thefrogman.me

Frogman TV - From Duck to Fridge: A Photoshop Journey

This video shows the process of fleshing out an idea from start to finish in photoshop. A simple parody of a kid’s drawing evolves into a complex multi-layer composition.

Also, adorable duck music. 

[YouTube version]

(I was asked if I could make this post “rebloggable” …so I did. Enjoy!)

When working with old photos that have faded and discolored, being able to read a histogram can come in handy. Here is an old photo that had become red and faded. 

If you go into Image > Adjustments > Levels you will see a histogram that looks like this. 

The left side indicates the blacks. The middle indicates the grays. The right indicates the whites. Now this histogram looks somewhat normal. The black slider should be near the edge of the first peak. The white slider should be near the edge of the last peak. But for some reason this photo doesn’t look right. Therefore we must go deeper. 

In the channel menu you have the choice of viewing the levels of all colors (RGB) or individual colors. Red, green, and blue. Let’s see what is going on in the red level histogram.

As you can see, the black slider is very far away from the edge of the first peak. That is what is causing such a dramatic red shift in the picture. So, we need to move the black slider to the edge of that peak and that should take care of most of the issue.

And then the picture looks like this.

Let’s look at the blue. 

Here you can see that the white slider is far from the edge of the last peak. Move that towards the peak and the whites will lose their blue tint. 

And the green. 

Both the black and the white sliders need to be adjusted. 

Finally, you should go back to the RGB channel and make your final adjustments. This is all a matter of taste. Do you like your images to have a heavy contrast? Move the black and white sliders in to your liking. Keep in mind that the further in you go, the more detail you lose. That’s where the middle slider… the gray slider… can come in handy. By moving it one way or another you can bring detail back into the picture. Remember that at this point these should all be minor adjustments. 

When you are done, just by changing the levels, you have really made a dramatic improvement on your image. 

Some other tips…

If your image is a bit blurry, try Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. This can bring back some detail, but it can also cause noise. Try to find a spot in between. 

Are there any small imperfections in the scan? Maybe a tear, a dust speck, or a fingerprint? Maybe you had a giant zit or blemish. Try the healing brush tool. Make the brush size slightly larger than the area you wish to fix, click once, and most of the time it will just disappear. 

Those are the best tips I can think of late on a Friday night. I hope they helped. 

A professional quality photoshop creation can easily be taken for granted. Not many folks think about all that goes into making something like my “Worfeus.” It is made up of 20 layers and took about 3 hours to complete. Above I have separated all the elements so you can see all the components that make up the final image. They look messy on their own, but when blended together they make a seamless image. Photoshopping is mostly about problem solving. Some problems I encountered during this were…

• Worf’s skin tone and lighting did not match Morpheus’s hands.
• Worf’s hand did not line up perfectly with the phaser rifle
• Worf’s metal sash was not long enough to cover the space needed.
• Morpheus’s coat was cropped further in than the end of the phaser rifle
• The black Lt. Commander pip would not show against the shirt

It took a lot of creative problem solving to address these issues. The trick to photoshop is figuring out the best tools and techniques to solve them. Usually there is always a solution, even if you don’t know about it.

To fix the tone and lighting I had to do some major tweaking. To get the lighting corrected, I used mainly the levels tool. I had to wash out his face and make it seem like it had a bright white light shining on it. Then I had to do a colorize with Hue/Saturation to get Worf’s skin tone to match Morpheus’s hands. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a perfect match, so I tweaked Morpheus’s hands too. Since I could not make one look like the other…I adjusted them both so they met in the middle.

To align Morpheus’s hand with the phaser rifle I basically had to slice his hand to shreds and adjust angles and rotate things. I had to extend his palm at the bottom by just copying and moving it down into view.

To extend the metal sash so it was long enough, I made a copy of it, flipped it horizontally and vertically, and then lined up my copy at the bottom of the original. Luckily since it had a standard pattern I could do this without any seam.

To extend the coat leftward I copied a section of the existing coat and moved it down and over to match the angle of the coat. I used the smear tool to disguise the seam and blend the two pieces together.

It’s often the little things that are the most frustrating. The black pip would just not show up against the purple shirt. I tried brightening it, adjusting the levels, adjusting the contrast, adding a drop shadow. Nothing worked. Finally I just took one of the gold pips, copied it, and hand painted a black dot in the middle.

And that’s how it’s done. If you read this, hopefully you’ll have a better appreciation for all that graphic artists do. You see graphics everywhere. On websites, TV shows, billboards, flyers, books. They all have to go through similar processes as above to get the job done and it is rarely pretty underneath the finished image.