[PS] Lomography Effect

After reading the newspaper about the lomography, I have a sudden urge to find out how to do it using photoshop since now we’re using digital camera more than those film camera which will give us this kind of effects. Here is one of the tutorials that I followed, http://tutorialpulse.com/56/lomo/

The picture comes out as below:

Original photo looks like this,

My first attempt may not be a perfect nice picture, so I will keep trying for more. Stay tuned.

Updated: Someone told me that I should put all the four edges with black colour.

[PS] Picasa – Slides Presentation

Another thing that I tried from the Picasa software is the slides presentation/video presentation. It takes me sometimes to figure out how to use this features and I tested for both non-audio and with audio. It’s pretty easy again.

I selected some pictures from my folder and then clicked the button – create movie presentation on the middle top.

It will bring me to another tab whereby I can I do some settings there. It allows us to have audio included into the presentation. It supports wma and mp3 files. So, I simply loaded 1 song into it.

Other settings are:-
Option – where it’s the option for the audio that I have loaded in.
Transition – the slides/pictures transition with the duration of seconds.
Dimension – the movie size.

I can preview it by clicking the play button at the bottom of the preview box.

If I want to add more pictures, I can go to Clips tab to add more pictures by clicking the Get More button. Once the pictures are loaded into the tab, select the pictures and click the plus (+) sign.

If I want to change the text of the slide, I can do so by going to the Slides tab and select the font, style, size, colours and alignments.

Finally, I can click the create movie button and it will start making the wmv file and it stores at My Pictures > Picasa.

[PS] Picasa – Simple Collage

I have installed Picasa software for my desktop for the scanner input initially. However, I saw my friend is using it to do collages and uploaded to Facebook. So, I give a try by picking up its quick tutorials from Picasa Help, http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=14190

Under the Photo Edits, it teaches you how to use the Basic Fixes features, Tuning features and Effects features under the 3 tabs on the left.

Most of the features can be applied by just clicking a button and the effect will immediately preview on the screen. It is pretty simple to use.

Next, I tried the collage feature by following the tutorial from this link, http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=19539&cbid=18g99ooqtcqso&src=cb&lev=topic

Again, it’s not hard to follow. I can choose its collage styles and apply other necessary settings into the collage before saving it. One of the example that I tried is applying the Mosaic setting, increased the grid spacing and clicked the shuffle pictures or you can drag and drop the pictures at your desired boxes.

The final outcome will be displayed at the right hand side as below:-

Click Create collage and the collage will be save into the My Pcitures > Picasa folder.

[PS] Black and White with Colour

When I saw my friend’s photo album in which a grayscale picture of people tossing the Chinese tea glasses, I made a surprised expression. It is because I saw the glasses were in colour mode with grayscale background.

I wondered how it can be done. I asked my cousin, maybe it’s 2 different layers. Then, I searched online and I found few nice tutorials.

If use the Photoshop CS2, goto Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. It will turn the picture into black and white as another layer. Then, select the history brush tool and select the colours that need to repaint the picture to restore its original colours. Use the undo button to undo any mistakes. It also suggests to use zoom to enlarge the picture so that the picture can be painted correctly.

Another example that I found from the internet is from this link,
http://www.astahost.com/info.php/Photoshop-Tutorial-Adding-Color-Black-White-Photo_t7741.html

It uses Photoshop Cs3 and using the similar method as the above. After you have created another layer using the desaturate function, it uses eraser tool to reveal the actual colours of the picture.

It will take some time and hard work to make it nice and then, it’s done!

As for me, I’m using Photoshop Element and I found out that it has a special tool for it. It’s not an one magic touch to turn the picture into black and white with colour. It is less tedious work than Photoshop CS2’s method.

Select the Smart Brush Tool and then, from the above toolbox, click on the dropdown for the style picker on the right. Select Reverse – Black and White. From the sample picture itself, it suggests that it will give us a result that we want. The picture will turn into black and white colour.

Then, use the cross arrow to select the area that you want to change into colour mode.

Notice that the selection made is not a perfect one, some extra selections at the side of the edges. It can be removed. Select the icon of a brush with a minus sign. It will cut out the unwanted area that you select again. Spend a bit time in making the selections and it will turn nice.

Yup, it’s done!.

[PS] Making Simple Banner

Few days ago I created my own banner for my food blog and I tried to use gradient to make the background colours of the banner. I mixed and matched the colours of the gradient from the properties box before I applied it. Then, I selected my picture and cropped it according to the size that I wanted.

Next, I dragged the picture on to the background’s layer that I’ve created and positioned it to the right side of the banner. After that, I typed in a simple caption on the banner and selected white colour as my main font’s colour against the dark background that I have. I wanted to do some shadow effect on my words. So, I duplicated the same line of words and changed the font’s colour to black colour and reduced the opacity of the words to 30% so that it looked like a shadow to the white fonts. Somehow, I didn’t feel nice with the shadow thingy behind the white fonts, so I changed it to another way. I transformed the black colour font’s words by 180 degree horizontally so that the words now look like upside down and I kept the opacity to 30%. It seemed nice to be now.

And, it’s completed.