Grex Graphics Conference

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Grex Graphics Item 6: A cure for a boring sky
Entered by jshafer on Thu Aug 5 06:12:16 UTC 1999:

I just got a new scanner, and was looking through my pile o' pictures
to find something to scan and play with. I ran across this picure of a barn:

I really like the barn, but must admit it's an incredibly boring photo. The sky
is almost completely flat, and the colors are pretty bland. So I dug a bit more,
and found this sky picture:

I created a blank image in Photoshop, loaded each image into its own layer,
and proceded to play. First I selected the sky in the barn layer and deleted it.
(I know there's got to be a better way to go to do a mask, but this worked.)
I played with the edges, touched up a spot or two on the print, and merged
the layers. A quick border and a sepia tone, produced this:

5 responses total.

#1 of 5 by jshafer on Thu Aug 5 06:13:26 1999:

(This same item is available at http://malthus.net/grexgraphics/barn/ )

#2 of 5 by drewmike on Thu Aug 5 12:57:20 1999:

Nice... but my eye was immediately drawn to the light frings on the left 
side of the barn and the two buildings in the background. Would a 
different compositing mode have worked?

(flying totally off the top of my head here)
The sky seems flat and light enough that you might not have had to 
delete it. Maybe if you put the sky on a layer over it, set the mode to 
Multiply, and removed the appropriate portions of the sky? Maybe with a 
layer mask so that anything you "removed" would be recover

#3 of 5 by drewmike on Thu Aug 5 12:58:02 1999:

(now why does it always cut off the last couplefew characters every time 
I use Backtalk?

#4 of 5 by jshafer on Thu Aug 5 23:14:15 1999:

You're right about the light spot there.  I still haven't figured out 
the finer points of masking...  I plan on having another go at this 
picture in two or three weeks, so any suggestions you have are most 
welcome.

#5 of 5 by drewmike on Sun Aug 8 03:37:27 1999:

Here's an example of some compositing I did with a layer mask:
http://www.itd.umich.edu/umtv
 
(The site auto-updates. After this Thursday that graphic won't be on the page
anymore, but will still be at .../umtv/990807.jpg)
 
I took the video grab of Mike Wallace, and in the layer palette I dragged the
"Background" layer onto the icon of a new layer, crating a duplicate layer
on top. Then I created a layer mask, and in that layer, erased all of the
background. The nice thing about the layer mask is that if you make a mistake,
you can just paint the original back on and try again.
 
With the soft-edged cutout of Mike on top, I created a new layer and put it
in between. I then placed the EPS of the UM logo into that layer.
 
The original file has a pool of blue light in the background on the left side,
so that's where I positioned the blue logo. I adjusted the opacity and, if
memory serves, composited that layer as either Hard Light or Soft Light. 
 
Then I used Distort to put proper perspective on it and added a little
Gaussian Blur so that it was about as sharp as the gold lattice on the right.
 
Oh, and I worked on this file at larger-than-final resolution. My video
captures are at 720 x 480. Resizing to compensate for the non-square pixels
gives me 640 x 480, which is the size I worked with. Only when I was finished
did I crop and downsample to 365 x 250.

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