A day or two ago,
I wrote about how I had taken a baby photo and lightened it using the "Levels" adjustment in Photoshop, in order to make it good enough to send in a thank-you note.
I noted that it still wasn't a photo that I liked well enough on its own. Part of that was simply that the brightly colored quilt made by my friend, though it was fantastic in real life, was too
distracting a background for this photo. If my daughter had been wearing something
equally bright, and had been in light that helped her pop out of the
background a little better, it might have been different -- but as it
was, the quilt's squares overpowered her.
Fortunately, I have two sneaky tricks for solving that kind of problem. One is just to convert the photo to a black-and-white image.
Converting
to black and white is very helpful when you have a bright or
distracting background that is drawing attention away from your
subject. Both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements will let you do this,
either by pulling the slider for Saturation all the way to the left (which strips all color out of the photo), or
by using their black-and-white mode. In Elements, that option will turn a photo black-and-white, and give you a choice of some
types of black-and-white style -- portrait, newspaper, urban landscape. Below, you can see how this photo looked in Portrait mode (top) and Landscape mode (bottom).
(In regular Photoshop, it simply converts the photo to black-and-white
but offers a range of different sliders for lots of colors, so you can
impart your own emphases or even tints.)
A
word of warning, though. If your subject is not particularly distinct
-- that is, if he, she, or it has the same basic tones as the
background (picture a light brown dog against mid-gray tree trunks)
then the subject may still not pop sufficiently, even converted to
black-and-white. So even though I've found this solution useful in
other cases, such as when my daughter was eating a toy giraffe, below,
I didn't like the results for the quilt photo.
In the end, I turned to my other sneaky trick. Check back tomorrow for the scoop.
Posted
Mon, Dec 22 2008 10:34 AM
by
Julie