An example of Photoshop manipulation

This page shows how much one can do with Adobe Photoshop (and the associated Adobe Photoshop Lightroom) these days.

Here is an image I took at Mom's 70th birthday party (April 2009). It was taken about three seconds after the image before it and the flash had not had time to "recycle" and hence the flash did not fire at all—the picture was far too dark. Here is a resized version of the JPEG image as it came out of the camera:

in-camera JPEG underexp

Fortunately, I shot in a mode ("RAW+JPEG") which gives me a "RAW" image where one has a lot more control to fix things. So, I made a massive exposure shift (equivalent to increasing exposure 13 times!) in the RAW image and saved it as another version. This is really "noisy" (notice the green speckles and horizontal banding throughout the image) but salvages an otherwise unusable photo.

JPEG from RAW

Sheryl liked this photo as a choice to use on the 50th wedding anniversary invitation (as the "Now" of "Then.. and ...Now" pair). But there were other elements, such as Adam, looking on and smiling (partially blocked). So I sampled the color of the background screen and painted him out:

painting out Adam

I then figured that this plain background looked too plain. (Every panel had a painting, it's just that Adam was blocking one.) So I copied a vase from another part of the background screen and pasted in as much as would fit:

putting vase into place

At this point, I cropped it into a feathered oval for Sheryl's purposes and adjusted colors and contrast to minimize the noise.

first oval crop

Only then I noticed two other visual elements and quickly painted over them, too: Part of Sophie's head and Mom's fork!

two more items to remove

And all of that yielded the final image used for the invitation:

final product
David Friedlander
28 August 2009