- Joined
- Jan 1, 2013
- Messages
- 891
Hello!
I had a rare hour to spare today and thought I'd play with a fairly recent addition to my collection, a wonderful Bowie by Shawn McIntyre, MS, and give you a quick glance at one easy way to use a digital background for your images. The route I went here was a textured backdrop, but it could be - well - anything you want. The principles are essentially the same.
This is not a "finished" and through-edited image, but rather a quick snap that took me 30 minutes from shooting through converting, taking screenshots for the seperate steps all the way to saving the image for posting here. Writing this thread will take me much longer I am afraid...
It is by no means the end of the line, because the actual image tendering has seen hardly any effort. I hope it will give you an idea on how to go about adding a digital background to your images though. One could take this as a starting point for creating whichever look one might want to achieve.
This shot was meant to include the sheath and was done in my living room earlier today:
I will add "proper" images of the knife in question later on as well. Here is an older snap (also at home to show the other side as well for now):
I really like this knife a lot - what the pictures can't tell, is that this is one of those knives that simply "feel right" (for a lack of better words).
For starters, I will borrow a few of Shawn's words to describe the knife in more detail:
The blade is forged from 30mm round K990 which is Australian W2; Shawn told me he was lucky to get the last four bars ever sold in Australia. The wrought iron came from a large hinge Shawn's brother in law found in the Simpson desert on an outback camping trip. It used to be an old cattle station gate, and Shawn said it must have been over 100 years old. The handle is Australian Ringed Gidgee that Shawn collected himself. The trip he found it on was recorded in an article called "Gidgee Quest" in Knives Illustrated a few years ago. The sheath is hand tooled Wicket and Craig leather and the stud is made from the same wrought iron as the guard. The knife is 350mm long overall.
This is how it started out - the shot was done in RAW format and converted without any image tweaking in the RAW-converter, because I prefer to use the more controlled editing Photoshop (in my case) offers. The first thing I grabbed, was some uni-coloured papersheath and I decided to use that. Using a plain white backdrop (like a sheath of paper, or the white surface of a desk etc) will work at least as well. Contrasting colour backdrops work even better because of the easier masking-procedure in Photoshop.
The first step from here on was to load the file into my editing software of choice, Photoshop, and mask out the knive and sheath. There are a lot of ways to do so in Photoshop, some more intuitive than others, some more precise than others. Here I simply used the "magic wand" tool set to a sensitivity of "21", clicked a few times to achieve a pretty close masking and then went to the "refine edge" option Photoshop offers in newer editions. A little painting the edge with the "refinement brush", a feathering of 2,0 and upped contrast of 1% allready gave a pretty good result. Only the wooden blocks underneath the knife and sheath I had grabbed here required manual masking, I did with the "polygon-lasso-tool". I used this basic mask / selection for the rest of the editing and saved it via the "safe selection" option just to make sure... If this was a "real" edit, I would have used the "pen" tool to trace both knife and sheath for maximum control, precision and useability. For "home use", the "magic wand / refine edge" combo did a pretty good job though.
Here is a screenshot I took to show you the result of the masking-out process - this is not a step I would need, but I thought it was easiest way to show what was actually the purpose of the first step.
This screenshot shows what I was going for in the first place, a seperate layer with sheath and knife (to begin with) - this was done by using "duplicate layer" (Ctrl+J) while knife and sheath were masked out.
Btw, the "image quality" (or rather lack thereof) of these screenshots comes from these being just that, screenshots and low profile JPEG-saving.
Here is a screenshot of a 100% view showing how good a job the pretty automated masking did here:
You can allready see one field that will need attention later on, the slight purple edge-tint that was introduced by the coloured background. The screenshot does not really show it because of the crappy quality. It is clearly visible in the real file though.
I will stop here for now, because my "time-window" has expired for the afternoon and I will try to find a way to include the whole photoshop-window in the screenshots to show the levels and other dialogs for better understanding.
Hope this was not all too boring - it is MUCH harder than I thought to try and exlpain something like this without actually showing it (on video for example...). Oh, and continuation will be over at the photo subforum.
Best,
Alex
I had a rare hour to spare today and thought I'd play with a fairly recent addition to my collection, a wonderful Bowie by Shawn McIntyre, MS, and give you a quick glance at one easy way to use a digital background for your images. The route I went here was a textured backdrop, but it could be - well - anything you want. The principles are essentially the same.
This is not a "finished" and through-edited image, but rather a quick snap that took me 30 minutes from shooting through converting, taking screenshots for the seperate steps all the way to saving the image for posting here. Writing this thread will take me much longer I am afraid...
It is by no means the end of the line, because the actual image tendering has seen hardly any effort. I hope it will give you an idea on how to go about adding a digital background to your images though. One could take this as a starting point for creating whichever look one might want to achieve.This shot was meant to include the sheath and was done in my living room earlier today:
I will add "proper" images of the knife in question later on as well. Here is an older snap (also at home to show the other side as well for now):
I really like this knife a lot - what the pictures can't tell, is that this is one of those knives that simply "feel right" (for a lack of better words).
For starters, I will borrow a few of Shawn's words to describe the knife in more detail:The blade is forged from 30mm round K990 which is Australian W2; Shawn told me he was lucky to get the last four bars ever sold in Australia. The wrought iron came from a large hinge Shawn's brother in law found in the Simpson desert on an outback camping trip. It used to be an old cattle station gate, and Shawn said it must have been over 100 years old. The handle is Australian Ringed Gidgee that Shawn collected himself. The trip he found it on was recorded in an article called "Gidgee Quest" in Knives Illustrated a few years ago. The sheath is hand tooled Wicket and Craig leather and the stud is made from the same wrought iron as the guard. The knife is 350mm long overall.
This is how it started out - the shot was done in RAW format and converted without any image tweaking in the RAW-converter, because I prefer to use the more controlled editing Photoshop (in my case) offers. The first thing I grabbed, was some uni-coloured papersheath and I decided to use that. Using a plain white backdrop (like a sheath of paper, or the white surface of a desk etc) will work at least as well. Contrasting colour backdrops work even better because of the easier masking-procedure in Photoshop.
The first step from here on was to load the file into my editing software of choice, Photoshop, and mask out the knive and sheath. There are a lot of ways to do so in Photoshop, some more intuitive than others, some more precise than others. Here I simply used the "magic wand" tool set to a sensitivity of "21", clicked a few times to achieve a pretty close masking and then went to the "refine edge" option Photoshop offers in newer editions. A little painting the edge with the "refinement brush", a feathering of 2,0 and upped contrast of 1% allready gave a pretty good result. Only the wooden blocks underneath the knife and sheath I had grabbed here required manual masking, I did with the "polygon-lasso-tool". I used this basic mask / selection for the rest of the editing and saved it via the "safe selection" option just to make sure... If this was a "real" edit, I would have used the "pen" tool to trace both knife and sheath for maximum control, precision and useability. For "home use", the "magic wand / refine edge" combo did a pretty good job though.
Here is a screenshot I took to show you the result of the masking-out process - this is not a step I would need, but I thought it was easiest way to show what was actually the purpose of the first step.
This screenshot shows what I was going for in the first place, a seperate layer with sheath and knife (to begin with) - this was done by using "duplicate layer" (Ctrl+J) while knife and sheath were masked out.
Btw, the "image quality" (or rather lack thereof) of these screenshots comes from these being just that, screenshots and low profile JPEG-saving.
Here is a screenshot of a 100% view showing how good a job the pretty automated masking did here:
You can allready see one field that will need attention later on, the slight purple edge-tint that was introduced by the coloured background. The screenshot does not really show it because of the crappy quality. It is clearly visible in the real file though.
I will stop here for now, because my "time-window" has expired for the afternoon and I will try to find a way to include the whole photoshop-window in the screenshots to show the levels and other dialogs for better understanding.
Hope this was not all too boring - it is MUCH harder than I thought to try and exlpain something like this without actually showing it (on video for example...). Oh, and continuation will be over at the photo subforum.
Best,
Alex
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