Showcase your photos

This fun Photoshop technique lets you showcase your photos on a computer screen or billboard and it uses the vanishing point filter to distort and crop the image.

The Vanishing Point Filter was first introduced with Photoshop CS2 so you will need Photoshop CS2 or later for this project.

Step 1
Open an image of a computer screen (or a billboard) in Photoshop and open the image you want to place on it.

The Sacré Coeur image is mine and the computer screen is © iStockPhoto, Dmitry Kutlayev.

Size the image to place on the computer screen to the approximate size the image needs to be having regard to the size of the computer screen image. The computer screen I used is 1600 x 1200 so I sized my photo smaller than this.

Step 2
Create a new blank layer on the computer screen image (Layer > New > Layer) and then switch to the image you want to add to the screen or billboard. Choose Select > All and then Edit > Copy. Return to the computer screen image.

Step 3
Choose Filter > Vanishing Point and click Ok. This opens the image in the vanishing point filter.

Step 4
Here you can create the perspective grid for the image. To do this, click the Create Plane tool and click at all four corners of the area that you want to paste the photograph into.

If the grid is red, it is not a grid that can be used so you need to readjust the corners until it turns blue. You can adjust the grid size if that makes it easier to see.

Step 5
Once the grid is in place, press Ctrl + V to paste the image from the clipboard into the filter.

Step 6
Click the Transform tool and size the image to approximately the size it needs to be.

Drag the image over the grid and you will notice that it reshapes to conform to the perspective of the grid.


Step 7
Size the image so it fits in the area covered by the grid. Any portion of the image that extends beyond the grid is automatically hidden.

Step 8
When you are done, click Ok to return to Photoshop. Your image should be neatly aligned inside the screen.

To finish, you can add a curves adjustment layer that lightens the image to match the screen lightness. You can also add a gradient to the curves layer mask to adjust the lightening of the image to match the original screen lights and darks.


Step 9
I also added a shadow to the layer by selecting the layer and select the Add a Layer Style button at the foot of the layer palette. Select Inner Shadow and create an inner shadow for the image so it appears more realistically situated on the screen.

Using a similar technique, you can place a photo on an image of a billboard or any other similar flat but angled surface.

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Five secrets of the Photoshop crop tool

If you’re used to clicking the crop tool dragging the tool over your image and pressing Enter, it may surprise you to know that there are other options that you can use when cropping in Photoshop.

Here are my five "best-kept secrets" of the Photoshop crop tool.

1 Rotate as you crop

When you drag the crop marquee over an image, you can rotate it by letting go the mouse button and drag on one of the corners of the marquee to rotate it. When you double click you will rotate and crop the image at the one time.

2 Perspective crop
You can fix perspective at the same time as cropping by first dragging a crop marquee over the image. Let go the mouse button and click the Perspective checkbox on the toolbar. Now when you drag on a corner of the marquee the corners move independently of each other allowing you to position the marquee along the lines you want to crop to in the image. When you crop the image it is cropped and distorted to create a rectangular image. You can use this to fix distorted perspective in your images.

3 The crop that’s not a crop
Once you have selected an area to crop, you do not actually have to crop it, and you can, instead, simply hide the cropped area rather than permanently deleting it.

To do this, you need to be working on an image layer and not the background layer so double-click the background layer and convert it to a regular layer. Drag a crop rectangle over the image and from the tool options bar, select the Hide option. When you double click the cropped area will be hidden but still accessible.
You can now select the Move tool and reposition the image inside the area that you have cropped it to. This is useful when you want to crop an image to 4 x 6 in size and you want to experiment with different ways to compose the image within this area.

4 Create and use crop presets
When you click the Crop tool you can choose from various presets by clicking the dropdown list to the immediate right of the tool in the tool options bar. Click a preset and drag on the image to create the crop marquee. You can turn a portrait crop to a landscape one (or vice versa) by selecting the preset, drag over the image and then rotate the marquee ninety degrees by holding the Shift key as you do so to constrain the rotation to multiples of 15 degrees.

To create your own preset, set the width, height and resolution in the tool options bar and then click the fly-out menu for the crop tool and select New Tool Preset. Give your preset a name and click Ok. It will appear at the foot of the presets list and you can select and use it anytime in the future.


5 Crop to the same size
To crop two images to the same size, select the Crop tool and make active the image you want to match the size of. Click the Front Image button on the tool options bar to configure the Crop tool with the dimensions of the front image.

Select the image you want to crop and drag a crop rectangle over that image. When you double-click to finish, the image will be cropped to the same size and resolution as the original image - in some situations this may mean that the image will have increased in size.

Warning:
If the Crop tool isn't working as expected, press Esc to exit the tool and click the Clear button to reset it - some settings are sticky and you may not remember you had set it to special crop settings earlier in an editing session.

Next time you go to crop an image, remember that there are more options for the crop tool than may initially meet the eye.

Simple Lightroom image fixing workflow

Whether it’s a photograph of mom that you’re sending to her or an image that you’re preparing to print, most photos can use some fixing before they’re ready to be shared or used.

Here’s a quick and easy Lightroom workflow that I apply to most every day images before sending them to family and friends, posting them to Flickr or my blog or printing them for a paper based photography project.

If you’re new to photo editing or to Lightroom, this step by step process should get you on the way to fixing your images.


Step 1
The first step to fixing an image is typically to straighten and crop it so that you remove any areas that you don’t want to include in the final image.

To help you apply the rule of thirds to your crop, in Lightroom the crop grid, by default, shows a 'rule of thirds' grid over your photo.

Place an object of interest in the photograph over the intersection between the gridlines or place the horizon or another strong horizontal line along one of the horizontal lines to achieve a pleasing composition.

Here I’ve cropped and sized the image to place the waterline along the top line of the grid.


Step 2
Adjust the Exposure by dragging on the Exposure slider. This image is a little underexposed and the histogram falls well short of reaching the far right of the chart area. Increasing the Exposure fixes this.


Step 3
To test to see if you need to use the Recovery slider to recover blown highlights, hold the Alt key (Option on the Mac) as you click on the Recovery slider handle. If you see light areas on the image, drag to the right to recover them.

Here I artificially increased the Exposure before doing this to show you what the image will look like if you need to use the Recovery slider. If you see something like this on your image and if it is nicely exposed, drag the Recovery slider to the right to remove/reduce these areas.


Step 4
Hold the Alt key (Option on the Mac) and drag the Black slider to the right until you see the smallest hint of black appearing in the image. You use this slider to ensure that your image has some blacks in it.

By now the histogram should extend to the very left and right of the chart area ensuring that your image has a good tonal range.


Step 5
If you have some areas that are clipped you will see white arrows in the histogram area. You can hold your mouse over these to see the clipped areas on the image. If areas are clipped you will have blown out highlights or plugged shadows which are generally undesirable.

Here I have over adjusted the Black Clipping slider so there are some plugged shadows that you can see colored blue on the image.


Step 6
You can use the White Balance tools to adjust the white balance in the image. Drag the Temp slider to the right to add warmth to the image or to the left to make it colder. Dragging to the right warms the image by adding peach/orange tones to it and dragging to the left cools the image by adding blue tones.

If you're shooting in RAW or DNG then there will be a range of options available from the White Balance dropdown list.

Here I've added a lot of warmth to the image to show what is possible.


Step 7
You can also adjust Brightness and Contrast although I prefer to skip these adjustments and add some Clarity to adjust and sharpen the midtones and some Vibrance to boost the color in the undersatuated areas in the image.

From here I would sharpen the image and it's ready to go.

In a future post I'll explain the basics of sharpening in Lightroom.

Changing color in Photoshop

Sometimes in post production you will want to change the colors of an object in your photos. Photoshop has a number of tools that you can use to change the color in an image, and in this post I’ll show you some of these which you can use without having to make a selection on the image.

Before I begin, a word about the photographs I'm using. They were shot by Jacinta Oaten, a 15 year old Australian sports photographer with a promising career ahead of her as you can see. Jacinta kindly let me browse her photo collection to select some images to use for this post - thanks Jacinta!

Color Replacement Tool
On the Photoshop toolbar sharing a position with the Brush tool is the Color Replacement tool. For this tool you’ll need to select the color that you want to paint with and then click and paint over the image.



The tool reads the color immediately under the cursor as you start painting and looks for similar colors to paint over. This allows you to paint somewhat outside the lines and still replace only the color that you want to replace.

Using the Tool Options you can set the Tolerance to so, for example, if you are recoloring an area that is a fairly solid color, you can use a low tolerance to isolate the color. On the other hand if you're recoloring an area where there is quite a bit of variety in the color because of shadows or texture, for example, you can increase the tolerance to recolor a wider range of colors similar to those under the cursor.

As you paint, you can let go the mouse button and click again somewhere else to change the sampled color so you can replace a different shade of that color, for example.

This tool is handy for detailed work as it allows you to resample and paint a number of times so that you can get in around certain areas avoiding other areas if you don’t want to paint over them.

The options with this tool include the Limits option which allows you to specify whether only areas of color contiguous to those under the sampling point of the brush are altered or if all matching areas under the brush are painted over. The Find Edges option attempts to preserve edge detail as you paint. Here I used Discontiguous to ensure the yellow inside the advertiser's names on the bike was changed too.



The Color Replacement Tool must be used on a layer that has colored pixels in it so it’s best to duplicate the background layer and work on the duplicate layer. Then, if you make a mistake you can mask out the changes that you’ve made to the duplicate later to recover detail from the image layer underneath.

Selective Color
The Selective Color tool lets you adjust the colors in the image by selecting which colors to adjust and then adding more or less of another color to them. To use it, select Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color. Using it as an adjustment layer fix lets you later remove the recoloring from any part of the image by painting on the adjustment layer mask.



In the dialog you can select the color to alter from the Colors dropdown list. In this image I wanted to change the Reds so they are selected.

The color sliders below this show Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. It helps to understand these colors and their opposites; Cyan is opposite Red, Magenta is opposite Green and Yellow is opposite Blue.

So, for example, if you drag the magenta slider to the right, you will add magenta to the image but if you drag it to the left, you will add green - its opposite. The other sliders work in the same way.



This tool works well when you have an image such as this one where most of the color that you want to change (the reds) only appear in the area that you want to change and not elsewhere in the image. To change the color, drag the sliders to add more of the colors you want to add and to remove the opposite color.



Sometimes multiple colors contribute the color to the image so here I've knocked out some of the pink tones in the bike windscreen by adjusting the Magenta color too.

Replace Color
Another tool that you can use to change color is the Replace Color tool. To see this tool at work, select Image > Adjustments > Replace Color. This tool must be applied as an adjustment and cannot be used as an adjustment layer so, again, apply it to a duplicate of the background layer.



With this tool you click on an area in the image that you want to change the color of. Click the Add to Sample eyedropper and then click to select more of the color to change.

You'll need to click on all the colors in the image that represent the color that you need to alter. You can test the result by dragging on the Hue slider at the foot of the dialog to see if the selection is accurate and that the color change is affecting the area you want to affect.

The Fuzziness slider lets you add more or less adjacent pixels to the fix - use it to obtain a smoother change from one color to the next. When you’re done, click Ok. Use the Saturation and Lightness sliders to tweak the effect.

The Localized Color Clusters checkbox can help refine the color selection so it's worth testing to see if it makes a difference. Here it isolated the selected colors and removed a problem that I had with the number and the silver metal of the bike being recolored where it shouldn't have been.



When you apply this fix to a duplicate of the original image layer you can add a layer mask to the top layer and use it to mask out any areas that are affected by the recoloring which should not be affected.

Choosing the right tool for the job
There are just some of the tools you can use to recolor an image. You will find one may work better than another depending on the image you are working on so experiment to see what works best for you.