fooling around with photoshop while the scanner does its thingy

Scanning negatives is a long process, well it is if you do extremely high res, which I do for the sake of clarity when it comes to doing prints later. It takes several minutes per frame to scan and the 'puter to process the image to something useable.

What to do in that time? Play in photoshop and see what you can do new or different. I liked the resulting image and it took enough steps to kill some time while scanning in a roll of film.

To get this image I took a cropped down the negative some and using "mode" changed it from 16bit grayscale to RGB. I then created a new layer that was automatically and aptly named background by Adobe's CS5.

I then broke out the eyedropper and picked a shade of red I wanted to "paint with". I used the brush tool, set at a very high pixel count (something silly like 475 pixels) and a textured brush. From there I followed the directions of the petals gradations and "painted" on that new color. Once the areas were colored in I used the blending tool at "multiply" to bring the two layers back together again allowing the original layer to allow the colored layer to show through and giving some detail back to the picture. I merged the layers, dumbed them down to 72 dpi for faster downloading here and voila...geraniums selectively colored.

Of course am busy scanning negatives for use in real handcoloring of negatives in the next day or so when I have time to experiment with that process again.

Another stab at painting...

This is quite the learning curve I am on. Right now am just learning one brush at a time to see what it does. This time around its a wet stiff bristled shorty. So far so good, what my next step after completing the learning about what each brush does...is to learn to combine them on one canvas like a real painter would do.

I have learned its a must to scroll in close and work top to bottom doing back grounds before the foreground or subject matter. It does make it much easier to bring about the feel of a painting.

Out of focus backgrounds are a challenge to blend and I am not completely happy with the result on this.

Iris. I have a ton of them, enjoy just this one.

More with the magic brush...wet pick up and bold brush

OK...I haven't decided whether this is a useful tool in my kit or just a novelty. Regardless I am enjoying using it and learning what it can do. I see the potential to apply it to "real photographs" for some spot work as well as making paintings. The latter I think on watercolor paper will help the "painterly" effects even more.

What you see here is the original image and my rudimentary learning on how to use the tool.

more fun with magic paintbrush

This is actually kind of fun. Tedious with a mouse, but fun none the less. The magic paint brush lets you pic up color from the underlying layer whilst painting away. Blending and all that other stuff is done with adjustable presets allowing some of the underlying to show through, if you want.

In playing around with this tool I've discovered that the lower res, smaller files are easiest to work on and get acceptable results. I tried working on an 8 megapixel image and nearly lost my mind sampling small areas at a time and trying to paint. It is much easier to reduce the size of the image and dpi and work from there. The compression of detail doesn't matter, actually helps in putting together an impressionistic image...like Painted Jalama Dunes you see here.

I really need to invest in a pen and tablet if I am to explore this option further. Of course to get there I need to sell A LOT of prints.