Photoshop CSI edition.

This version has the CSI Face Aware algorithm that will render a perfect face from only two out of focus pixels…

Many of us have watched CSI, NCIS, Hawaii 5-0 and have seen this amazing version of Photoshop at work. I love the fact that police forces with ever shrinking budgets have better computers than Star Trek (200+ years in the future) We marvel at 48″ touch screen flat panels that work like enormous iPads. I sit in awe with their 3D holographic projected display…

A lifetime ago (late 1970′s) I was a R.C.M.P. Forensic Photographer-Technician, which is pretty much our national CIS.

With a little tongue-in-cheek, I created the new Photoshop box…

Darrell Larose
Ottawa

43 years

Today marks 43 years since my Dad passed away at the too young age of 45.

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Today is 43 years since Sgt D’Arcy Donald Larose CD passed away. He was my Dad, and I still miss him deeply. I raise a beer to toast his memory, the beer I never got to drink with him.

I think of Dad often, but wish I could understand why life deals us the hands it does. What is the meaning of our Life’s Journey? All my memories are of you and the love and pride you had of your family, you always had time for all of us.

This is the only photo I have of Dad with all the siblings together. This is how I will always remember Dad. Dad will never die as long as he lives in our hearts and souls.

My beautiful Niece Nicole honoured his memory by naming her beautiful son Kaedan Darcy Larose. It is truly sad that D’Arcy never got to enjoy his Grandchildren and Great Grandchildren, I know he would beam with pride over each one of them.

My God Dad I still miss you, I only think of you when the Last Post is played. Someone once told me I had an Angel looking over me. I know that you are that Angel, still a lone sentry watching over us.

Dad spent his entire adult life in uniform, he fought, Britain 1942, Invasion of Sicily 1943, Italian Campaign (included Monte Cassino, and Liberation of Rome) 1943-44, France &  Belgium 1944, Liberation of Holland 1945,  for our freedoms and stayed in uniform in peacetime.

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“Love is stronger than death even though it can’t stop death from happening, but no matter how hard death tries it can’t separate people from love. It can’t take away our memories either. In the end, life is stronger than death.” (unknown)

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief…and unspeakable love.” (Washington Irving)

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Life’s journey doesn’t end with death, it is a new beginning. Follow your heart my friend. As we travel in our journey remember fondly those who cross out paths, albeit often too briefly. It is this journey that makes us what we are.

Playing around with Photoshop

I tried the Photohop “Theshold” adjustment, and got these interesting results. In order of my preference.

My second choice would be,

And my final choice, of the three would be.

These are fun, as in the darkroom days we would have copied the image to Litho film, or made a paper negative and gone numerous generations to bump up the contrast. All time & materials.

Darrell

 

Worth 1000

I am a member of Worth 1000 for several years. I have entered two pieces so far. Both have done well.

What is Worth1000?
Worth1000 is a collection of online arenas where the worlds best artists compete daily in creative competitions. Worth1000 has hosted thousands of daily competitions since it launched and is well known across the web for inadvertently triggering hoaxes, celebrity amusement and even major media scandals when an entry created here is mistaken for real. (Seriously, the Pentagon once issued a statement distancing itself from Worth1000 images).

That being said, here are my entries:

Here I entered a Photoshop Contest, and placed 12 out of 48 total.

http://www.worth1000.com/entries/452938/me-as-zeus

Contest Rules

Sculpture can be beautiful and stunningly realistic. Photoshop can breathe new life into these stone-cast images preserved forever in suspended animation, and that’s just what we’d like for you to do. For this contest, take a manmade sculpture and show us the life held captive within it.

Have fun, keep it clean, be creative. Don’t forget the cliche list. As always, quality is a must. We will remove poor entries no matter how much we like you. You’ll have 48 hours for this contest, so make your submission count.

I merged my face into Zeus, and chipped away the stone so have my face emerged. PhotoShop tools included drop shadow and freehand selection to remove the stone.

My best entry was in a pure photography contest, here I placed first out of 39 entries. Worth 1000 gets more entrants in the PhotoShop and Illustration classes.

http://www.worth1000.com/entries/416901/autumn-sumac

This is a Advanced level contest
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In this contest we want you to bring us closer to autumn, show us the details. This does not necessarily mean we want macro shots, although they will be allowed, but simply that we don’t want the whole forest. If a whole person could fit in your image, you’re too far away.

I am happy with both images.

Darrell Larose

Colour or Black and White?

I have been playing around with this image:

A boring snapshot, with some kitchen equipment in the background. I played around in Photoshop CS2 a bit and tweaked the background a bit.

I then went and adjusted the levels, desaturated, and nudged the curves a bit for this version.

The final product is just an online profile photo. I could have saved some Photoshop work if I had set-up my studio lights and background. But The end result would be about the same amount of time.

Darrell

Early Digital Photography

Way back in the old days I worked in a large commercial studio in Ottawa. We like most studios shot weddings (fun actually) family portraits and commercial. Product shots were often shot on large-format up to 8×10″ depending on the client and art director’s requirements.

When I ended up in retail I was handed a 2.1 megapixel Olympus C2000Z point and shoot camera around 2003 and was requested to produce work for web, eBay and in store POS materials. I was recalling the days of sweep tables, 4 -2400WS stobes, huge softboxes and the related hardware…

But never one to not accept a challenge I worked with this toy digi-cam. The store did have a used small plexi sweep table that we seconded to the task. Here are two of my favourite images from the days

The store became the exclusive Voigtländer dealer in the Ottawa region, but the official importer’s photos weren’t really that good. So I used my mini-studio and created this POS piece of the Voigtländer Bessa R w/ the 12mm Ultra-Wide lens.

Both were close cut with Photoshop 5.5 back then… Could I have done better with a 4×5 Sinar and digital back… probably! But having a handle on the limitations of the camera, one can achieve results.

Darrell

From RAW to Final Image

I took this outdoor portrait of an Ottawa model. The day was overcast which made for a lovely soft light. The World’s biggest “softbox”. I shot in Pentax (PEF) RAW 12 bit format. I’ll start with the Original image converted to png and downsized from the 3008×2004 pixel (12.6 MB file size)

Pentax *ist D, SMC Pentax-M 85mm f:2 lens. PEF format, 1/125 sec @ f:5.6

Overall not a bad image, the camera default 2:3 aspect ratio will be cropped so I composed the shot to allow cropping from the top down to a 4:3 format.

I was content with this low-key image for a bit, but decided to see how it would work as a Black and White image. So I did a B&W conversion with Photoshop CS2.

I always add just a slight hint of warm tone (sepia) to my digital Black & White images. Often not even that apparent but I find they print a bit better.

Finally while playing around with the RAW(PEF) in Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta 2 I saw what the final image could be. I adjusted the levels and warmed the photograph up a little. That created to me a nicer image.

None are really better, just different interpretations. Just like when I used to go into my darkroom with a negative.

The final image did win an Award of Excellence as mentioned in my previousBlog post.

Darrell Larose

B&W Conversion with Photoshop

Many will just go grey scale, while others will desaturate. This is really the best method. Starting with this digital image.

Pentax *ist D, SMC Pentax-M 85mm f:2 lens, Bowens Prolite 100, 1m softbox. Bowens Prolite 50 background, and reflector

You can play with the channel mixer. Here are some preset settings which I found on-line:

Image)Adjustments)Channel Mixer and check the monochrome box. Play with the top three sliders. Try to make them add up to 100%.

After tweaking the Channel Mixers, using the Agfapan 100 settings I got this result. Select the monochrome radio button at the bottom of the Channel Mixer dialog box. You may want to adjust manual levels, or brightness and contrast to fine tune. This is like changing  paper grades in a darkroom.

Here’s some film emulation suggested settings:

Agfa 200X: 18,41,41
Agfapan 25: 25,39,36
Agfapan 100: 21,40,39
Agfapan 400: 20,41,39

Ilford Delta 100: 21,42,37
Ilford Delta 400: 22,42,36
Ilford Delta 400 Pro: 31,36,33
Ilford FP4: 28,41,31
Ilford HP5: 23,37,40
Ilford Pan F: 33,36,31
Ilford SFX: 36,31,33
Ilford XP2 Super: 21,42,37

Kodak Tmax 100: 24,37,39
Kodak Tmax 400: 27,36,37
Kodak Tri-X: 25,35,40

And these basic ones:

Normal Contrast: 43,33,30
High Contrast: 40,34,60

or alternatively try this …….

Step 1. Take your original colour image as one layer. Below it add a 50% grey fill layer. Change the blend mode of your original colour image to luminosity. You should now have a true B&W tonal image.

Step 2. Above of your colour image add a 20% (light) grey layer. Change the blend mode of this layer to colour burn and adjust the opacity to suit. (somewhere around 50%). If you want to tint your image pick a 20% tone of say blue instead…..

Step 3. Above these layers create a levels adjustment layer and adjust to suit. Drag the end sliders in until where the graph starts to rise. Do the same with a curves adjustment layer if you fancy..

(because all of these are done in layers you can waste endless hours playing with them….but surely you have better things to do?….)

Many modern dSLR have a B&W mode, and you can use your B&W contrast filters, but you are commited to B&W when you do that.

Darrell

Transformations (or how I put my self in the picture)

I have been asked at times how I make some of my Photoshop transformations. Example 1, me as Spock.

Totally logical

Well sometimes I’ll see an image that matches an existing headshot I already have in my archives. By using the layers feature and some masking I can often merge the two images together.  I may have to adjust contrast and colour balance to aid in the transformation.

Not a transporter accident

Next example is a movie poster from SAW V.  This came about around Hallowe’en I saw the poster, so I grabbed a profile shot of myself.

The SAW poster was in black & white, so I did my normal layers, adjustments, resized my face to match. I also went and colourized the B&W image to get a sort of colour version. I used the eraser tool at different densities to merge the “mask” and my profile…

Result is this…

Darrell

PhotoShop as a Tool

I have enjoyed the power of PhotoShop to retouch images, ever since I tried it (ver.2.5) in film and darkroom based photography this image could be tweaked a little in the darkroom…

As a photographer I had control of the lighting, and film choice, ie; whether I would use a medium contrast film or a higher contrast film to punch the image up a bit. I could pop on a soft-focus filter (my favorite was the B+W, WZ-1). But I would have to consider retouching to fix a few blemishes on the skin, even pro models will sometimes get a pimple on a shoot day. I would also have to have a make-up artist on hand so I didn’t have unevenly applied make-up. With the digital domain I can now transform the image of Becky Yuen into what I had visualized …

The light grey background has been turned black, the make-up has been smoothed out, veins in the eye cleaned up. And lipstick colour changed a bit. I can still go further, but many go too far with PhotoShop and plasticize the model…

Darrell