1. Learn more photo manipulation
2. Learn more about Photoshop

Janee has a way of giving lots of very useful tips about little things in Photoshop along with the discipline of making images a certain file size and dimension!

All the image thumbnails below will open to a new, larger image, each in its own window. Be sure to close them after viewing.

Week 2, From Color to Grayscale and Back is just that! Black and white photos (created in Photoshop), color play and serious hand tinting are all part of it!

The "Desaturated" Images

1. The first image is included as the 'base' image, a photo of my granddaughter, Lauren, taken several years ago when she was 9 or 10 years old. I chose it because I wanted to have something colorful to 'uncover' in the Hue/Saturation image. I should mention that the photo was taken by an old (my first!) digital camera, the agfa 1680.
2. The next is the Desaturated image...quick and easy.
3. The third, done with a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer which allows editing of the mask to reveal the color lying just under it! Very exciting!
4. The fourth image, the Gradient Map Adjustment Layer, allowed more options for reaching a degree of black and white contrast not available in the first two tries.
5. The last image demonstrates the use of Channel Mixing.

Extra Credit: Color Funk!

1. The first photo is what I started with to get to the other 2 'crazies'!
2. In the middle image, I really got carried away and used 3D Transform on some of the channels, Liquify, and who knows what else, although Distort filters, Noise, are possibly some! Just trying them on the different channels gave some different results! Experimenting with it all was really fun.
3. The third image, an extra, which I included because it reminded me of a vase with flowers in it and also, I liked the way the colors came into the white base flower. Again, a frenzy, but the Distort Filters were instrumental in getting the glassy 'vase' look.

Colorizing

1. The wall fountain from Blithewold Gardens Mansion in Bristol, Rhode Island is the subject of the colorizing using Adjustment Layers, Hue/Saturation, Colorize. I realized something that seemed exciting to me.
   1. After applying one Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation>Colorize and settling on a blue to the fountain image and editing its mask to reveal the true color of the headband, I added a new Adjustment Layer and this time chose a purple as the hue.
   2. It was then a choice of brushes, Flare Brush around the eyes and then soft brushes on the cheeks and hair to reveal the blue adjustment layer colorization underneath.
      1. I hope to remember that when using a brush with textures or small patterns (ex. Butterfly Brush), the pattern follows the contour of the base image and resembles the results of using a Displacement Map!
2. The 'fake' Duotone is a very fond memory! I took this photo when I was about 10 years old, from the second floor window of my aunt's farmhouse in Oneco, Connecticut. I loved it there and this picture fills me with wonderful memories.
3. This last part of Lesson 2 was an emotional, as well as learning, experience. It is a picture of my Great Grandmother on my mother's side and while working on it, I was overwhelmed with so many thoughts about what she was like. I do remember seeing her for the last time when I was about 12 years old and she was bedridden and had hair that was so white! She told me that she came from County Tyrone, Belfast. And, as I worked, I could see the resemblance my own mother had to her!
   1. This presented some problems of deciding on color and not all colors painted in as I expected!
   2. I was most impressed with the way the wood of the desk came up, looking more real than anything else in the picture.
   3. I did add some 'spark to the eyes on a layer over the coloring.

   I am really happy to know how to do the hand tinting!