Soft Focus Portrait in Photoshop

Vanishing Point in Photoshop CS3

The Vanishing Point Filter in Photoshop lets you create perspective grids that you can drop an image into.

To do this, copy the image to paste into the grid into the clipboard and open or create the image to put it into. Add a new layer to this image, select it and choose Filter, Vanishing Point Filter.

Click the Create Plane Tool and click on the four corners of the grid. Move the points if necessary, you need a blue grid (if it’s yellow or red it isn’t correct and won’t work). Now, you can drag a second related plane by holding the Control key (Command on the Mac) and drag from a side to create a second pane. Don’t worry about the direction just that it’s at right angles to the existing pane. Let go the mouse. Hold the Alt key (Option on the Mac) and drag to align the pane, fine tune using the Angle value.

Now either continue to create planes or paste the image using Control + V (Command + V on the Mac). Select the Marquee tool and move it into position on the grid. Use the Transform tool to size it if desired. When you’re done, click Ok.

If you need to remove or delete the plane – for example to start over, click on it so it’s selected and press Backspace.

The Vanishing Point Filter is heaps of fun – use it to apply an image to a building, the side of a truck, or just in thin air!

Soft Focus Portrait in Photoshop

Portraits typically look much more flattering when they have a soft focus look. This is a fix that will give even a so-so portrait a lift. The colors in the image will be more muted and softer and more flattering to the subject. And, when you’re done, crop the final result very tightly to get that professional look.

Start by duplicating the background layer on the photo – choose Window, Layers to view the Layers palette, right click the background layer and choose Duplicate Layer and then Ok. Click the top layer and choose Filter, Noise, Median to smooth the image on this layer – choose a value of around 5 for the radius. Now apply a slight aging effect to this top layer by choosing Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation and reduce the saturation and use the Hue slider to create a slightly aged yellowing of this layer I set Saturation to -50 and Hue to -10 and click OK. Now experiment with the layer opacity of this top layer to vary the result – you want something softer than the original.

To finish, make a elliptical selection around the subject, invert the selection using Select, Inverse and add a feather using Select, Feather and add a large feather to the selection. Blur the result to soften the area around the subject and then crop the photo to size to finish.

Photoshop – Replace a sky

It seems to be one of those things that people are least satisfied with – the sky in their photos. It’s all too easy to shoot a wonderful image on a sunny day, there’s not a cloud in the sky and it’s blue, blue, blue. However, when you return home the sky in the photo you took is dingy blue white – yuck, yuck, yuck. It’s disappointing and it doesn’t have to happen.

If you’re shooting with a digital SLR invest in a polarizing lens and use it! It will make your skies deliciously blue. You can also get these lenses for many point and shoot cameras, I have an adapter and a polarizer on my Canon 3S IS and it all just snaps into place.

If all else fails, take a series if good photos of just sky when it’s not so bright and keep these in a “spare skies” folder. Then, when your sky isn’t all you want it to be, like my old car, you simply search out a spare part – replacement sky for it. To use it, visit my new Photoshop skies tutorial – don’t be fooled by the title, there’s a great 6 step by step solution at the foot of the page.

4 Bridges – Paris

This photo was taken during a trip on the Seine on a boat. The circumstances were about the worst you could imagine for photography. Four hundred people jammed into a boat which was enclosed mostly by glass and steaming into the sun on a very smoggy Paris afternoon. Great.. the temptation was to put the camera away and start drinking – the effort of trying to take any photo at all was almost too much. My only clear view was out the side of the boat, past a very active four year old and her long suffering mother. It wasn’t my ideal “boat ride for taking photos”, but it came included in the Paris Pass and who knew it would be this horrible?

Like the intrepid photographer I am, however, I persisted and I did get some usable photos, albeit ones that required a bit of help. Like this one taken out the front of the boat through about half an inch of scratched Perspex.

It is a view through four of the wonderful Paris bridges that we sailed through. The photo needed a lot of work. I gave the sky a miss – it just wasn’t there and, in the final analysis, I think the image is all the better for it not even being there. The biggest challenge was to extract some of the usable color and detail from the original image. It was autumn in Paris so there were hints of golden trees in the image which deserved to be brought out and the bridges were what it was all about. The mere fact that you could see all four bridges was spectacular.

I started the work by straightening the image – I find I can’t work on an image until I have it straight, it just bothers my eye when it’s out of square. To do this, I use the Photoshop Ruler tool to draw a line along the horizon or a vertical object that needs to be perpendicular. Then I choose Image, Rotate Canvas, Arbitrary. The exact angle from the Ruler is already there so all you have to do is click Ok. It’s simple and effective. For this image I used the top of the bridge as a ‘horizon’.

A few tricks with Levels and curves and the image gave up its magic and turned into what you see here. It’s one of my favourite shots – so far.

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