Living Concrete
So I was taking a "photo walk" around my neighborhood and I noticed this interesting concrete sculpture in front of a building and, of course, stopped to take a few pix. A couple days later, I was at a Photoshop lecture (via the LAPUG - Los Angeles Photoshop User Group) and learned a new tool/technique I wanted to try out. The two -- sculpture and technique -- seemed made for each other since the original photo was a bit dull (see first image below). I'm sure many of you already know this technique but for those who don't, here goes ...
NOTE: This works exactly the same in Photoshop Elements. In fact, I use PSE 9 myself!
This is a painting technique which allows you to color an object without losing it's texture or pattern or details!
1. Select an object whose color you would like to change (and it doesn't matter what color it is in the first place; it could be red or blue or whatever).
2. Set the foreground color to whatever you wish and select a brush.
3. Change the mode on the PS horizontal toolbar to either hue or color (more on which in a minute).
4. Paint away!
You'll see that only the color of the object will change, not its details; whereas if you leave the mode in normal, you'll change the color but it will hide all detail in the object. You could, of course, do your painting on a blank layer and then change the opacity of that layer to see the underlying detail, but you'll lose the vibrancy of the color.
Hue versus color. As far as I can tell, if the object is filled with saturated color in the first place, such as a red shirt, either of those modes will work fine; but if the object's color is not saturated (such as the concrete I was trying to paint), color works better. What hue does is mimic the saturation level of the underlying color: if it's faint, then the painted result will also be faint.
Pretty cool, huh :-)? I hope some of you have fun with this technique if you haven't tried it before!
Oh, I almost forgot ... when I was finished painting the concrete sculpture (see second photo below), I thought the result was still pretty uninteresting so I played with a bunch of filters (using FilterForge) and overlays till I got something I liked.
Living Concrete
So I was taking a "photo walk" around my neighborhood and I noticed this interesting concrete sculpture in front of a building and, of course, stopped to take a few pix. A couple days later, I was at a Photoshop lecture (via the LAPUG - Los Angeles Photoshop User Group) and learned a new tool/technique I wanted to try out. The two -- sculpture and technique -- seemed made for each other since the original photo was a bit dull (see first image below). I'm sure many of you already know this technique but for those who don't, here goes ...
NOTE: This works exactly the same in Photoshop Elements. In fact, I use PSE 9 myself!
This is a painting technique which allows you to color an object without losing it's texture or pattern or details!
1. Select an object whose color you would like to change (and it doesn't matter what color it is in the first place; it could be red or blue or whatever).
2. Set the foreground color to whatever you wish and select a brush.
3. Change the mode on the PS horizontal toolbar to either hue or color (more on which in a minute).
4. Paint away!
You'll see that only the color of the object will change, not its details; whereas if you leave the mode in normal, you'll change the color but it will hide all detail in the object. You could, of course, do your painting on a blank layer and then change the opacity of that layer to see the underlying detail, but you'll lose the vibrancy of the color.
Hue versus color. As far as I can tell, if the object is filled with saturated color in the first place, such as a red shirt, either of those modes will work fine; but if the object's color is not saturated (such as the concrete I was trying to paint), color works better. What hue does is mimic the saturation level of the underlying color: if it's faint, then the painted result will also be faint.
Pretty cool, huh :-)? I hope some of you have fun with this technique if you haven't tried it before!
Oh, I almost forgot ... when I was finished painting the concrete sculpture (see second photo below), I thought the result was still pretty uninteresting so I played with a bunch of filters (using FilterForge) and overlays till I got something I liked.