Alison Johnston

This isn’t going to be a start to finish project, but rather a couple of different ways you could be using selections and adjustment layers that you may not have thought of. You can borrow my image below to practise on if you like, copyright is mine etc.,

Lets look at doing dodging and burning with some very loose selections and a bit of mask blurring. Open the image and grab the Lasso tool. You can press L on the keyboard or access it from the side tool bar. Select the road area – see image below – when you get to the straight parts of the image, hold down the shift key to so the Lasso Tool draws a straight line.

Hold down the Alt key on the keyboard, then go to the bottom of the layers palette and click on the ying yang symbol (new fill or adjustment layer) and click on Curves. A small dialogue will appear (you can name it burn if you like), change the blend mode to Luminosity and click OK – the Curves dialogue box will then appear.

Try to keep part of the road in view, then you can pull the line down to where mine is if you want. See image below.

Click OK to accept the change. You can fix up the mask at this stage if it needs a little adjusting. Grab a white brush and paint :) There is an obvious transition line, so it needs fixing. Click on the layer mask to make it active, and then go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur I punched in 20 pixels for this image – that will vary of course depending on what size image you are working on. Click OK to accept your blur settings and then you can switch the adjustment layer on and off to see what you have done. If you don’t like it, click on the curves adjustment thumbnail (not the mask) and the Curves adjustment dialogue will appear and you can change the settings to suit. Duplicate the adjustment layer and click on the eyeball of the ‘Burn’ layer to hide it. Double click on the adjustment layers thumbnail and when the Curves Dialogue box reappears hold down the Alt key of the keyboard and you will notice that the cancel button changes to ‘reset’, click on that to reset the line. Reference the image below to see where I have moved the line to and voila – some instant dodging.

You would normall do that on 2 different parts of the image and on 2 curves adjustment layers. After you have finished the burn process, grab your Lasso (or any selection tool) and select another area and go through the process again.

So this gets the mind moving to think …. how else can we use this to do interesting things to our images. What about some colour ? Lets have a look at doing something like that :)

With the same image open, go to View in the top toolbar and make sure that “snap’ is ticked, and then in the view menu go to ‘New Guide’ and in the small dialogue box check either Vertical or Horizontal and in the ‘Position’ box type in 50% – a guide will appear. Do the same again, only make sure that if you checked horizontal the first time, that you check vertical this time. You should end up with something like the image below.

Grab the Rectangular Marquee tool and draw around one of the 4 sections in the image. The selection should ‘snap’ to the guides. see image below

Hold down the Alt key and click on the ying yang symbol at the bottom of the layers palette and choose Solid Colour from the fly out menu. Change the blend mode in the ‘New Layer’ dialogue to soft light and click OK. Now go ahead and choose a colour in the Solid Colour box …. I chose Red. Click OK to accept the colour. Remember that you can change this at any time simply by double clicking on the adjustment layer thumbnail – change the blend mode of the layer if you like, or take the opacity of the layer down. Grab the rectangular marquee tool again and select a different section of the image and run through the whole process again until you have all 4 sections with a different colour. see image below

To clear the guides go to View>Clear Guides Whether you do any blurring on those layer masks is entirely up to you. I didn’t on the image above. So can we do something with type in a similar way …. course we can :) Grab the Type Tool from the sidebar, or press T on the keyboard, and type something – I chose ‘A Road’ LOL Hold the Ctrl key on the keyboard and click on the type layer thumbnail, that will load the transparency of the type – grab the type layer and drag it to the little garbage bin at the bottom of the layers, or make sure the layer is highlighted and then click on the little garbage bin at the bottom of the layers palette and then click yes in the dialogue press that comes up or hit enter on the keyboard. You should be able to guess what is going to happen from here :) Hold down the Alt key and click on the ying yang symbol at the bottom of the layers palette and choose solid colour from the fly out menu, change the blend mode to soft layer in the new layer dialogue box that appears and then choose a colour. You might end up with something like the image below. What you’ll notice, is that you can see the road texture through the type.

You could do a similar thing with a shape layer. Draw out the shape, select the transparency and then delete the shape layer. Continue on with the usual procedure.

You can also use this to produce a coloured vignette around the image. Select the Elliptical marquee tool and draw out an oval kind of shape. To position the oval in between drawing it out, hold down the spacebar and move the mouse to drag it where you want. Release the spacebar to continue enlarging it. Go to Select>Modify>Feather and 50 pixels for this particular image. Go to Select>Inverse or Shift + Ctrl + i and then follow the usual procedure – hold down the Alt key and select whatever adjustment you want from the adjustmet layers fly out menu. I chose solid colour and changed the blend mode to Overlay and picked a dark brown colour. I also chose to give it some more blurring, using Gaussian Blur with a radius of 50 pixels. See image below.

You can use any of the adjustments on your images, so don’t just stick to the ones I’ve shown you here. I chose a Pattern Fill layer with Green with Fibres at 300% on the image below and changed the blend mode to Darken.

Have fun !