Making Blend and Blur Effects

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Making Blend and Blur Effects

By Worth1000

Adjusting values and hue: Hoaxing difficult photos

Well, it’s been a painfully long time since I wrote a tutorial, and I’ve been extremely busy as of late, but I figured I would try to come up with a different angle for something which I hold near and dear to my heart: Hoaxing.

One of the best reactions you can get as a chopper are the words “Is that photoshopped, or is that a real picture?” As you are all aware, making something look like it’s part of a picture it’s been inserted into is far from easy. When it all comes together it makes your heart sing, and you go back for a second look. (Ah, who am I kidding? I go back for about 20 looks, after showing all my friends and relatives. They all hate me now, my chops are now receiving the same treatment as vacation slides…everyone runs!)

So, I thought I’d do a step by step for a project I’m currently working on, putting an individual in a suit (full color) into a tinted photograph, and making it look as realistic as possible. (Or, as realistic as time will allow.)

Here are the pictures:

Is he insane?

Ok, so the pictures are pretty different, I'll grant you. Still, we'll try our best.

Ok, first step is to cut and paste, and then free transform. Grab your subject with the lasso (rough is fine, don’t try to trace him exactly) and paste into the image. Resize using Free Transform (Control-T) and make sure you have the ‘constrain proportions’ button on when you’re resizing him to the size you want. There’s nothing worse than seeing a pasted element that was reduced 20% in one dimension but 40% in the other. You don’t want that, unless you’re trying to hoax someone into the final credits of an old James Bond movie. You know, the ones where they squish the entire movie screen into television format and everyone looks really really tall?

Errr….never mind.

So, I’ve pasted, and resized, and here’s what I’m left with:

Errrrr….uhhhhh….yuck. This is a travesty, right? Would get flagged within seconds if I entered it as is. Let’s fix it up, shall we?

I dunno about this...

The first thing I’m considering is whether to put him in the foreground or background as far as the principal is concerned. I’m thinking background, not only because there is a much better visual dynamic that way, but because it conveys an appropriate sense of menace for what I want here. The gangster looking guy standing behind someone while looking scary is just one of those scenes that happens in movies all the time. So, let’s do that.

That decided, we’ve obviously got to get rid of some of this guy. To his credit (and he has my everlasting thanks) arsidubu’s tutorial regarding how to use layer masks is great, and it finally made an impression on me. I now can’t imagine using anything else. So, instead of re-explaining it here, go read it so that you understand how layer masks work and then assume that I used them. We’ll remove the areas of the gangster that should be behind the principal, and we’ll get rid of that nasty cut and paste halo while we’re at it.

There. Much better! Well….not really, it’s still a travesty. But, we’re not done yet! On to step 3!

So we’re attempting to put this really bright and colorful fellow into a tinted photo, monochromatic. I guess we won’t be needing all that color right now, just the tones. A quick desaturation of the layer he’s on, and poof:

Next, we’re going to try to match the tint of the photograph as closely as possible. Yes, it would be easier to desaturate the entire thing and then tint it using photoshop, but sometimes you won’t have the option. The whole point is you need to find a way to make the pasted element look like it’s part of the existing photo.

So, what we’ll use instead of the cheap quick ‘n dirty method of Flatten – Desat – Run Adobe Sepia Filter, is something which has saved more chops than I can count. ‘Blend Mode’. Specifically, we’re going to start by using the ‘Color’ blend mode on a new layer and see where that takes us. So, we’ll start by simply creating a new layer on top of everything.

Now what I’ve done to this blank layer is I’ve changed the properties associated with it. It is no longer simply a layer I can put stuff on, but it actually changes and interacts with the characteristics of the layers below it. Changing a layer’s Blend Mode results in layers where you can make specific changes to a portion of your image without actually modifying your original image layers. This is extremely handy, especially when you’ve spent 30 minutes trying to tweak your image, you give it up as a bad job, and you decide you want to start over with how it looked 30 minutes ago. The action history in Photoshop 7 is big, but not so big that it keeps track of every stroke of your stylus for 30 minutes at a time. Some changes you just can’t ‘undo’.

Looking better...

Ok, we’ve got the new layer, and it’s Blend Mode is set to color. What I guess I’ll try to do is sample some of the colors from the original image and paint them onto the new layer. What the ‘color’ layer does then is take whatever color you’re painting with and adjusts the color of everything below what you touch your pen to. So, we’ll use a medium brush, fairly fuzzy, and paint away.

Wow, that helped tons, didn’t it? He’s only about 1/3rd of the travesty that he was. He still looks out of place, but at least the reason for that isn’t color.

What I ended up doing was grabbing a patch of color on the ceiling and painting over him completely. Then, because the color was too vibrant on the skin tones (the color layer doesn’t compensate for it, all it knows how to do is color) I sampled the skin tone of the principal in an area where he was gray-ish. If you mix gray with the color you’re using, the effect is the same but the overall saturation is lower. This was what I wanted, and it looks like it worked. You can have the sampled color as dark or as light as you want, it doesn’t matter. This layer will not affect the tone of your image whatsoever, only the color associated with it. All tonal values stay the same.

Next, we have to do something about the light/dark contrasting problem, because he’s both a little too dark and a little too light. I don’t want to do anything with Levels or Brightness Contrast though. Why not? Well, I want to show you just how versatile Blend Mode is….plus, I already tried adjusting the blacks to a lighter shade, and they turned pinkish magenta. Reeeeeal ugly. Complete 70’s puke-o-rama, I’m not even kidding here.

So, we’re gonna make another layer and tinker with Blend Mode, and this one’s going on top of the first one. This time we’re going to set it to ‘Lighten’

Not bad...

So, we’ve got the ‘Lighten’ layer happening. What I think I’ll do is sample the darkest thing I can see in the Principal picture, and that will be ‘black’. When you paint on the ‘Lighten’ layer, it does the same thing as the Color layer, except (gasp!) it lightens things! Yes…not just that, but it lightens those things by changing the tone and color of those things based on the color you’re painting with. If I were to paint with light blue, then everything darker than that shade of blue would be painted blue. Anything that was equal to or lighter than that shade of blue would remain unchanged. This is hugely advantageous, because it means that we don’t have to be extremely precise when applying the paint, we just have to smear it over all those areas we want to lighten. In this case, we want to lighten all of the darks on the gangster guy. I’ll paint over his suit, glasses, hands, and everything…and I’ll use a big brush to make sure I’ve got all those areas covered properly.

As you can see, we’ve taken the darkest areas of the gangster and changed their shade/coloring to that of the darkest elements in the photo. So while the tone is lighter than it was before, as far as the picture is concerned he’s still wearing black. Black is always relative within the picture itself…there’s nothing more disheartening than seeing that someone has put a fantastic chop together, but the ‘blacks’ on the inserted image are way darker than anything else in the photo. It usually only takes a few minutes to touch them up, but those few minutes make a huge difference.

Next we’ll do the same for those areas that are too light. I wonder what I could use to fix that…

What? Use a “Darken” layer? Why…that’s brilliant! And it’s just wacky enough, it might even work!

Just a little more

Ok, so I did a little something you couldn’t see. I grabbed a sample of the white shirt on the Principal and used that as my ‘darken’ color, painting over all of the highest contrast white sections on the ganster I wanted to blend. What I also did was grabbed a slightly darker version of ‘white’ off of the same shirt, and painted it on the left hand side of him. Why? Well, if you look at the light source for Principal’s face, it’s coming from the right. We’re going to have to emulate that kind of shadow, and soon…we may as well start now.

So the darks are light enough, and the lights are dark enough. We’ve got color matched, more or less, the size is ok. We need shadows on the face. Here’s where we get sneaky.

One of the common ways of doing this is using the Burn tool. Don’t. Please…when doing close-ups of faces or other object in the picture, just don’t do it. When using it on large areas of skin or when trying to apply it evenly over a large section, it just can’t help but look like a Burn tool mark trying to look like shadow. That’s not what you want. Small areas, minor fixes, by all means….it’s a wonderful tool for that. But changing the lighting on someone from front/top to front/side? Just say no.

What we’ll do is we’ll take our original gangster guy and duplicate the layer he’s on. We’re gonna turn HIM into a ‘Darken’ layer. (Oh…izzat so now? Howz about, I turn YOU into a ‘darken’ layer? Huh? Would you like that? Do I amuse you?)

Hey hey, calm down Guido. This won’t hurt a bit…

Done.

Ok, layer is duplicated. We’re going to go into Image – Adjust – Layers for this one. We’ve got all the differently blended layers above it taking care of the lights and darks, but what we need to do is take the entire image of this guy and make him darker, mid-tones especially. We’re essentially trying to make him look like he’s entirely covered in shadow, because shadow is what we’re trying to create. Once he’s dark enough, change the layer to ‘Darken’ as well. There should be no change in the tones of what you see when you make this change, but we want to make sure that this layer will only be making things darker, and that we’re free to make any adjustments we want without fear of screwing up the lights or mid-tones that are already there and working. If when tinkering with levels we made part of him brighter by accident, it will not show up.

Once the entire new gangster layer is darkened, use the mask that is already there from the first one (yes, duplicate layer does duplicate the entire layer, masks, properties, and all) to erase the half of him closest to the window, showing the light copy of him underneath. You’re essentially ‘drawing on’ light, but not using any destructive tools like Burn or Dodge. This way, you’re taking all of the subtle nuances of tone and making them all brighter or all darker the same amount. Much more realistic. There are better ways, but this works fine.

So, use your artistic eye and erase the dark in just the right areas. You may notice that erasing in a certain area does nothing. Well, that just means that the different blended layers above the layer you’re working on are doing their job. You can’t see everything that’s darker about the image because you have the ‘lighten’ layer doing its thing up above it, and same with the ‘darken’ layer. So, just erase where you think light should be, and don’t worry about the lack of effect.

As it turns out, we got much of the effect we were looking for with a few quick strokes.

The only remaining details involve your standard hoaxing stuff. Blur where it looks like you should blur, or if there’s a blur effect over the entire image use the blur filter and balance it with the Edit – Fade Blur command. But aside from a couple of minor corrections, we’re looking at finished product. Nothing terribly wrong with it at first glance, fairly passible.

There are other Blend Modes you can use, and I use them all. I’d show them to you, but it’s getting late, and I’ve got some more chopping to do.

Ah, who am I kidding? I’m going to bed. I’m getting old… ;-)

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