Photo Fixing 2

Never mind composition at this point. I know that the butterfly is centered and looking out of the frame. I cropped it for the sake of easy-loading on this page.

When you first look at a photo, you see its beauty — the whole reason that you shot the image. You remember the day, the sounds and the smells. But your viewer just gets a photo.

You can spend hours and hours with your $5000 camera in the field, waiting for the right light, on your belly, having slogged through ice fields to get there.. only to end up with an image that falls flat with your viewers. So, in the end, all that matters is the image.

So, once you have your photo, you need to look at it as your viewer will. Find what’s not great and fix it! That’s where Photoshop comes in.

As we work through this bit of photo fixing, we’ll work with these techniques and concepts:

• Looking at and critiquing a photo
• Using a Levels Adjustment Layer
• Using a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer
• Using Masking on an Adjustment Layer
• Painting away imperfections

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And that’s certainly true for photo-retouching. If you like it, sixteen other people will look at it and find something wrong. So do what feels right for you.

So what am I seeing wrong with this butterfly?

• Background is too light
• Blue cast to the photo
• Some distracting overblown (white) grass blades

Let’s start by fixing that color cast. Click the New Adjustment Layer button at the bottom of the Layers palette. You’ll see a dialog box like mine at the left.

Scoot those sliders till you like the look of your colors. I moved the Yellow-Blue slider over toward yellow, the Cyan-Red over a bit toward Red, and left the Magenta-Green alone.

This leaves us with the image at the right. I’m thinking that the background is too light and the butterfly too dark. I want him to “pop” more. Let’s try a Levels Adjustment layer.

In this Levels Adjustment, I’m messing with just the top sliders. I moved the dark slider a bit left and the center one left. This gave me a more contrasted background, as you see just below.

I want to lighten the butterfly, though! He’s all in shadow. So let’s click the Mask on the Adjustment Layer in the Layers palette. It’s the white square.

I want to fill the butterfly with black on the mask, so that the Adjustment will not apply to him.

The Select Object tool did a fine job of isolating my butterfly.

So it’s looking pretty good. I don’t like just how dark the image is behind the butterfly, or maybe the background is too light elsewhere. But, for now, I am not liking the white strips of grass in the upper left of the butterfly and just below him. I’ll just paint those.

• Make a new layer.
• Zoom in, choose a small hard brush and use several shades of the greens that are in the image. While you have a Brush active, holding Alt turns your pointer to the Eyedropper, and will let your sample from your image.
• After you’ve applied some color and it looks pretty awful, (see left) Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

In the upper left, I still have that vexing light. Since it’s actually white, I can’t darken it down, but I can add some more background pixels, using the Clone Stamp.

In A, this is the area before I did anything. Notice the cottony white blobs.

In B, I’ve used Clone Stamp tool to randomly put some color into these white blobby areas. This looks pretty terrible.

In C, I’ve used Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur on this layer.

I ended up painting and blurring a little bit more of the white grass. And I added another Levels layer to darken down just the upper left part of the image. Above is what the mask painting looked like on that Levels Adjustment layer.