Photography Tips and Tricks

Sometimes you just want to do something special with a photo. Combining Photoshop skills and digital photography skills can produce a really nice piece of art that you can share with family and friends. Here is how to create your own amazing piece of art.

Photo Rights

Because of copyright issues, never use other people’s photos for your art. It violates the photo owner’s copyright. Plus, you would also be using something that you didn’t create. Your art wouldn’t be totally yours if you used someone else’s work, and you wouldn’t have bragging rights. You want to be able to brag that the art’s 100% yours, right?

Getting Started

Let’s get started creating your photo collage with Photoshop.

First, open a new workspace. Make the workspace the dimensions of the size of the artwork you want to create.

Next, pick a picture. For our example collage, I picked a picture of my oldest daughter. It isn’t a very good photo, but it has possibilities. To pick your picture, imagine what it might look like if you put it in a different setting and combined it with other pictures and objects.

After choosing your photo, you want to get rid of extras. As you can see here, I faded the edges of the cropped image. The lasso tool can be a big help in isolating certain things in a photo that you would like to work with.

Then, I made the photo somewhat opaque with my photo editor. This made to work better with the other objects and the overall look.

Adding Detail

Here, you see that I basically laid in some colors around the photo. Use your imagination! Add colors, combine photos, or change the colors of the photo. As you can see here, I started painting over the picture. Then, I started adding details to the painting around it. I added deep shadows to the chin area, added more color and shadow to the hair, etc. Each step is a different layer, that way if I don’t like something I can go back and change it or delete it.

This step looks very different from the original photo. There’s a lot more detail to the background and the reflection in the water was added since the last step. I added the reflection by using the cloning tool and a very wide brush.

This is my finished collage. By now the photo should look less like a photo stuck on a canvas and more like piece of art.

Here is another example of a photo collage that was done by my good friend Gary Edgemon.

So, go sort through your photos and turn them into something you can be proud of!

Sometimes you’ll look at a photo and think, “Gee, I wish I could tweak this photo, and then it would be perfect.” With Photoshop or similar photo editing software you can change anything you want in a photo. Here are the basics to making your photo perfect.

Skin Imperfections

Pimples. Zits. Bruises. Scars. No matter what the skin problem, they can all be removed with Photoshop in just seconds. Your subject can have the flawless skin of a movie star and no one has to know it wasn’t natural.

 Simply select the cloning tool from the toolbox. Now, at 100% opacity, pick a place of origin that is close to the imperfection, but is perfect looking. Choose a brush that will work best for the size of the imperfection. Cover the imperfection with the cloned skin.

Take a look at the example. The little girl has beautiful, perfect skin…except for the circles under her eyes. The cloning tool was used to select the peachy colored skin of her cheeks and the cloning tool covered the circles with a medium sized brush. The second photo shows the perfect skinned results.

The place of origin may have to be changed to different spots if you are covering a big area. Also, if your edges seem not to blend very well, take opacity down to 50%.

Extra Objects

Have you ever taken a photo and then realized there was a really ugly object in an otherwise perfect picture? Here is how to zap that object.

With the eyedropper, select a color that is right by the object. Then, with a paintbrush, paint over the object.  This technique works really well to blot out aircraft, power lines, and radio towers in landscape photos.

If this looks a bit odd, take the cloning tool and match the area to its background with the technique used for perfecting skin, above.

Redeye

Who hasn’t had a photo ruined by red spots on their subject’s eyes? There is a simple solution, though. Just select a very small round paintbrush and black paint in Photoshop. Magnify the photo until the eyes are quite large. Now, set the opacity to 50% and cover the red. Presto! No more redeye!

With Photoshop there’s no reason to trash a photo ever again. Just practice these tips and you will have fantastic photos every time.