Week 5 Panorama

before the digital image era I owned a panorama camera : an Hasselblad XPAN that was shooting wide pictures on a standard 135 film. Images like that:

So when I got my first digital camera before the DSLRs I wanted to do panoramas. For example I did this one from 5 images I took in the Swiss Alps with one of the early NIKON digital cameras (around 1990)

The reason it is special for me is that I did it completely manually! there was no panorama tools widely available so I spent a week of my free time to distort, scale rotate and match the colors!

Fast forward to 2013. I am now using either Photoshop or Panotools to stitch images. I shoot the images with the camera on a tripod with a rotating head and a rail to put the optical center above the center of rotation to avoid parallax problems in the overlapped areas. 

Few months ago I spent a week end in Las Vegas and took a day trip to the Grand Canyon. it was raining and snowing and freezing but there was 15 minutes with sun and I could shoot a serie of 7 pictures. I merged them with Photoshop and did the usual enhancement work on the resulting image. In particular I removed the shadow I projected on the left rock and I removed the metal safeguard on the right

Week 4 Movie Poster : The Queen of Night

For this assignment I imagined a movie based on part of the "Magic Flute" story and the opposition between the Queen of Night and the Sorcerer Sarustro. I found a nice portrait on the web from Kalipso studio photo

I cropped it and extended the left part with a black background, transformed it into a 1980x1080 picture and added some blue using duotone to have my base illustration

I then added the text. Two secondary titles are just white over the background. But for the main title I wanted something bolder I used a very thick font with a very big font size and I created the outline of the characters by rasterizing the text, then selecting the characters, contracting the section and using it as a mask to remove the core of the letters. I changed the size of the character, the horizontal and vertical pitch to almost cover 100% of the text area with characters. I positioned the texts to keep the eyes free to give more strength to the composition. Here is the final image.

Week 4 : With Liquify buy one Model get two free

For this assignment using liquify, there was no additional guidelines, so I decided to work on a simple portrait found on the web.

I decided to try to use liquify and the usual retouch tools to transform the original model into another one. First I changed the race. beyond the obvious change on skin color I liquified the nose and the mouth. I then added some breast and made the model more athletic by creating higher and wider shoulders

Then I changed the gender. I liquified the nose and the mouth again, removed the breast and created a higher chest, larger arms, I extended the neck by moving the head and healing the result with the clone stamp. I liquified the sides of the face to create strong jaws that I emphasized with shadows on the cheeks and created a masculine chin. I then grew the eyebrows, reduced the eyes and added texture to the skin. I could not let the poor guy with the flowery tank top so I created a black T-shirt

Week 4 Lab : Illustrating a Poem

here is the Poem:

Beginning
BY JAMES WRIGHT

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moons young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

I decided to focus on "Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow Of her face". I first took a forest image from Jeff and to use it as my set

the first thing was to correct the image, straighten it and give it a 16/9 aspect ratio. I used the perspective tool to straiten the trees and then the warp tool because the trees on the side of the image had become arched.

I wanted to integrate a moon in the picture so I created a hole using the eraser with a random dots brush to create a believable opening. I then integrated the moon. I chose a picture I had taken few years back

The only thing I did here is to desaturate a little bit that layer as I was beginning to work on the overall lighting of the scene. I wanted to integrate my woman character on the left of the picture. after trying different options I went for a close up dynamic portrait.

As expected selecting the face and the hair was a challenge. after multiple trials and errors I found an approach that worked well. using the quick selection tool I selected the face and the compact part of the hair. then I invert the selection and selected the rest of the hair with a color range on the red colors. I finished with manual repairs

the last element I wanted to integrate was the narrator. I imagine him half hiding behind a tree. I found this image and the selection was straight forward

I then integrated the elements in a picture and worked on the lighting. to recreate the monlight effect I first desaturated the yellow channel on all the elements, selected the highlight with color range on the forest and dramatically reduced the brightness, then I added a cool filter on the forest layer. I added shadows to the face to better match with the position of the moonlight and to create the idea that the face is the only part in the light thus "lifting up the shadow". Few additional corrections of the sharpness of the object were added so the scene is not too heterogeneous.

the last element added was the sentence chosen as the reference from the poem. here is the result

Week 3 Part 2 : Color Remapping

The assignment is to remap the colors of a picture using a matching palette. I chose a simple flower image to start from.

Then I chose a palette to use to correct the colors. I decided to use the assignment to mimic a picture that would look like the ones in the early color printed magazine. to achieve the effect I chose a Palette with 3 colors close to the 3 colors in the original image but far more saturated to mimic the limited dynamic early color films and printing process had. that palette has both the green of the leaves, the purple of the flowers and I chose to use the orange for the leaves that are brownish in the original picture. I would use the other green as a color for a fine border

For this image I mainly used the quick selection tool to select my 3 main zones to correct and added 2 pixels of expand and 2 pixels of feather so that the transitions are smooth. inside the selections I used the replace color tool to apply the color scheme. I then used the color half tone filter to simulate the magazine printing technique, and added a border with the fourth color as planned.

Week 3 Lab : Duotone

I tried first this technique with a picture I took in Napa during the fall:

I changed the mode first to gray tones and then to duotone with a green as the other ink

I do not like the result. I think to have a good result there is a need for more overall contrast and less local value changes. I looked back for another picture and found one from the eiffel tower taken with my Haselblad (on film! I miss the Blad lens quality...).

As the base image is already in gray tones I just had to transform it in duotone. I chose a red brownish color that looks like old rusty metal. I like this one far better.

Week 3 Part 1: Extreme Makeover : Sunset in Montana and Stable in Saratoga

This picture was shot by one of my friend in montana:

As the assignment states "all I want you to do is find one photo that needs correcting ", I think this image fits the description. So I asked for the RAW image and I corrected it. On an image that is so extreme what I begin to do is some kind of tone-mapping using a technique I call auto HDR. instead of doing HDR with multiple pictures with different exposure, I create multiple Jpeg copies of the same image after changing the exposure in the RAW editor. for this image I did not want the HDR to be an "effect" but just a rescue tool so I tried not to over do it. before doing the color and contrast correction I had to reduce the color noise in the picture to remove those random colored pixels. I then used a combination of curves, hue/saturation, on selected area some time on a separate layer with a mask to reach the interpretation I had in mind. I then made sure that the color system was consistent for example the color of the snow compared to the maximum light of the sky or the purple haze on the mountain as a complementary color of the sky color ( as the shadow is not black but the complementary of the light ). Finally few small touches like boosting the red boat or adding some sharpness. It was more work than expected, but the result shows that even when we think that a picture is lost there is still a lot of information left in the pixels. Here is the finished product.

I found another one (from the same photographer) but this time completely overexposed:

I did the same but pushed more the HDR on the "effect" side because I think it works well with the old wood and the spot light inside of the stable. I had to correct the perspective and crop a little on this one.

I spent more time on the color and the halo of the light inside as I wanted it to become a stronger part of the composition