Retouching An Image - White Beauty | JaniceO Art of Digital Galleries

Apr

2015

Retouching An Image - White Beauty

White Beauty - Fairy tale white Arabian stallion, Silver Wind van Nina

l_plate Digital cameras are simply a gift to amateur and professional photographers alike. I love to take images of horses but as anyone who has ever tried to take a snap of a favourite animal would know, the instance you press the shutter they close their eyes, flick their heads, or do any number of annoying things to ruin the shot. Add movement and the problem multiples.

In the past I've taken a full roll of 36 images, sent the roll off to be processed hoping that I might get two or three images I like and end up with nothing I like. Digital cameras changed that. I can take as many images as I like. I can view them as I go to see if I've captured what I want. Instead of husbanding images because film costs money and processing even more, now I can take hundreds of images of my subjects and delete the ones I don't like.

There is a downside to digital though. Often the images look a little flat. The colour not quite as it was when the button was pressed. Come on down Photoshop, or any of the hundreds of image editors available today, to the rescue. Today I'm going to retouch an image taken by Sharon Meyers of my Arabian stallion Silver Wind Van Nina in Adobe Photoshop CC2014.Here is the image straight from the camera. It was shot on a Nikon D200 as a jpeg, around 7am on a crisp Autumn morning in February in our little Aussie corner of the world.

It's a lovely relaxed image, walking toward the photographer and the spot we'd picked to stand him up. We were at home, at Comanche Lodge, so he was feeling comfortable in his surrounds which explains the nice soft, interested feel. The first thing I almost always do with an image, particularly a landscape or animal, is apply a High Pass filter to sharpen the image a little and get rid of the flattened look. I'm also quite fond of using the Clarity slider in Adobe Camera Raw to do this.

Now that Camera Raw is available as a filter in Photoshop CC2014 it's a simple matter to use it on any image. If you use Lightroom, the Camera Raw adjustments are available there under the Develop Menu. I'm going to use the High Pass filter, which acts only on the edges of my image and therefore saves me having to juggle sliders in some of the other Sharpening tools. I duplicate my image either by going through the layers menu or using Ctrl J (Cmd J on a Mac) or simply highlighting the background layer and dragging it down to the New Layer button in my Layers Panel.

I set my new layer to Soft Light Mode and select the High Pass filter from Filter-Other. I usually start around 10 for a landscape shot. Move the slider until you have some nice outlines in amongst the grey blur. I find that I most often use Soft Light mode on my high pass layers, particularly if there are people in the image. For this image I change the mode to Overlay, which gives a sharper image, and set the filter radius to 9.8 pixels.


Closeup before applying filter.	Closeup after applying High Pass filter.

As you can see in the second image, the High Pass filter has brought out the details of the horse's face, making the eyes stand out, the pigment of the muzzle textured, raising the halter from the skin. The wisps of mane are more visible, as are the veins that run just under the skin of his jaw. This horse is a snow white grey with mottled pink and black skin under the hair and that mottling is now showing through his coat, as it does in real life.

If the filter effect is a bit stronger in some areas, than you would like, use a soft brush with Foreground colour set to black, add a Layer Mask and select it, then paint out the filter in the areas you don't want it to show. Adjust the opacity of your brush if you want a little sharpening to apply or leave it at 100% to remove all effects. You can also reduce the opacity of the whole layer. In this case, I left the layer at 100% opacity. I changed the name of this Layer to High Pass. Try to rename your layers as you go so that you know what they are there for and what area of your image they effect.

The next thing I'm going to do is remove some of the distracting scars on the horse. Because he is white, they show up quite a bit and the sharpening makes them even more visible. Removing scars is not affecting the conformation of the horse. I create a New Layer and select the Spot Healing Brush. I leave the Brush at the default settings, Normal blend mode, Content Aware type and make sure the Sample All Layers is ticked. Then simply size your brush just a little larger than the blemish you're removing. I rename this Layer, Heal Horse.

Looking at the background, I can see that it has been nicely blurred by the photographer leaving the horse as the first draw to the viewers eye. However there are some objects, a light, a post, and further back dark blobs that are actually cattle on the neighbours property. They are all a little distracting and add nothing to the image so I'm going to remove them. I make a new layer for this though I could have continued on my previous layer but this way I can alter each area separately. I use the Spot Heal brush again and also the Clone Tool for the post just behind the horse.

A sharpened image, cleaned of distractions.

I'm going to add a little Dodging and Burning to bring out the contrast and highlights on the horse. I create two Curves Layers. One I set to darken the image by pulling the line from the centre down to the RH corner just a little, around 145 & 100. Fill the mask of this layer with black by hitting Ctrl I (Cmd I on a Mac). Rename to Burn. I will use this layer to darken areas of my image. The other Curves Layer I pull the line toward the top LH corner from the centre. Fill the mask the same way as the previous Curves Layer and rename to Dodge. This layer will be used to add highlights and brighten shadows.

Select a soft brush, reduce the fill to around 8 to 20% and set the Forground colour to White. Selecting the Burn layer, I begin painting in the darker areas on the horses face to enhance the definition and bring the colour back. I then switch to the Dodge layer and add some highlight to his eye, mane, forelock, edges of the ears, along the back into the tail, down the shoulder and the raised front leg. The sun is coming from the front left so I'm looking to keep that aspect with my highlights.

Just remember when highlighting not to remove shadows that ought to be there, such as under the nose-band. They make the image real life. If you are looking for a photo realistic image then go softly with your burning and highlighting. The opacity on either layer can also be reduced to lessen the effect if it is too strong. If you use a pen and tablet then uncheck the pressure sensitivity for this process as you want the brush to be applied uniformly to your settings.

I have five adjustment layers for this image - my High Pass layer, two layers to remove distracting objects and blemishes and two curves layers to add some highlights and some shading. I group these layers by using Ctrl G (Cmd G on a Mac) and name the Group, Sharpen Heal. This keeps my project tidy.

Now I'm going to adjust the image's overall lighting by adding one of Photoshop's Color Lookup Layers, a series of Curves Layers and a Levels Layer. The Color Lookup is I suppose like a preset. I've used Fuji125 Kodak 2393 on this and reduced the layer opacity to 40% at Normal Blend Mode. This has brought in some contrast to the image by sharpening the colours. The first Curves Layer brings back light onto the main subject. The second I used to just bring back some of the shadows a touch and the third is a very shallow S curve to affect the whole image. The Levels Layer just tweaks by tiny movements all three ranges to just pop the image.

I group my lighting adjustment layers and rename the Group to Lighting. I'm almost done. I add one more layer and use the Sharpen tool set at 50% and Normal. I open the image at 100% and re-size my brush to the area I'm working on, I brush over the eye, the halter, a couple of strands of the forelock, some of the mottling on the face. Increase the image size again and make sure that I have not overdone the sharpening and introduced noise.

Lastly, I add another layer and attach my signature. I've made my tag a brush which I generally apply with a soft brush, then add the blending modes Bevel & Emboss, Satin and Gradient Overlay - Black to White. I re-size it to suit. Here is my final image side by side with the original.


Before.	After.

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