Lesson 5 Channel Masking

Here is the final composite using channel mask.


This is the original image shot by my niece Lily, I love this photo of my daughter with her two big front teeth missing. I actually like the original photo, the only reason I put it onto a different background is for this class to practice channel amsking. I learned quite a lot, as I never used channel masking before. I like the textbook mentioning mixing the red and green channel together which generate a new channel. Then I used offset of -100, to get better contrast. I use this photo for practice is the hair is kind of messy because of the wind gust at the beach. It would be very difficulty to use other selection tools.


After the channel masking (I used a variety size of brushing tools to paint around the hair, the black white screenshot of the channel mask is the best I can do. When i load the selection, some of the sky still come out. I used the background eraser tool to clear the edges, which does magic job.

For final touch I did color match just slightly tone done the color. I used clipping mask to generate the watermark (added dropshadow).

Leeson 4 Colorizing and Color Theme Composite

Here is the before and after photos of coloring, the original photo was black and white, shot by my niece lily of her friend. Although the it was a great pose, the original photo was a little out of focus and to dark.


I used unsharpen mask to sharped it which got great results. I also brighten up the image about 20%. I used the gradient map qudratone supreme from the book and it turn out surprisingly well.


For color theme, I chose one of the photos of lily and my kids, the original photo was shot in front of a bush in the fall, it was a great photo with the kids smiling so naturally and just the background needs to be changed. I found this a daisy blooming in spring photo from fotolia and brought it.


I used polygonal lasso tool lasso out the rough outline of the kids and then use the background eraser tool (chose a soft brush ) cleaned the edge. I adjusted the brightnes and contrast a little and also use the clone stamp and healing patch tool to get rid of lily's bracelet on her teeth also brightened her teeth a little.

Homework 3 Duotone Guess What Are the Stuff in the Front?!

Hi, Everyone: Happy PhotoShopping!!

Here are the two original photos I bought from Fotolia, yes for this homework I did spend quite a few bucks and quite a few hours. Hope you can tell what are the stuff in the front, you know the rectangle stuff in the front. I can NOT tell what they are if I did not done it myslef :-)





Here is how I did it:
1.I spent more than three (maybe five) hours finding the rectangle stuff (solar panels) on Fotolia and lasso them out (I tried at least 5 different images). I finally settled on the above photo as it is kind of the same perspective as the background photo. Still not quite happy with the selection of photo.
2. I mainly use the Polygonal lasso tool to select them, actually my preferred way of doing it is instead of selecting them, I tried to delete the background. I had done at least thousands of selections in the past year, I think the quick selection and magic wand tools are Painful, because they usually get jagged edges and sometimes miss spots later on in the workflow you realize that you missed half of of the finger! I do usually have a solid fill color layer underneath. I also cloned some part of the panel and resized them.
3. I use the CTRL+CLICK in the layer panel to select the png image. Then "selection"--"modify"--"feather" 2 fixel, after that, copy the png into the background image. That really helped blur the edge a little to merge with the sunset image.

4. The background image(sunset) is enlarged (to 960px wide)using smart object filter, I like it better than upsampling. The background image I want it to be a little blur to cause the "field of depth" feeling, so enlarge is not really a problem.
5. I duplicate the solar png layer. I did the color match to get the solar panels have the orange brown tint. (I did not do "invert", it is just too yellowish). Then I reduce its opacity to 50% and blending mode "color" with the original solar png image. Merge those two layers together.

6. I convert both of the images into black and white before I greyscale them. Using "Adjustment"--"black and white", I played with the manual settings a little to get what I think the best contrast black and white of photo.
7. I then used "grey scale" and duotune.