Please Help :(

[Kraellin]

janice,

glad you like it

i cant possibly tell you every stroke, but i can give you a general idea. i first make a duplicate of the background layer and usually correct for contrast and lighting first. as i recall, i didnt have to do that this time. instead, i used a 7 band sharpening filter. this brought out some highlights and tones a little more.

push, smudge and clone all do fairly similar things. you're basically moving 'paint' from one part of the image to another. i use a variety of brushes with each, all set to opacities lower than 50% in most cases and do very small areas at a time. this helps to keep a consistency in the transitions of color and luminosity because you're always drawing 'paint' from a nearby area and only small bits of it at a time due to the lower opacity. this gives you very good control on what gets moved.

i try to figure out how things might look from what data is in the image already. there are almost always clues. sometimes the clues are misleading, and in the case of this ring, i wasnt sure of a couple of them, but that's the price of admission

in the case of this ring, i used a very small brush size and push to draw in the darker lines and smooth them a bit. this was done with the default brush. to help get good lines i can also make a single dab along the line, then hold down the shift key and dab again further down the length of the line. this will 'push' the 'paint' the distance between the dabs and make a nice computer straight line. i will also sometimes lower the density of the brush so that it's not a completely solid one color line. this is also good for going along outside edges and smoothing those up.

also, it shld be noted that all this is done on a new blank raster layer made above any other layers and setting the brushes used to 'use all layers'. this paints on the blank layer but shows through to the other layers as if i had painted directly on them. this has a very distinct advantage of not destroying any data on the base layers and you can easily erase new paint from the blank raster layer.

i also use a variety of brush types. there was one in particular i used on the 'burnished' looking gold near the bottom. this was an elongated 'raking' sort of brush, but that had a 'fade' quality to it. this somewhat 'raked' the paint along while blending it in nicely.

i also used the lighting/darken tool brush for darkening in a few places along the bottom.

i used very little clone on this image. i did clone some paint from the bottom right over to the bottom left just to match up the colors a bit for a start, but that was about it.

smudge was used VERY sparingly and at a very light opacity just to smooth a few things out here and there.

and, i used a soften tool brush along the outside edges to reduce the sharp edges i had created with the push tool.

i did nothing to the gem, though i did smooth up its setting a tiny bit.

i tend to spend more time on these things than some. this isnt a brag or something like that. it's just how i work and what i work with. i find the push tool to be a very useful and underused tool. it's great for tiny, tight work and was used a lot on your image. this adds time. there was hardly any automatic process used on this.

and like i said earlier, if i had used the other ring in the same picture as a guide, i would have had to put more of a polish and shine on things. that would have involved other processes.

also, after doing this ring, i happened to look at the other thread where you posted rings. are those the same rings as the ones here?

oh, and welcome to RP

craig

[Janice Ong]

Hello craig,

They're different rings, just an eaxample how i want my ring to look like. The ones that are well done have been all photoshoped and I'm struggling to achieve it.

I still dont understand 'push '... but I'll give it a try.

As you can see the photoshoped pieces looks really good and polish. How do you make the polish effect? It looks crystal... to me though.

Thanks man !

[Kraellin]

janice,

'push' may be exclusive to paint shop pro. i'm sure photoshop has an equivalent, but i dont think it's named 'push'. it's probably something in the smudge stuff in p-shop. basically, it's like a heavier duty smudge. smudge tends to push the paint just so far and then fades out. with push there is no fade. it will just keep going and going and going. so, it's great for doing long lines.

as for the highly polished look, you would want to remove the grain and brighten things up and probably use more 'pure' colors. polished looks also tend to have overly bright highlighting. but, i never know how to really do these things until i do them. so, maybe someone else can give you more details on this.

also, i seem to have missed the part where you said you wanted the ring solid. when you said that did you want it like bart did, filling in the body of the ring band like he did or something else? i didnt on my retouch. i only worked on touching up the surface.

craig

[SteveB2005]

Janice. I shoot and retouch a fair amount of jewelry. Can you be specific about the kind of camera and lenses you used? What did you use for lighting. Did you use a light tent? Post this info, then me or someone here might be able to guide you along for some better shooting results. Thanks steveb

[SteveB2005]

Janice. I am posting a rough retouch I did of your ring, just to demonstrate one way to go using gradients in Photoshop. I haven't finished it due to lack of time, but I will post the completed ver when I can. My advice is to collect fine jewelry catalogs and study the work. I love photographing jewelry but I am always experimenting to get the best results. Steveb

[ray12]

Steve,

Nice use of gradients.

Gold reflective certainly is a challenging look to get well.

Wonder if anyone has ever seen a tutorial on how to paint on gold? How to get the colors right, how to get the blends, how to create radiuses - and especially how to figure out where to put the shadows and highlights.

I have seen some traditional true airbrush work that looked pretty convincing (the kind with real air) - but most of the stuff I see using Photoshop is really fairly poor quality - because the science and art of gold reflections is so specialized I think.

Ive seen some comments on pseudo-gold and brushed gold - but I have never seen a description of how to make polished gold look convincing!

What are the factors for success. I can understand a tent for shooting - but what about the retouching aspects of polished reflective gold? Anyone seen a tutorial on creating or retouching convincing polished gold?

Ray