Secrets of Photoshop

People often come up to me and ask what's the most important thing when taking pictures like if it's my camera equipment or if it's the lighting or if I dope up the dogs to get them to sit still and though it's a little of all three, I have to say that it's mostly Photoshop.

Photoshop is about the most amazing photography tool to come along since eyeballs. Unfortunately, using Photoshop correctly doesn't come as naturally as using your eyeballs so I thought today I'd pass along some tips I've come up with over the years and what better way to do that than with a few examples.

In the first example, there's an unseemly cigarette butt in the bottom left corner which I want to remove from this photo of Rocco.

Removing extraneous objects is one of the most often done feats with Photoshop and while it may look easy it's actually something that takes years to perfect.

You can see in the revised version of the photo, below, how I've managed to conceal the butt by carefully painting it over with a colour that so closely matches the background, you can barely tell I've manipulated the photo at all. It may look easy but in real time, that took me a good three hours to do.

The next example involves hair. In the Photoshop Super Master Users community, we have endless Twitter conferences over how to handle hair because without a doubt, hair is one of the hardest things to revise. It's just so finicky, all those little strands, and dogs, of course, have got a lot of hair.

Luckily, I happen to be somewhat of an expert on hair, so I thought it might be beneficial to show an example of how I handle this most difficult of techniques.

In the next example, we see Molly who is cute as a button. Unfortunately, the photo is absolutely ruined by the loose strand of hair just above her right eye (I've got an arrow pointing to it in the picture).

I know what you're thinking. Impossible. This photo cannot be salvaged ... and yet. And yet ...

With the right combination of brushes and filters and hands as steady as any world class brain surgeon, I've managed to not only remove that devastating curlicue, I've actually restyled it so that what was once absolutely appalling is now transformed into a unique and eye catching accent on Molly's brow. This image took me nearly two days to complete but I feel the effort has been worth it.

For Dino's photo shoot, unbeknown to me, my memory card was full so I didn't actually end up with any shots of Dino - but no worries. With a little Photoshop magic and an original picture of a stuffed toy, I was able to reproduce Dino based solely on my memory of that photo session.

This transformation took me almost a full two months to complete and I almost died but I just kept telling myself that it's for the dogs, it's all for the dogs, and knowing that, I was able to persevere.

Before Photoshop:



After Photoshop:


Now the trick to accomplishing the previous transformational task is to start with something that looks like the final desired image. The stuffed toy I used was unfortunately the closest thing my assistant could find which reminded us of Dino, hence the long time to complete the final image, but in the next example, because what I started out with was so similar to the desired result, the work was a lot easier. This Photoshop transformation only took me a couple of minutes.

Before:



After:
And even then, if my assistant had actually been listening to me more carefully, instead of finding me a picture of a brick, she would've found me what I really asked for and the photo would have been pretty well self made.

Okay, everyone, hope this was useful for you all and happy Photoshopping!