Preamble:
I was at an art show on the weekend. My friend Cathleen McLain invited me to come and share my photography with the world, and I accepted with glee. She told me I would love the work that her friend Lori Barker does, and I do. Lori transfers photos on to aluminum and then engraves them with a dentists drill. They are AWESOME! She doesn't seem to have any in her etsy shop right now, but you can get the idea of the stuff she does from having a look there: http://www.spiritcollage.etsy.com/
Anyhow, Lori had come across this book made from images from a camera that this guy had accidentally dropped in water. The images came out all strange and wonderful. It just happened Lori had her old digital camera that she had replaced. Because possible alkalinity was mentioned in the book she dumped some bicarbonate of soda in water, and dropped her old camera in, dried it out, and started taking photos with it. I am sure she can comment more about the process here if you want to know more.Lori took a photo of me at the show. We were talking editing, and I mentioned a couple of things to deal with the pixellation in the image. It looks like Lori is a pretty accomplished photo editor in the first place, but I went through it in more detail for others who might want it.
Thanks for the portrait, Lori. Here's what I did:
IMAGE - IMAGE SIZE
* Next to "Resolution" put in the number 300. This will ensure that it is well within print quality. 150 or above would also be acceptable. (If this number is higher than the number of pixels per inch of the original image, which it is in this case, the program will add in more pixels. This can be a problem for editing more regular photos, but since this photo is abstract, it really won't matter.)
* In the part of the box that says "Pixel dimensions" change the drop down menu to "percent" and then make the number 100 (meaning 100 percent. This will keep the original image dimensions. If you want to make it bigger or smaller, now is when you would do that. I like this one the size it is, though.)
There are other options you can choose while changing your image size, but lets not worry too much about them right now.
Next:
Ok, you have a few choices now. When we were talking at the show after you took this photo you said you didn't want it so grainy. I suggested "edge preserving smooth" but when I got home I realized that I was talking about a feature in Paint Shop Pro, not Photoshop. Apologies about that. So.... one way you can get it less grainy is:
FILTER - NOISE - DUST AND SCRATCHES (this is close to the option I suggested for you, but it's called something different here in Photoshop than the name I gave you)
* Make sure the "preview" box is ticked. This will show you what you are doing on your image as you are doing it.
* Use the slider bars on the bottom two options to check out what you can do to the image. I liked "Threshold" at zero, and a "Radius" of about 5 pixels. Anything else lost too much detail in the background.
While this really helped get rid of the grain, I didn't like what it did in losing some of the background. So in the end, I didn't click OK. I wanted to see some of the grain get lost in my face and arms, but I like the texture in my jeans and background. So I did it another way. (There is ALWAYS another way to do something). I chose:
In my toolbar on the left of the screen, I right click my mouse on the symbol that looks like a hand with a finger pointing. I choose "smudge tool". If you zoom in on this image you can see the options I chose: a size of 65 and a mode of "lighten" to help it stand out even more, and a strength of 26 percent so that it takes multiple strokes of my little "brush" circle to get the effect, which tends to even out the effect more than doing it at 100 percent.
* Put the little circle where you want to smudge, hold down your left mouse button and move it. I found moving it from left to right in most places helped more because the lines in this picture are vertical, and it helped to smudge them into each other better.
So... there it is. You can do a whole lot more with this image if you want. I suspect you are a purist, Lori, since your work of art in this instance is what you have done with the camera itself.
Here's what else I did ( in case you want to know):
IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - COLOR BALANCE
* I used the slider bars to change the colors around for fun. The numbers ended up being +100, -36, -41. I like the rich reds this produces, and the way it really makes the background pop.
* It also made me see where I didn't smudge my face as much as I wanted to, so back to the smudge brush for a little more work (this time on 50% strength).
IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST: I took the contrast slider all the way to the left, reducing the contrast to -50. I like the way this brings out the background a little bit more. I played with distorting the background a bit just for fun using FILTERS - LIQUIFY. That was fun.
At about this point I remembered I had a life, and that having a life means I still have to unpack and sort out everything from the show yesterday so that I can get back into my spare room and do other stuff I have to do. So I guess I am going to go and do that, and package a couple of etsy orders and find myself something to eat. It was awesome to meet you, Lori, and be the LoriLoriMacMc team for the day! lol.
