Jane Coram's pics

[Jane Coram]

You’ll see there’s a neat line around the hair line. But you try to paint inside the selection on the face and you won’t be able to. You can only paint on the area outside - that is, over the red Quick Mask area.

Select the white paintbrush on a medium sized brush and take the Quick Mask away from the hair area. You’ll see that that you can’t go over the line onto the face area, which means you’ll get a perfect join between the face and the hair.

[Jane Coram]

If you want to check and see if you’ve missed any, you can click on the little black and white icon on the layers palette and press the Alt key and it will show you a black and white silhouette so that you can check if there are any gaps.

[Jane Coram]

You can then save the selection to load again later.

Now you’ve got to colour the hair. Brown isn’t an easy colour to get, you need to use the magenta, yellow and cyan curves to get it, you’ll just have to experiment and twiddle until you get it right. Sorry. It’s trial an error really. The higher you make the curve the darker the colour will become.

Basically from there on in, it’s the same thing over and over until you’ve done all of the different areas.

You can load more than one selection at a time, by going to the Select Menu, Load Selection and then Add selection. That will put two or more selections on screen as one big lump.

Adding more than one selection saves a lot of work. For instance you could load the hair, flesh, shirt, tie and coat selection, then you’ll have a perfect silhouette of Druitt so that you can paint in the background (Just remember to select Inverse on the Select Menu so that you can paint outside of the selection.)

[Jane Coram]

The eyes are a bit tricky, but they are basically done the same way. Put a rough lasso around. Put on the Quick mask. Paint around everything but the iris and pupil.

I’ll deal with putting in highlights at the end.

When you take the quick mask off you’ll have two selections for the eyes. Just use the curves in the same way as all the other layers.

[Jane Coram]

As you build up one layer after another you’ll get a layers palette that looks like this. You can go back in at any time to correct colours that look wrong once you’ve put other colours on. You’ll see I’ve got a blush layer there. No-one’s flesh is all colour. The good thing about using this technique is that you can do subtle shades of colour. You don’t have to fill in a selection with one flat colour.

To give Druitt’s flesh a bit more depth: -

Put the face selection back on again - you can do it without, but it’s probably a bit easier if the face selection is loaded on.

Put a fairly conservative magenta layer on over the top of the face, something like a mild case of sunburn will do nicely.

[Jane Coram]

Now we need to hide the colour temporarily and put it back in only where we want it to go and at the depth of colour we want, rather than a blanket layer of magenta.

Select the paint bucket from the tool bar.

Fill the whole image with black using the paint bucket. The whole of the magenta layer will disappear.

[Jane Coram]

Now we need to choose a brush to put the colour back in selectively.

Pick a medium to large size brush (try 65 and see how you get on, if it’s too big, then try something smaller.)

We need to lower the opacity of the paintbrush. In other words, it’s not going to paint on the whole 100% intensity of the colour, just a certain percentage of it, so that it gives a more subtle effect.

That way you can just paint some areas of colour on, leaving other areas pure flesh colour.

[Jane Coram]

How brush opacity works.

[Jane Coram]

Now very gently put a blush over cheeks, forehead, chin - well just look in the mirror and see where you’ve got pinkish bits.

You can then choose a smaller brush and gently tickle in the lips. Don’t overdo it or he’ll look as if he’s got lipstick on.

You can do the same with other colours on the image for more subtlety. It’s just a case of experimenting.

You need to remember not to get your black and whites muddled. When you’re working with Quick Masks, White takes the Quick Mask out and Black puts it in.
When you’re working on the image Black takes it out and White puts it in. Yes I know, bloody confusing.

It should look something like this now.

[Jane Coram]

Of course, we’re still left with the speckling problem on the image.

There are several ways to overcome this.

Make a copy of the image - don’t work on the original!

Flatten the layers, so that you just have the background layer.

Go to the Image Menu and change it to RGB. A lot of the filters won’t work in CMYK mode.

Make a duplicate layer. Layer Menu - Duplicate Layer.

Go to the Filter Menu and select Noise and Median.


Don’t take it up too much, because skin has got a texture to it, you don’t want him too smooth, you just don’t want him to look as if he has leprosy. You might need to experiment a bit. Click OK and have a look at it on the image, because it often doesn’t look as strong on the image as it does in the box. If you look at the image, you’ll see that his features have blurred, which we obviously don’t want. That’s why I’ve used a duplicate layer. Now you can just use the eraser and carefully rub away the features on the top layer revealing the unfiltered layer underneath.

[Jane Coram]

If you think it’s too strong, then you can lower the transparency of the top layer to make it less pronounced.

If it’s not strong enough - if you go to the Filter Menu, the last filter you used is right at the top of the list. You can just select it and it will put the same filter on again. You can always lower the opacity of the layer if it’s too strong with a double helping on it. (There are other ways to do it, but I don’t want to confuse everyone!)

[Jane Coram]

For the background, I made a duplicate layer and put a very strong blur over it to get rid of the blotchiness, and then put a blue curves layer over it to give it a bit more contrast.

There is a good chance that you might have a bit of an ugly join between the hairline and the flesh in some places. To correct this, you can use the Smudge Tool.


Make sure that the flesh layer is selected on your Layers Palette.

Select the Smudge tool and set it on 50% opacity.(It’s the same slider you use to set the brush opacity)

[Jane Coram]

You can do a Brightness and Contrast Adjustment layer on it as well, to get highlights and even out shadows.

[Jane Coram]

You can do more subtle adjustment layers by using some of the other features on the Adjustment Layer dialogue boxes.

If you click on the left hand side of the diagonal line, you’ll get a little white dot.

If you move that white dot up and down, you’ll put the colour from the adjustment layer only on the lighter areas of the image.

If you click to the left, you’ll get a black dot, and if you move that up and down, it will put the colour only in the shadows and darker colours.

The one in the middle, which you’ve used, put the colour in the midtones.

If you make a mess you can hold down the ALT key and hit the cancel button and it will reset all the graphs.

You can fine tune it more than that, but that’s the basics.

Obviously that is a very rough guide, but if anyone wants to ask any questions, or if I've missed anything else (highly likely ) then just post up and I'll fill in the gaps - I know I've had to miss a lot out, but I will try and do a few more steps on the brightness and contrast and the background when I'm not so knackered.

[Jane Coram]

Here's where I've got to so far, but I might do a bit more work on it. It's a shame it wasn't a better photo.

Anyone can always pm me if you want to ask anything if it's easier!

Hugs

Janie

xxxxx