image open, choose Image, Resize, Canvas Size.
Type a Width the same as the print size and about 2 inches wider than the current image size. Do the same for Height.
Click OK.
Right-click the Shape tool in the toolbar and choose Custom Shape Tool.
NOTE
Know the Image Size
In this example, the image size of the photo is about 5 x 7 inches. Placing it on an 8 x 10 canvas adds just the right amount of border for the decorative frame.
In the options bar, open the Shape pop-up palette.
Double-click any Frame shape.
With the Foreground color set to the color you want the frame to be, click and drag in the image to surround the photo with the frame.
Click the Simplify button.
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Want More Custom Shapes?
To pick from a variety of frame shapes, when the Shape pop-up palette is open in steps 5 and 6, click the circular arrow button and choose All Elements Shapes from the pop-up menu.
The frame used here is just one of many Custom Shapes, which are ready-made so that you don’t have to do any freehand drawing. Categories include Animals, Arrows, Banners and Awards, Characters, Default, Frames, Fruit, Music, Nature, Objects, Ornaments, Shapes, Signs, Symbols, Talk Bubbles, and Tiles.
Choose Filter, Texture, Craquelure.
Click OK again.
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Craquelure Not Your Style?
Instead of applying the Craquelure filter in step 9, try any other effect or combination of effects from the Filter menu.
A gradient fill is a blended transition—usually between two colors—within a selected area. In this example, the gradient is applied to the entire background, but it could also be used to fill any object you select, even hollow text.
With the Editor in Full Edit mode and an image open, choose the Quick Selection tool, or press A.
Click to select the area in the image to which the effect will be applied.
Choose the Gradient tool, or press G.
Click and drag across the area to be filled in the direction you want the color gradation to take. (Press Ctrl+D to release the selection.)
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Making Your Selection
Use any combination of selection tools in step 1 (Magic Wand, Lassos, or Marquees). Press Shift as you select with a tool to add an area to the current selection, Alt to subtract.
Somehow, putting a soft edge around the subject of a portrait just seems to make the image more special. It’s a traditional darkroom technique that’s incredibly easy to emulate with Photoshop Elements.
With a picture open, right-click the Rectangular Marquee tool.
Choose the Elliptical Marquee tool.
Click and drag in the image to draw an oval selection marquee.
Choose Select, Inverse or press Shift+Ctrl+I.
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Keep Trying
The amount of feathering you add depends on the resolution and size of the image; you might have to try a few different settings before you’re satisfied. Don’t forget that you can use the Undo History palette to back up and try again.
NOTE
Getting in Shape
Don’t feel that you have to stick to creating an oval vignette—that’s just the most traditional shape. Experiment with other shapes, including using the Lasso tool to draw a freeform selection.
Choose Select, Feather or press Alt+Ctrl+D.
Enter a number of pixels in the Feather Radius field and click OK.
Press Delete to remove the background.
NOTE
Going Way, Way Back
For a really old-fashioned feel, combine this vignette effect with a sepia tone effect. Check out the tip on p. 204 for instructions.
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Tidying Up
To center the vignetted photo in the image, invert the selection after step 7 and choose Image, Crop. That gets rid of the photo’s asymmetrical white border.
Back in the ancient days of film, high-contrast (hi-con) transparencies were called Kodaliths, the name of a Kodak product for mastering printing plates. You can create some dramatic artistic effects doing the same thing digitally—by converting a photo to black-and-white, with no shading.
With the Editor in Full Edit mode and an image open, choose Image, Mode, Grayscale.
Click OK on the warning dialog box.
Choose Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Brightness/Contrast.
NOTE
Don’t Do This to Your Dad
Hi-con doesn’t make flattering portraits. Clean-shaven men with five o’clock shadow end up with real stubble trouble, and wispy laugh lines become deep trenches.
Adjust the Contrast slider to 100.
Click OK.
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Adjust Brightness
In step 4, after increasing Contrast, it might also be necessary to adjust the Brightness slider a bit, as done here.
You’ll often see this effect used in advertising—it’s a neat way to convey the idea of an object moving from the past to the present, or from a humdrum world into an exciting one. One side of the image is black and white, and the other side is full color, with a smooth transition between the two modes in the middle.
Click to choose the Gradient tool, or press G.
Making sure that the foreground color is black, choose the Foreground to Transparent gradient in the options bar.
Choose Saturation from the Mode pop-up menu on the options bar.
Click and drag horizontally across the middle of the photo.
NOTE
Messing Around
Try different Mode settings and different gradients to see what other interesting results you can come up with. You can also set the Gradient tool to generate one of the four other gradient shapes, such as radial.
Remember the striking image of the little girl’s pink coat in the black and white movie Schindler’s List? One color object really stands out against a black-and-white background. Here’s how to achieve that effect in your own photos.
Click to choose the Selection Brush.
With the Selection Brush, paint over the object you want to leave in color.
After the selection is made, choose Select, Inverse.
Choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Remove Color or press Shift+Ctrl+U.
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Bonus Points
For an extra color boost, choose Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Hue/Saturation after step 2. Drag the Saturation slider to the right to make the one colored object even more vivid.
Backgrounds can be useful, but they can also be distracting. When you want to pull an object out of its environment by removing its background, turn to the Magic Extractor.
With the photo open, choose Image, Magic Extractor or press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+V.
With the Foreground Brush tool, click several times or scribble on the object you want to keep.
With the Background Brush tool, click several times or scribble on the rest of the image.
NOTE
Almost the Same
This technique works similarly to the Quick Selection tool. The dialog box’s instructions say to click the areas you want to indicate as background and foreground, but scribbling works just as well.
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Best Bets
You’ll achieve the best results when you use an image that has a distinct foreground object that’s very different in color or in lightness from the background.
Click Preview to see how the object looks with the background removed.
Use the Selection Eraser and the Smoothing Brush tools to delete leftover background areas or restore missing foreground areas.
Click OK to finalize the background removal.
NOTE
Go Back, Go Back
Take as long as you need to complete step 5; this is where the quick-and-dirty jobs are separated from the truly professional-looking ones.
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Background Notes
After you remove the photo’s background, you can choose Layer, Flatten Image to replace the transparent pixels with the background color. Or, if you prefer, you can drag the image into another photo to give it a new background.
No one’s proposing you start cranking out fake Rembrandts, but there’s something about brushstrokes on canvas that says high class. Try this with the family portrait and pretend you sat for a Dutch master.
With the Editor in Full Edit mode and an image open, choose Filter, Brush Strokes, Angled Strokes.
Adjust the Direction Balance, Stroke Length, and Sharpness sliders until you achieve a combination of settings you like.
When you see the desired effect in the Preview window, click OK.
Choose Filter, Texture, Texturizer.
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Tuning Your Strokes
The slider options in step 2 control the magnitude of the effect. You want to balance making the brushstrokes obvious enough to be seen, yet not so much as to obliterate fine detail in the picture.
From the Texture pop-up menu, choose Canvas.
Click OK.
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How Rough Is Your Canvas?
As with brushstrokes, you can adjust Texturizer options to control roughness and lighting on the canvas: Scaling, Relief, and Light Direction. The Invert option reverses light and dark effects.
Posterization became popular in the psychedelic movement of the 1960s as a way of making images seem more intense. Photoshop Elements includes a filter called Poster Edges to create this effect.
With the Editor in Full Edit mode and an image open, choose Filter, Artistic, Poster Edges.
Adjust the sliders for Edge Thickness, Edge Intensity, and Posterization until you like the look of the image.
Click OK.
Whether your drawings look like stick figures or you’re just in too big a hurry to sit down with your sketchpad, Photoshop Elements can make any photo look hand-drawn. For example, take a photo of the curbside view of your home, convert it to a sketch, and use it to illustrate personalized party invitations or stationery.
With the Editor in Full Edit mode and an image open, choose Filter, Sketch, Chalk & Charcoal.
Adjust the sliders for Charcoal Area, Chalk Area, and Stroke Pressure until the image looks right to you.
Click OK.
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Make It Snappy
Although level correction isn’t a required step, it’s applied to this example to darken the lines so that the result reproduces better in print.
Pointillism is a technique pioneered by French Impressionist painter Georges Seurat more than a century ago. His paintings are composed of thousands of tiny dots of bright colors—and the overall effect is apparent only when viewing the work from a distance. In a sense, he invented pixels, which are the building blocks of today’s computerized, digital images.
With the Editor in Full Edit mode and an image open, choose Filter, Pixelate, Pointillize.
Adjust the Cell Size slider to get the look you want.
Click OK.
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How Big Is a Cell?
Cell size in step 2 controls the size of the picture dots and the magnitude of the effect. You want it large enough to make the effect visible, small enough to preserve important picture details.
Who says photographs have to be square or rectangular? The sky’s the limit as far as the Photoshop Elements Cookie Cutter tool is concerned, so you can make the shape of the photo part of the message it communicates. Try them all!
With an image open in the Editor’s Full Edit mode, choose the Cookie Cutter tool from the toolbox.
Click to open the Shape pop-up menu, and then select a shape.
Click and drag in the document window to create the shape.
Click the Commit button to hide the parts of the image outside the shape.
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Cutting and Cropping
After you’ve applied the Cookie Cutter tool to your image, you might want to use the Crop tool to get rid of the extra empty space surrounding the new shape.
Using the Photoshop Elements new Smart Brush, you can apply special effects with a paint brush, putting them right where you want them and nowhere else. It’s a great tool for cleaning up snapshots with a minimum of fuss.
With an image open in the Editor’s Full Edit mode, click the Smart Brush tool.
Choose an effects category from the pop-up menu at the top of the Smart Paint palette.
Click an effect to apply.
Paint over the area to which you want to apply the effect.
NOTE
Layers on Layers
The Smart Brush adds adjustment layers to your image, combined with layer masks that determine where the adjustments are visible and where they’re hidden. To learn more about adjustment layers, flip back to “Adding an Adjustment Layer” in Part 6.
NOTE
Do It Now or Do It Later
You can return to a Smart Brush adjustment at any time to modify its settings. When you click the corresponding layer in the Layers palette, Photoshop Elements restores the Smart Brush selection.
To remove an area from the selection, click the Remove from Selection brush.
Paint over the area that shouldn’t have the effect.
To modify the settings, double-click the Pin in the image window or the layer’s thumbnail in the Layers palette.
Make your changes and click OK.
NOTE
It Takes All Kinds
The effects you can apply with the Smart Brush fall into several categories; some are “fixes”for common image problems, and others are special effects to jazz up your images. Be sure to explore all your options.
The Detail Smart Brush works the same way as the Smart Brush, only instead of helping you make your selection the way the Quick Selection tool does, it only goes where you put it, so you have more control. This tool is great for fixing up small areas where you need to make sure that the effect is applied exactly where you want it and nowhere else.
With an image open in the Editor’s Full Edit mode, click the Detail Smart Brush tool.
Choose an effects category from the pop-up menu at the top of the Smart Paint palette.
Click an effect to apply.
Paint over the area to which you want to apply the effect.
NOTE
Just Like Big Sister
The Detail Smart Brush can apply all the same effects as the Smart Brush; be sure to explore all the options in the Smart Paint palette.
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A Little of Both
The Detail Smart Brush works like a Painting tool; it has settings for brush size and shape in the options bar. But it also works like a Selection tool; you can click Refine Edge in the options bar to modify the selection’s shape and size.
To remove an area from the selection, click the Remove from Selection brush.
Paint over the area that shouldn’t have the effect.
To modify the settings, double-click the Pin in the image window.
Make your changes and click OK.
NOTE
Getting Back
To make changes to an existing Smart Paint effect, Ctrl-click or right-click its Pin to reactivate the selection. If a Pin is located inconveniently, you can click and drag to move it.