My photoshopping experiment

[sunshiinedays]

I photoshopped this picture of my daughter, tried to make it look like a drawing but it looks more like pencil on top of a photograph. I also saturated the colours a lot, she's not wearing makeup. I'm pretty pleased with the results, but I think it might be too dark/greyish (??)

 

[Kehaar]

Looks nice. I like the contrast of the bright colours against the dark.

 

[sunshiinedays]

Thank you, Endless Song (love your username, btw).

 

[akagordon]

Ya know the layers/channels/paths window in Photoshop? If ya don't, chances are you've seen it or used it and didn't know it. It's down in the right hand corner of the screen if you're using Photoshop CS2 (unless you've changed your settings of course.) Well, at the bottom of the box is a little circular icon that is half dark and half light. If you click on it, it brings up a menu of adjustment layers. Click on thresholds near the bottom. It will bring up a scale of shadows, midtones, and highlights in the photo, The left side being the shadows and the right being the highlights, and when you slide the bar to the left it shows you the darkest areas of the photo and to the right vice-versa. Now, this can be used to do a lot of things, like color correction, and it tells me a lot about a photo too. If you do that to this photo in Photoshop, then you see that there is practically nothing on the right side of the slider, thus no highlights. This means that almost all the pixels in the photo are midtones, which is why it looks kind-of bland or grey. Now, there's several ways to help correct this but the two most common are using the levels or curves adjustments, which I don't mind explaining some other time if you don't know how to use them.

The following is a simple color correction using curves. It's not perfect because it's not original but you'll notice that tone of the photo is a lot brighter and less "greyish":

dream2.jpg

 

[Kehaar]

Thank you, Endless Song (love your username, btw).

Thank you.

 

[sunshiinedays]

Thank you akagordon, that is so much better!!! I don't have Photoshop, I'm using an older version of PSP. I'll have to play around some more to see if I can mimic what you've done