Photo Editing - Layer Adjustments1

You will need this photo to compelte this tutorial. *

1. Open the lily photograph. The photograph appears sideways. The top opf the lily plant is on the left of the image. We will want to correct this first. For this project I want the stamens inside the flower to point from upper left to lower right. Since they are almost horizontal, I need to rotate image half of the 90 degrees to make this happen. Press your D key to reset your palette.

Click Image=> Rotate image=> Arbitrary.

Select Clockwise(CW) and type in 40 degrees.

2. We are going to select out the center of the flower in a specific ratio that is similar to the standard photo dimension or 450X600. Select your rectangular marquee from your tool box. Set the rectangular marquee to the following:

• Feather = 0
• Fixed Aspect Ration
• Width = 45
• Height = 60

Select the center of the flower starting just above and to the right of the center. Drag your marquee ebelow and to the right of where the stamens are.

3. Click your image menu and select Crop. Click Select=> Deselect.

4. Double click your hand tool on your toolbox to fit to screen.

5. If I were going to make the adjustments to the layer using image=> adjust, I would do that first prior to sharpening. But since I am going to make the adjustments as a separate layer adjustment, I will sharpen first. Click Filter=> Sharpen=> Unsharp mask. Select the default settings as they are subtle yet effective, as follows:

• Amount = 50%
• Radius = 1.8 pixels
• Threshold = 0 levels.

6. Click the adjustment icon at the bottom of the layers panel. It looks like a half white, half black moon. Sleect levels from the adjustments.

The levels will appear weighted towards the dark. Grab the white slider and drag it to the left (larger red arrow in picture) until the white level sis set at about 193.

When you move the white to the left, you are also moving the center tone towards the left, making the overall image lighter then it should be.

Drag the center slider right to about 0.82(smaller red arrow in picture). Click ok.

7. This has washed out the white petals at the top of this image. We will adjust the mask on the levels layer. Click on the mask on the levels layer so it is active.

Hit your X key to reverse your colors. This way for a mask you have black on top white underneath.

Select your brush and set to 200 pixel SOFT brush. Paint black on the levels mask over the bleached out white portion at the top. This will nullify the levels for just this area.

8. The White at the top is still washed out Right click on the mask and select "set selection to mask"

Click Select=> select inverse. This will set the selection to the upper part of the image, where the white petals are above the center.

9. .Click the layer adjustment button the bottom of the layers panel again and select levels. on the levels slider, drag the black slider to the right so that the value is about 50. Click ok.

10. Click on the background layer. Grab this layer and drag it ontop of the new layer button to duplicate this layer. On the background copy, set the mode to vivid light. The vivid light is way to harsh yet if we tone it down we can give the petals the look of translucency. Drag the Opacity slider down till you like what you see. I put mine between 8 and 15 %.

11. Save this file as lily.psd to maintain your editable file. To save your compressed jpg image and maintain your photo EXIF data, you must save using file=> save as. select JPG as file type and set the compression to ~30 for web, 100 for other. If you save for the web, the EXIF data does not go with the file.

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