my bunny

[thegeeze]

Hi Folks,
I'm so glad I found this place... You folks are the greatest!!!

I'm a newbie at retouching and still trying to figure out what all the tools do in PS-5.5 ... lol
I have a favorite image of my wife that was taken in 640x480 @ 72ppi. The image was taken digitally by a friend who is a memory miser and it lacks alot of detail in the costume.

I've achived some results at bringing back some of the depth and sheen in the fabric of the costume by adjusting levels/ contrast, but left some areas wildly transparent and discolored.
I then rubber stamped some of the most "out of control" areas and since I was disappointed in the color (black), I applied layer effects/color fill @40%.

Are there better ways to achive this?
my bunny.jpg


thx
Alan

[DannyRaphael]

Looks like you did fine on restoring the fabric detail.

Ditto on increasing the resolution quality and overcoming the .jpg artifacts. You can purchase software to do this faster (check out Neat Image), but being able to to do it by hand is a good skill to develop.

Since the color of the ears/outfit is the same and different from other colors in the image, look into the Select > Color Range command (to make the base selection) and Quick Mask tool to tune it up. Once the selection is made (marching ants), save it (Select > Load selection...) for later use, then, while the marching ants are still active open a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer where you'll have ultimate control over the color.

To illustrate the concept use the Lasso tool to select any area on any color image. Then add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and mess with the sliders. See how you can control the color? Since it's an adjustment layer, if you change your mind and want pink instead of yellow, it's easy to "adjust."

The trick is to get a good selection (mask). Here's a very good tutorial on masking. Conceptually it applies to PS across the board regardless of version.

http://www.vrya.net/ts/photoshop7.php

Hope this gets you moving a little farther down the road...

~DannyR~

[thegeeze]

thx Danny,
I'll have to pactice those techniques.

And the link you gave is a good read.

thx again,
Alan