Jane Coram's pics

[Jane Coram]

Hi Nats,

Yes, sorry, I haven't checked back in here for a bit - I always remember my Nan's and Mum's anniversaries as well and think about them. Wherever they are I'm sure they appreciate it.

Much love

Janie

xxxx

[Jane Coram]

I’ve just done a basic colour up of Druitt and thought some of you might like to try the technique I use. There are lots of ways to do simple colour ups and everyone has their own way of doing it, this is just my way. Other colour ups which require colours to be totally accurate are a lot more difficult. This is the simplest colour up to do really.

Unfortunately the photo I’m working from is really not very good, so it’s going to limit what can be done with it. It will only be possible to make it look like an old hand-coloured photograph because the detail isn’t there to make it look like a proper modern coloured photograph.

Here’s the photo anyway. You can see it’s very grainy. That always causes problems when doing colour-ups. We’ll have to try and compensate at the end.

Just in case anyone wants to print out this step by step to follow, perhaps if everyone would keep questions or comments to the end it would be better - otherwise they'll have loads of posts in the middle of the step by step and won't know what they're doing! It's hard enough at the best of times

[Jane Coram]

You will find it harder to work on a low resolution image, (72 or 96 dpi) but it can be done if the image is big enough in centimetres.

Most of the images in the Casebook archive are quite low resolution because they have to be, but they are a good size in centimetres and you can use almost all of them for doing colour ups to learn the technique.

The first thing to do is to take any residue colour out of it. Even photos that appear black and white can still retain some faint colour and if you try to use it with even a trace of colour on it, you’re always going to be battling to compensate for that colour.


To desaturate it: - Go to the Image Menu - Adjustments - Desaturate.

[Jane Coram]

You now have a true black and white photo.

Although the image is black and white, you need to make it a CMYK image. I’ll explain why. CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. Those are the four colour inks that printers use to make any colour image. I use CMYK because it means you don’t get any nasty shocks when you try and print it out later.

Some screen colours can’t actually be printed out - the printer just picks the colour closest to it and uses that, which means that colours like blues and purples especially, come out looking a bit dull. If you use CMYK, it will come out exactly as on screen. I’ve found you can get better control using CMYK for flesh tones as well.

To change the image to CMYK, go to the Image Menu - Mode - CMYK.

Obviously we can only guess at Druitt’s colouring, but looking at other photos of him, his skin looks fairly average in tone. It looks as if it tends towards the pale side, rather than being florid. We need to mask off a lot of the image so that only Druitt’s skin is exposed before we can put the colour on.

Making a Selection:

Select the Lasso tool and put a lasso around Druitt’s face. You just click down with the mouse to start and drag the mouse around the area you want selected. Stop when you reach the point where you started and you should have a lasso around the area.

DON’T CLICK OUTSIDE THAT AREA ONCE YOU’VE DONE IT OR THE LASSO WILL DISAPPEAR AND YOU’LL HAVE TO START AGAIN.

Get as close as you can without making it too much hard work. As long as you get it roughly around his face, that’s fine. I don’t know if you can see it in the image there, but it doesn’t have to be that close.

[Jane Coram]

We’re going to put a Quick Mask on the image to make sure that we get an accurate selection, that’s just to start you off.

If you look at the bottom of the tool bar you’ll see the Quick Mask buttons. The one on the right puts a Quick Mask on the image. This masks off certain parts of the image so that it only colours the part you want coloured.

[Jane Coram]

You’ll see that as soon as you put the Quick Mask on, the colour picker at the bottom of the tool bar changes to black and white only. You can toggle between the two by clicking on the little arrow at the side.

You can see it’s pretty rough. That’s fine.

You’ll have to switch quite often between the black and the white using this technique. It’s a bit bewildering at first but you soon get the hang of it

[Jane Coram]

Select a paintbrush -

It’s hard to say what size to pick as it depends on the size of the image. If you’re using a Casebook photo, try something around the 20 pixel mark and see how you get on, then just make it bigger or smaller to suit. Choose a soft edged brush, otherwise you’ll get an unrealistic hard edge.

[Jane Coram]

We’re going to paint in the rest of the Quick Mask, up to the edge of his face. You can start with a bigger brush and make them smaller as you get closer to the face. Black will fill in the Quick Mask and white will take it out again, so if you make a mistake, just switch to the white paintbrush and take it out again. The white paintbrush will act like an eraser.

Obviously there are certain areas where there is an overlap between hair and skin, don’t worry about that too much for now, we can sort that out later. Just take it to where you think the skin finishes and the hair starts.

The second image here shows what it should look like when you're finished.

When you think that it’s about right. Click the left hand Quick Mask button and it will remove the Quick Mask, leaving you with a very neat selection around the face. It takes a bit of practice but it does come in the end. (And that is so begging for a dirty joke. Lol)

[Jane Coram]

You need to save this selection to use later. Very easy, just go to the Select Menu and Save Selection. Basically this just saves the dotted lines marking the edge of the selection for you, so you can just pop it back on at any time,

Make sure you name it or you’ll get in a right mess later.

This is important so that you don’t get ugly overlaps between two colours.

Don’t click anywhere outside of that selection with the mouse because it will disappear!

If it does, then just go to the Select Menu, to Load Selection and it will appear again.

To load a selection at any time - go to the Select Menu and Load Selection. There’s a drop down menu there which will have all of the selections on it.

[Jane Coram]

Now to actually colouring up the photo.

Basically what we’re going to do is to lay a transparent sheet of colour over the top of each area of the image, so that you can still see the layer beneath through it, but through a coloured tint. It’s possible to get very realistic coloured photos using this method, depending on the quality of the photo. When I was a kid I used to hold up the coloured cellophane sweet wrappers from Quality Street, in front of the black and white telly to try and make it into a coloured picture. It’s the same principle really, but without the toffee in the middle.

Go to the Layer Menu and select New Adjustment Layer, the ‘Curves’. You’ll get a little dialogue box up. I would recommend you name the layer. In this case I’ve put ‘Flesh’. It’s important to name the layers so that you can find them easily again later.

[Jane Coram]

Once you click Okay you’ll get the Curves box up and this is where you do the adjustments.

If you click on the little drop down list at the top, you see there are five different graphs. The first one is CMYK, then you have Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. You can adjust each one individually. The CMYK one will make the whole lot either lighter or darker, and the others will adjust the other colours.
Choose the Magenta graph. Click down with your mouse in the middle of the diagonal line and drag it upwards and downwards.

You’ll see that if you move it one way it puts a Cyan tint on the image, and if you push it the other way it puts a Magenta tint over the image.

Magenta gives you Magenta one way and Green the other.

Yellow gives you Yellow one way and Blue the other.

Black adjusts the black levels in the image. It takes a bit of getting used to, but you soon get the hang of it.

You can also highlights, midtones and shadows separately, but for this it’s probably best to keep it simple for now. I’ll do some step by steps on that after this one if anyone is interested. You can still get good effects just sticking to the basics. Poor old Montie should have turned all the colours of the rainbow by the time you’ve finished. When you’ve got fed up playing get rid of the box by clicking cancel and we’ll get onto the real thing.

[Jane Coram]

You might find that the line doesn’t stay in a nice curve but goes all over the place, this is especially true if the mouse slips and you end up with another dot in the middle of the line.

If it goes wrong just hold down the Alt key and click on Cancel and you’ll reset it back to the start again.

Once you’ve had a little practice you can do it on the real thing. It’s easier just to get rid of the practice one and get a clean Curves box up.

[Jane Coram]

Starting the colour up

Flesh is made up of Magenta and Yellow using this method.

Using the Curves graphs, Select Magenta and clicking down with the mouse drag the diagonal bar up and down to give him a nice pink sort of colour. We’re going to adjust it later, so just get something on there.

Once he’s got a bit of a blush, Select the Yellow and just try to get a vague flesh colour. If you think it’s too highly coloured you can go back in at any time and take the colour up or down a bit, just by double clicking on on the little graph icon in the layers palette.

When you add the other colours you often have to adjust it, because it looks different sometimes when it’s next to another colour.

[Jane Coram]

Hopefully you still have the face selection up on screen. It should look like the image below at this stage. If you don’t have the selection around it still just load it again.

The point of that selection is that none of the canvas outside that selection can be affected by any tool, paintbrush, filter - well anything. It’s totally locked against changes of any kind. So we aren’t going to be able to do anything on the hair as long as that selection is there - unless we do something about it.

[Jane Coram]

To be able to paint outside the selection:

Go to the Select Menu and select Inverse. Now the whole situation is reversed. You can’t do anything inside the selection - only outside it.

Press the Quick Mask button again and you’ll get the face Quick Mask up again.