Woman and Child

How I did it...

Woman and Child

Using psp8

I encountered difficulty to get effects wanted and spent a lot of time experimenting with various approaches including using the various enhance photo effects as well as the Adjust features. Ultimately I settled on the following.

My objective was to get a clearer picture of the figures and a less prominent background.

• 1. I Promoted the background layer, greyscaled it, and returned it to 16m colors. Then I duplicated it and worked on the duplicated layer.
• 2. I used Adjust || Salt and Pepper filter (default) to sharpen the image some. Then Sharpened once. I then used Serpia effect at 10% and the Enhance Photo || Clarify (default value.)
• 3. I made a white background underneath the image and then Erased background and softened the edges of the image.
• 4. I Duplicated the figure layer twice more to get a more distinctive edging. Then merged the three layers. I used the Smudge and Soften brush on the figure faces. When satisfied use I sharpen once.
• 5. The rest of image still two sharp so used the soften brush on it.
• 6. With magic wand made a selection around figures, created a layer under the figures and used a drop shadow with 100% blur and a gold color as a highlight of the figures.
• 7. I cropped the image removing much of the sky as it was too much for the photo for my liking.
• 8. On the original photo layer I used Brush Strokes with the Detail preset though set the softness to 1. Then I used Soft Focus with the Blurred big halo preset. I used the Deform tool and made the background narrow and shorter. I then used the magic wand for a selection, inverted it, and then cropped the image.
• 9. I duplicated this layer 3 times and set the mode options from top to bottom of the four layers: hard light, soft light, difference, normal. Then I merged these four layers. I didn't like the gold drop shadow so I used the colorize effect and set Hue to 24 and Saturation to 64 and then set the mode option to Color Legacy.
• 10. Used the background eraser to get rid of the sky as it was still much too bright. I added a new bottom layer, flood filled it with a light silver blue color, added a fine leather texture, applied the same brush strokes and soft focus effects for a background effect
• 11. I lowered the opacity to about 34 on the original image to soften the final effect, added the corners album preset frame, merged the layers and resized the photo to 150%.

-- Prof --