Use magnetic lasso tool to highlight sections in photos

Posted on May 5, 2008 by admin

Personally I am a bit of a purist when it comes to photos, but recently I’ve had photos rejected from the sites I upload to and I’ve realized that everyone is photoshopping their photos now.

Here is a tutorial on highlighting a section of the photo and making the rest decolourized. This may work for say a fruit tree, where you want to highlight the strong colour of the fruit, but not the tree.

I started with a sample picture from Photoshop 7. As you will see there is no particular reason to alter this image, but I am using it as a demonstration.

I am wanting to highlight one of the balloons and leave the rest desaturated.

1. Open Photoshop and open the image you want to work with

2. Duplicate your photo and work on the copy

3. Select the magnetic lasso tool.

4. Set it like this: Feather, 0; width, 10 pixels; Edge Contrast, 10%; Frequency, 57. Tick anti-alias. You should already be in New selection mode.

5. Go to Edit>Preferences>Display & Cursors and in the Other Cursors select Precise and OK.

6. Zoom in if need be.

7. Left-click on the part of the photo you wish to highlight for the coloured part. Trace around the edge carefully and left click again exactly where you began. You will see little dots all around the item.

8. Go to Select> Inverse. Now you will see everything selected except the item.

9. Go to Image> Adjust>Desaturate.

10. Deselect and save.

Here is the finished product.

After

Panoramas made easy! (pixiq.com)

Using Paint to make a photo collage

Posted on February 4, 2008 by admin

: Image via Wikipedia

You’ll need to resize your photos to the final image size you want in a free program like Irfanview. Paint can’t do this.

One of the best ways to collect photos and to send them is the photo collage. Most people’s minds veer off the idea of making a photo collage. It seems too hard to contemplate. But it’s not hard. It’s fun!

There are tons of software programs, some free, available for download on the net that can help you create a photo collage that works. But in actuality, a little work with your friendly Paint program, usually installed on your hard drive, is all you need. It’s not as easy to control the final image size, but putting together a collage in Paint is easy.

Open a new Paint file, click the bottom right-hand corner dot and drag down and to the right to make the page the size you want. You can repeat this process to make it bigger and bigger. If you want a background that’s a different colour from the automatic white one, choose the colour you want from the colour toolbar, click the paint bucket icon, then click inside the page. This colour can be changed later using the same process.

Get all the photos you want together in a single folder, using thumbnails to view them at a glance. Right-click on the first photo and choose “Open with Paint.” From “Edit,” choose “Select All,” then “Copy.” Go back to your original collage page and choose “Paste” from “Edit.” Your photo will appear on the page and you can drag it to where you’d like it.

Continue the process with the other photos until you’ve finished your collage. By working with your picture programs, you’ll quickly become adept at your new hobby.

There is a new free way to create a collage video now. Try Animoto

You can see my quick test here.