Snap Shot: When Josiah Lurked at VFTW

Before each season at Vote for the Worst, names of people who auditions would leak. Some accurate, some not but it gave worsters a chance to do some investigating and one of the names that came up is a kid named Josiah Leming.

I always keep an eye on all the threads (this was around late December) just so I will be ready with ideas if ever an inspiration for a chop comes to mind. Sometimes just randomly chopping somebody on another person can be unexpectedly funny.

At the time, everybody has just survived the wrath of Chris Crocker’s rant on Britney Spears. So I figured Josiah + Crocker = a chop? maybe? Partially I was bored and needed somebody to chop. LOL

After posting the picture (above), people who visited his myspace noticed he used the image to subtly acknowledge he is lurking at VFTW. Remember under contractual obligations he cannot post or talk about anything regarding Idol until after his episode aired – that is, if he didn’t make top 24.

Here are some screencaps – courtesy of Adam.

I must say Josiah is awesome for ‘getting’ what VFTW chops are about.

Building A Chop – Theo Things A Dueth 1

This tutorial shows how to combine two images into one. Plus it’s a great practice of all the different techniques we’ve learned so far. Below are the images we will use.

Syesha.jpg

Theo.jpg

Open both images in Photoshop. Press V to select the Move Tool.

(Win: CTRL / Mac: CMD)

Drag Theo into Syesha. Zoom out and resize Theo by pressing CTRL-T. Drag the upper right anchor point while holding the SHIFT key to reduce proportianlly.

Watch carefully and stop when you think he and Syesha are proportional.

At this point you will notice that if we move Theo to the left edge there isn’t enough room to show him. So we will make the canvas bigger using the CROP tool.

First, move the resized Theo in the middle of the document. Select the CROP Tool (Press C).

Drag the tool along the whole document then drag the left anchor point more to the left as shown below.

Hit the ENTER/RETURN key to crop the image bigger.

Reposition Theo by aligning the top of his piano to the top of Syesha’s piano (below).

Zoom (CTRL-SPACE-Drag the mouse) into Theo and put a path around him with the Pen Tool (Press P).

Since the background is dark we don’t have to be so exact on the clipping path.

Make the path into a selection (check previous tutorials).

Invert the selection by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-I. Press delete to remove the background on Theo. Press CTRL-D to deselect.

Select the Marquee Tool (Press M) and dragging the mouse from the upper right of our document, make a selection as shown below.

Then go to the Background layer and copy the selection to a new layer (CTRL-J).

Go to EDIT>TRANSFORM>FLIP HORIZONTAL to flip the layer. Move it all the way to the left until the left edge of the layer snaps to the left edge of the document.

At this point let’s see what we need to fix:

1. The pianos have different colors. We need to make a smooth transition in the obvious seam.

2. Same with the background as number 1.

3. We need to get rid of the person (duplicated) in this background.

4. Theo doesn’t have enough image – he’s cut off at the waist.

To Be Continued…

You can try and figure out how to fix all four points. Answers will be in the next blog post.

Masking and Extracting Hair

One of the most frustrating challenges facing choppers is the extracting of hair. The idea of spending more time than needed just to mask hair turns everyone off into chopping. Worry no more. Here’s a simple and fast technique to extract hair.

We’ll use the image hairtest.jpg below.

PREPARATION.

Open the image then select the Lasso Tool (Press L).

Roughly select the edge of the hair as shown below:

(Win: CTRL / Mac: CMD)

Press CTRL-J to copy our selection to a new layer (shown below).

EXTRACTING BY CHANNEL ADJUSTMENTS.

Go to the Channels Pallette. (Windows>Channels)
Select which of the individual channels (R, G, or B) has more contrast. In this case, we will select the Red (R) channel by clicking on it.

Then we will copy the Red channel to work on.

1. Select the Red Channel.

2. Drag it to the Create New Channel icon below the palette.

1. A copy of the red channel will appear in the Channels Palette.

2. Open the LEVELS Adjustment by pressing CTRL-L or go to IMAGE>ADJUSTMENTS>LEVELS.

3. You can copy the setting shown above or punch in these numbers – 51 / 1.00 / 1.43. What we are trying to do is to increase the contrast in the image more so that the background will turn white and the hair will turn black giving us an image that’s easy to extract.

4. Press OK to confirm settings.

To elaborate on the Level settings, here’s a short explanation.

1. Sets the White Point of an image. Meaning this changes the highlights and the light portions of the image. If you move this inwards (towards the middle) it will increase the brightness of the light parts of our image.

2. Sets the Black Point of our image. Moving this towards the middle will increase the darkness of the dark parts of our image.

3. The middle sets any tone in between the two.

What I did first was turn the White Point knob inwards (to turn the light portions really light – almost white) until I get a contrast that won’t make the hair look pixelated or broken up. If I notice the hair starts getting degenerated I either move it back to the right and stop where the contrast looks better. At this point the hair looks gray.

Turn the Black Point inwards and watch as the hair turns dark. Stop when it shows a nice contrast of dark hair and white background.

The try and adjust the Grey Point to fine tune the contrast even more.

Here’s the image we have with the following setting:

Black Point: 51

Grey Point: 1.00

White Point: 1.43

CLEANING UP.

As you can see there’s still shades of gray where the background used to be. For that we’ll just manually erase it.

Select Eraser Tool (Press E).

Set the brush size to around 35-40 pixels. Hardness set to 0%.

Start at the edge farthest from the hair and slowly erase the gray tone left by the background until you have something similar to the image below.

FINISHING THE EXTRACTION.

In the Channels Palette, click on RGB (or Press CTRL ~)to go back to our original image.
Select the Pen Tool (Press P) and draw a path to the rest of our image excluded when we selected the edge of the hair in the beginning of this tutorial.

Go back to Channels, hold CTRL then click on the Red copy Channel to make it into a selection.

Notice it selected the background instead of the hair. We have to invert the selection so press CTRL-SHIFT-I. Now our hair is selected.

Besides this selection we are going to add another seleciton from the path we created.

Go to the Paths Palette.

Press hold CTRL-SHIFT and click on our Work Path to not only turn this to a selection but add it to our current one created from the channels.

Note when we hold control/shift and hover our cursor over the path it shows a + selection icon.

Go to the Layers Palette and turn on and select the layer that says Background as shown below.

Press CTRL-J to copy the selection to a new layer. Turn off visibility on the Background layer to see the results.

To test what we did I would create a new layer over the Background layer and fill it with color – if you’re curious.

Building A Chop – Pots and Pans

We will use our image (pan.psd – with the path and layers saved from the previous tutorial) and combine it with another to create a chop. We will use ramiele.jpg (below).

PREPARATION.
Open pan.psd and ramiele.jpg side by side

Make sure the Layers Palette is also open and it shows the layers we created in the previous tutorial.

Grab Layer 1 from pan.jpg towards ramiele.jpg. This will copy our clipped layer over ramiele’s image (shown below).

RESIZE AND REPOSITION.
We will resize and position our new layer. Set Layer 1’s opacity to 70%.

(Win- CTRL; Mac-CMD)

Press CTRL-T. This will enable us to transform our layer.

1. Hold the SHIFT key while dragging the lower right of the transform box to resize the image proportionally.

2. Placing the mouse in between the transform anchor points will enable us to rotate the image. Rotate the pan about 180 degrees – to turn it upside down.

Note: The above instructions are interchangeable. You can start with the rotate if you wish.

Rotate and transform the pan layer so we will have something similar to the image shown below.

Once we’re satisfied at the size and angle of our pan, hit the enter key to complete the transform.

FINISHING OUR CHOP.
Zoom close into Ramiele’s face (CTRL-SPACE-drag mouse).

Select the Background layer. Then select the Pen Tool (press P).

We will make a copy of Ramiele’s face to cover the part of the pan that is behind her head by drawing a path. Example shown below.

Go to the Path Palette and make our path into a selection (CTRL-click on path). Press CTRL-J to copy our selection into a new layer.

1. Pan layer (Layer 1).

2. Copied layer from Background from our path selection (Layer 2).

Drag Layer 2 above Layer 1.

You’ll wind up with the image and layer order below.

Go to Layer 1 and set the Opacity back to 100%.

Then Select the Burn Tool (Press O) with the following option settings:

Brush: Around 40 px size; Hardness: 0%
Range: Midtones; Exposure: 50%

1. Select Layer 2 and;

2. run the brush a couple of times over her forehead to simulate shadows created by the pan over her head.

Our finished image below – Pots and Pans Blitches!

Snap Shot: Idol Lovechiles Gallery

Once the finale for AI7 was over inspirations for chopping have ended – until the tour starts. The show may be over but my drive to do more chops were there. It’s like my blood was still pumping. So as not to get bored I decided to do some idol ‘lovechiles’ which is I combine features from two idols to create a new person as if this is how their baby would look if they spawn. I got the idea after news of Clay Aiken having a turkey baster baby with Jaymes Foster. Of course, this isn’t exclusive to man-woman only.

Double D finale… Cookchuleta

MJ + Carly = Marly

Pans (Ramiele) and Tomato (Danny) Child

Josiah and Amy Davis

Jason Castro and Syesha Mercado = Syeson Castrado

Mavid!

Brooke and MJ = Babbling DoucheBag

Amanda and Garrett

And of course – the Claby

I know a lot of people use a morphing program to do these but they usually wind up looking like what they are – as overlapping images.

My versions were totally chopped where I had to decide which feature i want to keep. The first trick is to find pictures of the subjects taken in the same angle. Then after resizing and matching some of the features like eyes, nose, mouth and jawline I would carefully erase any feature I don’t want.

Taming The Pen Tool – Part 8

The next part in our Pen Tool tutorial involves the Layers and Path Palettes.

The Layer and Path Palette are usually docked together as a default. To open them you have to go to WINDOWS > LAYERS or WINDOWS > PATHS

Open pan.jpg (hopefully you also saved it after creating the path)

Save and rename the path as discussed in Part 4 of the tutorial.

(CTRL-Win; CMD-Mac)
Open the Path Palette and change the saved path to a selection – that is, hold CTRL and click on the path name.

Once the path turns into a selection, we go to the Layers Palette. Press CTRL-J.

What this does is it will copy our selection to a new layer as shown above.

Click off the new layer we created and go to the Background Layer and make another selection as we did before by CTRL-clicking on our path.

Instead of CTRL-J, do a CTRL-SHIFT-J

What happens this time is instead of copying our selection, it cuts it out of our layer (shown above).

1. Our previous layer copied from our selection. (CTRL-J)

2. New layer with selection cut from our background layer. (CTRL-SHIFT-J)

Save this document (with layers and all) as a psd file.

Taming The Pen Tool – Part 7 (Options)

Hopefully you’ve been practicing on our image trying to get the path around it right. When you notice that you don’t have to go back to redo a path it means you’re on your way to mastering the tool.

Now, notice there’s a little hole on the handle of the pan. This tutorial will explain a few minor things when applying paths.

What we should do is put a path in that hole too so when the image is over another image or a background it will show up in the hole, too. (shown below)

PATH OPTIONS EXPLAINED

Above is the most common used option I set for the pen tool. I really don’t have to explain what the settings mean you can still use the pen tool competently. But for the sake of clarity… or in case these are not your default settings…

1. The pen tool can also be used to create Shape Layers – that is, if you draw a path it creates a new layer with a fill color on it and the path editable. This is useful if you’re creating logos in Photoshop.

I always set this to draw a path (2nd option). What this does is it creates a path in the Path Palette. From there I can save, rename, make selection, stroke, fill, resize a path.

2. The second option basically let’s us use a tool as if it’s another tool. Not much to explain here except if I choose the Pen Tool I want it to behave as a pen tool – so I chose the pen as shown.

3. When Auto Add/Delete is on it just means you can add or remove a point in an existing path.

4. The Pathfinder Options might freak out beginners but basically I set it to the fourth options which when another path is overlapped over another it gets excluded. I always keep it in on exclude (4th option).

You can select path and play around with these options to see what each Pathfinder option does.

As long as you have your settings identically set to the image above you will be fine for now.

Taming The Pen Tool – Part 6

Like I said in the previous tutorial we will break an image’s outline to curved and straight paths.

Note: I will refer to the tutorial on keyboard shortcuts for Zooming and Scrolling at this point as we start going into the more complicated aspects of this series of Path Tutorials.

We’ll use the image below (pan.jpg).

Observe that the silhouette of the pan as different segments of curves with varying degrees. Some are steep paths, some are long and flat.

Let us start by creating a point at the angle where the handle meets the lid.

1. Select the Pen Tool (Press P). Create first point.

2. Create another point where the lid and the lid’s handle meet and hold/drag the mouse to create a mountain curve. As you drag the mouse, note how the arc moves and try to trace its curvature to the outline of the pan. Release the mouse when you matched the edge.

(Win: alt / Mac: option)

Before starting another point and path, hold down the ALT key and click the last point created with the pen tool. I call this ‘neutralizing’ the point. I could explain why we have to do this but as this is a tutorial for beginners I find this a necessary step without going into details why.

Once, we ‘neutralize’ the point we are going to move on to where the next point is going to be. So try and anticipate – from where we are starting – where our next point will be by imagining how we will draw the curve with the pen tool. In this case I would say the center of the lid handle. As shown below:

Then neutralize the point again, figure out where the next point is to trace the outline, and so on and so forth.

To give you an idea, I drew segments of paths around our image (differentiated by colors) to show how I would do the subsequent curves. Note there are a couple of straight lines, if necessary you can hold the SHIFT key to create a perfectly perpendicular line.

Here’s a video of how I did it.

I would suggest taking another image and figure out where the segments of curved paths will be before actually clicking on the first point. And remember to always ‘neutralize’ after each point.

Short Cuts: Quick Image Adjustments

Acquiring images off the internet doesn’t exactly give us the best pictures. Most of them are too washed out. Some are not bright enough. A few are just icky. Here are a few tips with a few clicks of the mouse or keyboard shortcuts that will make everyone think you’ve spent hours touching up the image.

(Win: CTRL / Mac: CMD)

AUTO LEVEL:

1. Original Image
2. Auto Level Adjusted

To adjust the Levels automatically: Press CTRL / SHIFT / L

AUTO COLOR:

1. Original Image
2. Auto Color Adjusted

To adjust Color automatically: Press CTRL / SHIFT / B

AUTO CURVES:

1. Original Image
2. Auto Curves Adjusted

To adjust Curves Automatically:

1. Press CTRL / M. Curves window will pop up,

2. press AUTO,

3. then OK.

Of course, these won’t work all of the time but in most cases instead of spending time adjusting the colors and/or contrast this affords us more time chopping.

Taming The Pen Tool – Part 5

So far we have only discussed what the basics of the Pen Tool and editing paths. And all we know what to do is make straight paths.

I am going to borrow a couple of terms from origami and apply it to how we create paths. The Mountain and the Valley. Below are two examples of paths and what we will call them throughout these tutorials:

Mountain Path

HOW TO CREATE A MOUNTAIN PATH:

1. Open Test.psd

2. Press P to select the pen Tool. Create a new point by clicking somewhere on the lower left of the document.

3. Create another point over by the right by click/holding on the mouse.

4. The mouse still on hold, drag it down. You will note the path will curve up.

Valley Path

HOW TO CREATE A VALLEY PATH:

1. Open Test.psd. We will do almost the same thing as a Mountain Path but the opposite direction.

2. Press P to select the pen Tool. Create a new point by clicking somewhere on the upper left of the document.

3. Create another point over by the right by click/holding on the mouse.

4. The mouse still on hold, drag it upwards. You will note the path will curve down.

All we need to learn at this point is how to make a Mountain Curve and a Valley Curve with paths. In our upcoming tutorials we will break down an image’s outline into these two types of curves.