Photoshop Friday #5

Using an old photo in Photoshop can be challenging. Luckily there’s plenty you can do to revive them. Jeanne sent me a scan of this Russian officer which I really liked, so I decided to combine it with another one of her images—a photo of some logs she’d taken earlier this year at Artfest—and combine both into an ATC.
1. First, I cropped the Russian officer to 2.5” x 3.5” and used Adjustment>Levels, Adjustment>Contrast and Adjustment>Saturation to give him more definition.
2. Then I opened the photo of Jeanne’s logs and applied Levels, Contrast and Saturation again.
3. Using the Move tool, I transferred the Russian Officer over to this document and chose Lighten from the layers palette so the logs would show through him.
4. I shifted Jeanne’s guy around until the logs provided a textured frame, and then cropped to 2.5” x 3.5” without merging the images.
5. To make the logs stand out more, I applied Filters>Watercolor.
6. The Russian officer looked a little pixilated to me, so on this layer I used Filters>Palette Knife to soften him up. Note: you will have to play with the filter sliders to get the effect you want.
7. I saved this two-layered ATC, then resaved it merging the layers, and I was done.
The morale of this particular ATC is that if you like an image, don’t give up on it if it doesn’t do what you want it to do straight off. Play with the different options under Image>Adjustments and don’t be afraid to experiment with Filters and Layer effects.