Photoshop Technique 3 - Compensating "Too Much Flash"

My flash photography skill still sucks, a lot of time the main subject are blown out despite of the correctly exposed background. Just learn a useful technique to save the errors.

1. Make a copy of the photo layer - Layer > Duplicate Layer

2. Change the layer Blend Mode from Normal to Multiply to bring back the original foreground detail the flash blew out. However, darkening the entire photo made the background too dark.

3. Hold the Alt key and click the Layer Mask icon - to add a black Layer Mask.

4. Switch foreground color to white > use soft-edged brush to paint over the foreground area, in this case, me and the woman who were over-flashed - revealing the darker "Multiply" layer and removing the over flash effect.

5. Avoid to paint the background as the flash wasn't too harsh there - the amount of flash looks slightly balance now.

Photoshop Technique 2 - Spot Healing

Why do people pay for thousands when taking wedding photographs? Not forgetting the make-up artist and of course the skills of the photographer, but photoshop makes most of the wonders.

How many people have perfect spotless face? Like one of my ex girl friend said, I look most attractive from a distance or in the club when she can't see the details of my face.

Before - please count the numbers of the moles on my face.

This technique is fairly easy:

1. select the spot healing brush tool
2. adjust the diameter of the brush tool
3. click on the moles or area that you want to cover up, the tool will automatically select the closest color zone around the selected area and overlap it.

Alternatively, clone stamp tool can be used which you can clone a color zone manually and apply it on the area that you want to rectify.

After - cleared from moles and acnes!

However, the orange skin problem will need a greater technique to rectify it and I will master it at a later stage.

Photoshop Technique 1 - Desaturating Part of An Image

Talking about modern photography, Photoshop is an essential tool for the photographer to enhance his works. I have always wanted to learn it and today thanks to Joey who had given a big hand for the first step.

Original picture taken at Covent Garden

Too many objects in the picture and my main point when taking the picture was on the baby.

To make it stand out from all the other components of the picture I think the best way would be to desaturate all except the main object.

It's good to seek advise from the expert, Joey made it looks easy by teaching me the following steps:

1. Use the polygonal lasso tool to select the object that you want to remain in colors
2. Select -> Inverse too choose the 'unwanted' background
3. Image -> adjustment -> desaturate (or Ctrl + Shift + U) to turn the background into B&W
4. Blur tool can be used to blur the background but not in this case as I want to keep all the details, just to make the baby stands out of the the crowd.
   

The result:

This is really useful and I really love it :)