Club notes 7 - Put a spotlight on a notice board & Enhance Photo taken into the sun

Put a spotlight on the notice board

Open DSC01361

Decide from where the light will come, say top right hand corner

Draw a circular Marquee (hold shift down) to just encompass the whole of the
notice board

Use the Polygonal Lasso tool to cut off at the right hand edge (Hold
Alt down before starting to draw) – the light will fall behind it there and will be out of sight of the observer

Selection | Save Selection 'round'

Zoom out so there is a significant border round the picture

(Ctrl and [ twice)

Add to selection with polygonal lasso from top right hand corner of
the window to edges of circle (hold shift to add)

Save selection as 'light beam'

Feather the selection with about 5 pixels

Create a new layer, call it 'beam'

Edit | Fill with white

Reduce the Opacity to about 20%

Load 'round' selection

Feather the selection with about 5 pixels

Create a new layer, call it 'round'

Edit | Fill with white

Change blend to Overlay

With selection still active, move to Background layer

Add a Brightness & Contrast adjustment layer with levels set to about +40

Reload 'round' selection

Add a Levels adjustment layer, drop input RHS slider to about 150

Reduce the Opacity to about 20%

Enhance photo taken with sun behind subject

As well as adding some brightness to the bride & groom, we will remove
a bit from the background and blur the whole except for the bride &
groom's faces. This will always look a bit artificial, but if used
carefully will not be too bad.

Open DSC01507

Select all (Ctrl and A)

Zoom in to the faces

Add a Levels Adjustment layer and bring up the right slider to about
160, this can always be adjusted later.

Use a soft, round 100 pixel brush at about 50% opacity on the
Adjustment layer to remove the adjustment round the faces

If you lose too much, swop foreground and background colours (X) and
paint it back in again

Zoom back to fit on screen (Ctrl and 0) then increase the brush size
and opacity to cover the rest of the picture

Go to the channels palette and load the Levels 1 mask as a selection
(Ctrl click on the icon)

Invert the selection (Shift and Ctrl and I)

Back in the Layers Palette, load another Levels Adjustment layer

Use the centre slider to reduce the brightness a bit

Duplicate the background layer (Ctrl and J)

Add some Lens blur, Filter | Blur | Lens Blur, probably about 15 to 20

Use a soft round Eraser to remove the blurred duplicate image round
the faces

Hold down the Alt key and click on the Background layer to see how the
picture started off; repeat to get back to the end result.

Finish it off by cropping to a suitable composition

Perhaps add a bit of vignetting as well

Reduce the Opacity to about 20%