Graphic Design: Photo

<body> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="450"> <tr> <td> <h1>Digital Photography and Retouching by Chuck Braman</h1> <p class="flush">Over the past few years I've acquired an interest in digital photography that I've pursued by means of learning Photoshop sufficiently to become an Adobe Certified Expert for Photoshop 4.0. (I did this by means of reading the Photoshop 4.0 UserËs Manual twice, and working through the Photoshop 4.0<img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/ExpertCertificationLogo.jpg" align="right" hspace="2" width="107" height="46"> Classroom In A Book tutorial three times, the HandËs-On Photoshop 4 tutorial three times, the Photoshop Artistry tutorial twice, and the Photoshop Magic tutorial once.) The few samples below represent a very small fraction of what I am able to do, so feel free to ask if you would like me to perform a process that you don't see. Among other techniques that are not represented are sophisticated photo collages and virtually any special effects imaginable.</p> <p class="flush"> </p> <p class="flush">I've been a fan of Sophia Loren since I was a kid. Here's a photo of her from the movie "Boccaccio '70" that I retouched to use as wallpaper for my PC.</p> <p>It started out as a low quality, washed-out JPEG that I found on the web:</p> <p class="flush" align="center"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/Sophia1.jpg" hspace="3" vspace="3" width="185" height="240"></p> <p align="left">First I restored the missing detail from the lower portion of the photo, and cropped out the background:</p> <p align="center" class="flush"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/Sophia2.jpg" hspace="3" vspace="3" width="185" height="240"></p> <p align="left">Finally, I colorized it:</p> <p align="center" class="flush"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/Sophia3.jpg" vspace="3" width="185" height="240"></p> <p align="left" class="flush"> </p> <p align="left" class="flush">Here's how I fixed the photo of myself that I use throughout this web site.</p> <p align="left">When deciding which photo of myself to use, I faced the dual problems that I'm a very un-photogenic person, and that I have had few photos taken of me the during the past two decades. The only one I found that I liked was a tiny photo in a contact sheet, the negatives for which had been lost several years ago:</p> <p align="center" class="flush"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/Chuck1.jpg" vspace="3" width="106" height="71"></p> <p align="left">Of course, the first thing I had to do was to scan it to produce a photo of a much larger size. This accentuated the photo's low quality and its many imperfections:</p> <p align="center"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/Chuck2.jpg" vspace="3" width="425" height="283"></p> <p align="left">To fix it for my web site, I did five things: (1) Removed the specks of dirt on my forehead; (2) Removed the blotches on my left cheek; (3) Replaced the nearly flat-textured areas of the picture on the cymbal and in the background with solid colors as a backdrop for the type (visit my home-page to see the type); (4) Faded the image for effect, as well as to de-accentuate it's low quality; (5) Colorized the image to match the color-scheme of the web site. Here's the final product:</p> <p align="left"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/Chuck3.jpg" vspace="3" width="425" height="272"></p> <p align="left" class="flush"> </p> <p align="left" class="flush">Here are a couple of photos that I was told to scan from magazines to use within a presentation I created for Braun. In this instance, I had to make the coffee maker in the first photo</p> <p align="center" class="flush"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/Graphi1.jpg" hspace="3" vspace="3" width="327" height="293"></p> <p align="left" class="flush">appear in the table of the second photo. To do this, I did four things: (1) Retouched the coffee maker in the original photo to remove the protruding plant, water faucet, and basket handle; (2) Cropped the image; (3) Reversed the image; (4) Placed the image in the new photo (5) Skewed the image to so as to make it match the new perspective of the second photo.</p> <p align="center" class="flush"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/Graphi2.jpg" hspace="3" vspace="3" width="332" height="293"></p> <p align="left">(The low quality of these images results from the fact that I lost the original photos and had to rely on the copies embedded in the PowerPoint file.)</p> <p align="left"> </p> <p align="left" class="flush">Following are three examples of Photoshop being used to create custom backgrounds for PowerPoint presentations.</p> <p align="left">Here's a Photoshop text effect that I used to create the title slide of a presentation for Philips:</p> <p align="left"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/PhilipsBackground.jpg" vspace="3" width="425" height="319"></p> <p align="left"> </p> <p align="left" class="flush">For the presentation design below, I used Photoshop to create the simulated cloud effects on the bar on the left, and then made the three stock photos transparent so as to appear to float in the sky. This design was intended to imply the integration of the medical profession with the world wide web. (In the original presentation, the vector gradient on the right does not show banding that it shows in the screenshot below.)</p> <p align="left"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/Intermed.jpg" vspace="3" width="425" height="319"></p> <p align="left"> </p> <p align="left" class="flush">Finally, here's an example of a Photoshop job that didn't involve photos at all. In this instance, I was given the logos for Brown & Williamson (a leaf) and Bates Worldwide (a sun), and told to create a background for a Brown & Williamson PowerPoint presentation conveying the theme "From Darkness into the Light."</p> <p align="left"><img border="0" src="GraphicDesignImages/BWBackground.jpg" vspace="3" width="425" height="319"></p> <p align="left">I used Photoshop to create the red texture of the background, the inner-shadow text effects, the 3-D effects on the enlarged graphics from the logos, and the simulated lighting effects.</td> </tr> </table> <p> </p> </body>