Johnston
15 members found (show all)
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Shaun Johnston
Australia
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Alison Johnston
Australia
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Nicholas Johnston
United Kingdom
178 creative works found
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Featuring Australian fine art nude model Ishtar Johnston.
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Dodging and Burning
by Alison JohnstonFor some reason, people go a funny shade of green when one starts talking about Dodging and Burning …. nothing to fear at all. I’ve ju…
For some reason, people go a funny shade of green when one starts talking about Dodging and Burning …. nothing to fear at all. I’ve just realised that I haven’t got any little images to insert in this tutorial …. I’ll make them later. Dodging and Burning is not difficult at all, when you realise that 20 low opacity strokes are better than one huge Dodge or Burn stroke. D&B is used to create precise shadow/highlight and can certainly add enormous amounts of lift/punch to an image. Most people would duplicate the layer to do some D&B on, and this is fine until you are working on a 10/15/20mb file and everytime you duplicate the layer the image size doubles. Unless you have a huge amount of RAM, your computer will slow down and sometimes even freeze. Is there a solution …. of course there is, its photoshop. So you’ve been working on an image, and naturally taken snapshots along the way. Now you decide that you would like to do some D&B. Click on the new layer icon on the bottom of the layers palette. Go to Edit>Fill>50%gray>click ok and that’s it LOL, nah, only kidding. Change the blend mode of this layer to soft light. Go grab the Burn tool (example), select whether you want to burn the highlights, midtones or shadows from the top menu and I would suggest quite strongly that you use a very low opacity – around 10% to start out with. I usually use a very soft brush for this and set the size according to what I’m going to be doing. The sheer beauty of using the 50% gray layer set to soft light is that you can simply turn the layer on and off to view your progress – don’t like what you’ve done … trash it and start again. Use exactly the same principle for the Dodge tool. Yet another way to D&B. Click on the new layer icon on the bottom of the layers palette, change the blend mode to soft light (without filling it with 50% gray), select your brush tool and make sure the foreground colour is set to black. Lower your brush opacity in the top menu bar to round about 10% again and start brushing where you want to Burn (darken) the area. Do exactly the same thing, only with white as the foreground colour to do some Dodging (lighten). Yet another interesting take on the above is that you can D&B with colours. Try it … grab your f/ground colour as red (example), check the opacity is down and Dodge or Burn away with that colour. Perhaps even pick a dark red (example) from the image itself to use as the Burn colour. Have fun, and don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in. The sheer joy of photoshop is all the fun you can have with it.
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This was taken on Australia Day, 2007, from Kangaroo Point cliffs in Brisbane. This is a very large image. It will print with beautiful sharpness and clarity at up to a metre wide.
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Grunge Text/Type
by Alison JohnstonSo lets make some grungy text. You may never need this, but it’s simple to do … so why not! The image below is the only image we ar…
So lets make some grungy text. You may never need this, but it’s simple to do … so why not! The image below is the only image we are going to be using today, but you will need the larger file, so clicky on THIS link. Copyright is mine – yada, yada. Open Photoshop and create a new file 800px X 600px, background set to white. Open the larger image (which you will have saved to your computer) and with your move tool selected and the shift key held down, drag the tree image over to your new file. Holding down the shift key will centre the image for you. Working on the trees layer Go to Image>Adjustments>Threshold and I want you to take the slider to the left until it reaches 80 (see image below). We’re aiming to get a lot of white in the image. Next we’re going to add the type. Select a foreground colour, I used Red. Grab your type tool and select Horizontal type – then go ahead and type something, I used RedBubble. (Arial Black > Regular>100pt>Sharp – for those who may be interested) Move your text to where you would like it to be, you can place it similar to where I placed, but it will need to be over some of the black. Once you’ve played around with this a couple times you’ll get a general idea of where the text should go. Before we go any further, we have to rasterize the text. You can either right click on the text layer and choose rasterize type or go to Layer>Rasterize>Type. Now the fun begins :-) click on the trees layer, the one you did the threshold adjustment on and select your magic wand tool, check that the contiguous box on the top menu bar is unchecked and select some of the black. Because you have the contiguous box unchecked, the magic wand tool will select all of the black areas. Now, hide the trees layer by clicking the little eye icon and click on the type layer, then press the delete key. Go to Select>deselect or press ctrl D on the keyboard. And there you have it, some grungey type text. Use your move tool to position the text wherever you want and you can drag the trees layer to the little garbage bin icon … cos you don’t need it anymore. I’ve cropped my final image. Larger file is HERE Enjoy playing, and if I haven’t made anything clear just ask me.
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Featuring Australian fine art nude model Ishtar Johnston.
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Featuring Australian fine art nude model Ishtar Johnston.
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This is a panorama from Mount Coot-tha taken on Easter Sunday, 2008.
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Featuring Australian fine art nude model Ishtar Johnston.
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Featuring Australian fine art nude model Ishtar Johnston.
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The Smudge Tool
by Alison JohnstonThe smudge tool doesn’t sound like a terribly exciting tool, something that you could have some fun with – but it can be and we’re going …
The smudge tool doesn’t sound like a terribly exciting tool, something that you could have some fun with – but it can be and we’re going to look at one way in this tutorial. This tutorial is going to involve the use of the pen tool, but it will be painless :-) The first thing that you will need to do is create a new document, I have used 800×600 with a black background. Next you will need to create a new layer above the background layer by clicking on the new layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette and then select your elliptical marquee tool and draw out a small circle similar to the one below, holding down the alt + shift keys. Before deselecting the marching ants, go to the gradient tool and pick a gradient from the drop down menu, I’ve used the ‘copper’ gradient. Make sure you are using a linear gradient, and hold down your shift key while dragging from the top to the bottom of the circle – you can deselect the marching ants. You can go ahead and duplicate the small circle by selecting your move tool then holding down the Alt + Ctrl keys (this will copy and drop the copy onto a new layer), drag a little way then hold down your shift key as well and this will constrain the down movement. Next you’re going to grab the pen tool, and, starting from the centre of the top most circle, click a point then move across and click and drag another point. You will have to reduce the size of your image for this, but keep the canvas larger because you will have to click the final part of the path outside of the image. Go to your paths palette, which should be default with your layers and channels palette, if it isn’t go to Window>Paths – and at the bottom on that palette click on the ‘create new path’ icon. Go back to your tools palette and choose your pen tool again, click on the centre of the next circle and do something similar to the above, but change the direction a little. Repeat this for the other 2 remaining circles. The original path will be called ‘work path’ and then the rest will be called ‘1, 2, 3’ – you will need to line up the corresponding layer in the layers palette in one of the future steps, but first we have to go and choose a hard edge tip for the smudge tool. Click on the smudge tool and get a size similar to the one in the image below. I’ve made the circles and brush size bigger than I normally would for the sake of visibility. Depending on what you were going to do with this technique, all things can be changed. With the smudge tool selected, click on the first layer in the layers palette, then go to the paths palette and click on the ‘work path’ layer, then right click on this choose ‘stroke path’ from the fly out menu – a small dialogue will appear and ‘smudge’ should already be selected, but if it isn’t choose ‘smudge’ from the drop down menu. Click OK and you should have something similar to the next image. You can go to your paths palette now and drag the path you just stroked to the little bin icon at the bottom of the palette. Go to the next layer up the stack in your layers palette, make sure the smudge tool is still selected (it should be), go to your paths palette and click on the corresponding path in there, then at the bottom of the paths palette click on the small ‘stroke path with brush’ icon (second from the left) Continue to do this until the remaining paths are completed. Depending on the gradient you used and the size of the circles and brush size, your image might look something similar to the one below. Go ahead now and merge the 4 stroked layers in your layers palette to 1 layer. Next, press Ctrl + T on your keyboard to bring up the Transform tool, right click inside this and select ‘distort’. You can do something similar to the image below if you like, but I would suggest that you go to Layer>Matting>Defringe after you distort the selection – I used a 10 pixel radius on this particular image. From here you can go ahead and do a multitude of different things. Change the background and experiment with blend modes. Use the plastic wrap filter, or give the image a drop shadow then place the drop shadow on its own layer and blur it. You don’t even have to use 4 of these pipe effects. On the image below I changed the b/ground to blue with a radial gradient, and changed the blend mode to overlay. I then used the FX to give the pipes an outer glow by changing the glow colour to white, a blend mode of ‘Linear Dodge (Add) with an opacity of 50% Technique set to softer and a spread of 90%. Try out different things and see what you can come up with, but most of all – have fun!
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Oil on canvas, 18” x 14” (457×356mm)
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Making a selection using the colour channels in Photoshop.
by Alison JohnstonI haven’t done a tutorial in a while and thought this might be something you find handy for replacing a sky, or perhaps selecting fly awa…
I haven’t done a tutorial in a while and thought this might be something you find handy for replacing a sky, or perhaps selecting fly away hair etc., Photoshop has lots of tools for making selections, the magic wand, the highly under / rated quick selection tool in PS3, the lasso, the magnetic lasso, the polygonal, / the pen tool, the extract tool etc., but for some reason when making a selection in / channels is mentioned, folks become a little more nervous. Probably one of the better ways to make accurate selections is in the colour channels, but be warned that it doesn’t always work, so checking the colour channels is one thing that is worth doing straight off the bat. What we will be looking for is the channel with the most contrast, in this case between the sky and the trees. As it happens, the blue channel is the one we will be using, but do check through them on other images you try this on. We’ll be using the paint brush tool and the dodge and burn tools for this exercise, so as long as the program you use has channels, a paint brush, dodge and burn tools you should be able to complete this in programs other than Photoshop. I have uploaded 2 large images to my flickr account, so you can see what you are doing :-) MAIN IMAGE and SKY IMAGE The copyright is mine .. yada, yada … Start Image. Completed Image. I have been building a library of sky images for quite a while, and it is a useful thing / to do. If you find yourself lost for something to take a photo of, start building yourself / a library of skies, textures etc., they can come in very handy. So, we’re going to replace the sky in the first image, with the sky in the 2nd image / because, people often change reasonable blue skies with other blue skies :) Here we go … open the main image and duplicate the layer by dragging it the new layer icon, pressing Ctrl J, or going to Layer>Duplicate Layer in the top toolbar. Next, I want you to click on the channels tab, which should be next to your layers tab. Next, click on the blue channel … you should now see something similar to the image below. I want you to duplicate the blue channel by dragging it to the create new layer icon at the bottom of the palette, and you can go ahead and name this if you like .. I left it as blue copy. You’ll notice that we don’t have access to our adjustment layers from the bottom toolbar like we do in the layers palette, we have to select from the top toolbar. So go to the top toolbar and select Image>Adjustment>Levels and making sure that you are working on the duplicate blue layer (blue layer copy) you can punch in the same settings as I have on the image below. I’ve tried to hide the sand with the dialogue box because we aren’t really interested in that just yet, What you’re looking at is the sky area and the trees and that they are pretty much black and white. You can go and grab your paintbrush now, and with the foreground set to black, paint over the sand at the bottom of the image. Don’t be afraid to zoom in to make sure that it is completely covered. Paint over the bush on the right of the image as well, just be a bit careful as you get nearer the top, remember that we can burn any stray areas with the burn tool. With the foreground set to white, go over the white areas in the sky top left. Stay away from the tree line with the brush tool, we are going to get closer to the trees with the dodge tool in just a second. Don’t forget to zoom in for the sky area as well. You can see in the image below that we are trying to achieve a black and white version of the image for the mask Shall we dodge or burn first ? Lets dodge :-) Select your dodge tool, select highlights from the top menu bar and keep your opacity down to 10%, or perhaps even less. Go along the top tree line .. zoom in for this … and see if there are any stray black pixels, if there is just dodge over them. You can also check around the other white areas, inside the trees for example. When you’re happy with what you have, switch to the burn tool, and choose shadows from the top menu and leave that at about 10% as well. Do the same as you did with the dodge tool, except to the darker areas i.e. burn out any remaining white areas that shouldn’t be there. To Toggle back and forth between your original image click on the RGB channel to check that you have all the areas you want dodged or burned. Like the image below. I went to filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and gave this a blur of 1 – that would obviously be different if you had a higher res image. Before going back to your layers palette by clicking on the layers tab make sure that you click on the RGB layer in the channels palette and then bring in the sky image. Sandwich that between the background and duplicated background layer. Click on the background copy and switch back to the channels palette. Select the blue copy layer (or whatever you called it) and then you can do a couple of things – you can either press the first icon at the bottom of the channels palette which will load the channel as a selection, or you can press Ctrl and then click on the blue copy layer, / and that will load the selection. Click on the RGB channel and then return to the layers palette. Your selection should now show up on your image in the layers palette. Go to Edit>Cut and the new sky image should show through. To further refine the selection, add a mask to the layer and proceed as you normally would to mask away any stray bits that may be left. Select the new sky layer, and use the move tool to position it wherever you want in the image. I know that probably sounds like a lot of messing around, but once you have done it a couple of times you will get the hand of it. And this is one of the easiest ways to select stray hair,fly away hair etc., Taking the time to get a mask as accurate as possible in the colour channels will save you loads of time later on. Hope this has been helpful to you. If you don’t understand any of my ramblings, feel free to ask questions, or BM me.
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“At 10pm one night at Kangaroo Point, I decided to go for a wander and find some nice vantage points from which to capture panoramas of the city. As I walked along the base of the cliffs and toward the Story Bridge I could hear the roar of the crowds of people living it up in nightclubs across the river. It was a beautiful night and I’m glad I was able to capture this image to share it.” This digitally stitched panorama is based on a series of 40 second exposures. To give an example of the full size of this image, here is a 100% crop of the top of the leftmost building – the Riparian Plaza. Enjoy!
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Adding Colour Back to a B&W Image
by Alison JohnstonFor some strange reason you’ve found yourself with a B&W image that you want to add some colour back into. Perhaps the bride holding the…
For some strange reason you’ve found yourself with a B&W image that you want to add some colour back into. Perhaps the bride holding the bouquet would look really nice if the roses were red and the stems were green but the rest of the image was left in B&W. There are several ways that you can go about this in Photoshop but what we’re looking for is the most flexible, one that we can edit later without having to bin a couple of layers because the colours weren’t quite right. You know the scene, spend a few precious hours doing the roses in the bouquet and then you find out that the darn things were pink, not red …... arghh! The question is, is there something within Photoshop that can help us ….. indeed there is. Anyone who has restored some old photos will know all about hand colouring and basically, that is what we are going to do. Open a B&W image, or just desat a colour one, or convert to grayscale (not that you would normally do that) but we’re just going to have a play and we don’t want any colour in the image, we don’t want it in RGB mode. So what adjustment would give us the most flexibilty to change the colour if we chose too. You guessed didn’t you :-) We’re going to be working with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and we’re going to check the colorize box. At this point the whole image is going to be whatever colour you choose, that’s okay, we’re going to fix that. Choose a colour with the Hue slider – Adjust the Saturation slider and the Lightness slider until you are happy with the colour. Now you’ve got this great big mess but we’re gonna fix it. Go down to the little mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette and click on it. You will now have a white box next to the hu/sat adjustment layer – and you’ll notice that you image still looks awful. So lets fix it. Click on the mask (white box) to make sure that it is active and press ctrl i on the keyboard (cmd i for the Mac) The mask should now have turned black, and the image should look exactly like it did when we first started. Grab your brush, and making sure that the f/ground colour is set to white (cos on a black mask, white reveals) and simply paint the area that you want the colour to show through. Change the layer blend mode to soft light, or if you don’t like that try overlay or one of the other blend modes. Don’t forget that you can also use the opacity slider to take down the intensity of the colour. So yeah! how am I going to change the red roses to pink ? – double click on the hue/sat adjustment layer (not the layer mask), and the hue/sat dialogue box will appear. Change the hue/sat/lightness sliders till you get a whole other colour …. magic, you don’t have to trash layers and with them all you’re hard work. You can do this as often as is needed to add various colours back into the image. Do a red adjustment layer for the roses and then a green one for the stems and leaves (example). Heck, do various shades of red and green if you want. It’s flexible and relatively simple to master. Do gradients as well if you like and have that effect on a single rose and another gradient effect on a different rose. Make sure your f/ground and b/ground colours are set to what colours you want to use in your gradient. Click the little adjustment icon at the bottom of the layers palette and click gradient. From the dialogue box pick your f/ground b/ground gradient choose linear (or one of the other gradients available) click okay, add a layer mask, invert the layer mask, grab the brush tool, making sure that it is set to white – and paint in your gradient. This is limited to a certain degree but you can get some really nice effects going on and best of all it is editable. Here are a couple of sample shots. I’m not a flower photographer, so this is about the only image with a flower in it, but it will give you an idea of what you can do. Disclaimer – All spelling mistakes are deliberate :-)
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Photo to Lineart
by Alison JohnstonLets have a look at changing a photograph to lineart. Some photos are going to be easier to convert to lineart than others. For example…
Lets have a look at changing a photograph to lineart. Some photos are going to be easier to convert to lineart than others. For example, the simpliest would be anything with straight, definate lines … like buildings, walls, furniture etc., Some images are going to convert well straight away, others may need a little more manipulation. You are going to have a couple of different filters that can be used and a couple of adjustments to tweak …... like we would expect anything else from Photoshop :-) Grab my birdie image below to practise on if you like …. no larger images than this, so just right click and save as. Once you have the image open in Photoshop, double click on the b/ground and accept the default Layer 0 …. or rename it. Then duplicate the layer and from the top menu bar go to Image>Adjustments>Desaturate or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+U The Find Edges filter, found under Filter>Stylize>Find Edges doesn’t give us a dialogue box to tweak, but go ahead and use that filter now on the desaturated layer if you like. You can see that it hasn’t done that bad a job, especially with this image. Go to the top menu bar and use Image>Adjustments>Levels and you can punch in the same numbers that I have below, or use some of your own. Lets back up and try the Poster Edges Filter. In your History Palette click back on Desaturate. If your history palette isn’t open go to Window>History. Open the Filter Gallery by going to Filter>Filter Gallery and then open the Artistic Folder, then click on Find Edges. I don’t know if you can see the numbers I punched in, but they were Thickness 1 – Intensity 1 – Posterization 6. Click OK. So that looks awful :-) Go to the top menu bar and choose Image>Adjustments>Levels to bring up the levels dialogue box. You can see in the image below, that I’ve really had to push the numbers to get a reasonable effect. I think the eyes have turned out better in this version than the find edges version. In the final image below I have blended together the Find Edges and the Poster Edges layers. I filled the b/ground (birdie) with white and used the eraser tool on both of the other layers to take away what I didn’t want. I could have gone in and dodged some of the darker lines to make them less prominent, but overall this hasn’t turned out too bad for a rather complicated image. Try doing a building yourself and you’ll see how much easier it is :-) You can also use Curves and Brightness/Contrast from the top menu bar instead of Levels. You can also leave the b/ground bird as it was and take the opacity of your lineart down to bring some colour back in to the bird.
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A storm that approached my home early last year, was fun to photograph as it developed. The sky at the time reminded me of the opening scenes of The Neverending Story. Opted to kneel and have the sky partially obscured by a native bush, quite bored of the typical sky pictures, think it adds a nice touch? Gives me the feeling of hiding in safety, peering out at the inevitable chaos approaching. When blown up the detail is incredible.
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Lets make it rain with Photoshop
by Alison JohnstonPerhaps you want to composite some images together to make a scarey, stormy image. Or maybe you have an image that has storm clouds, is …
Perhaps you want to composite some images together to make a scarey, stormy image. Or maybe you have an image that has storm clouds, is dark and overcast and would benefit with some rain added to it – or maybe some snow for that winters scene. Start and Finish Images Using a couple of filters and a blend mode in PS you can create away to your hearts content. The image I’ve used in the tutorial is 800×600 @ 72 dpi You will have to adjust some of the settings that I am going to use to compensate for a larger image and dpi, but I know you like to play in Photoshop :-) Firstly, open your chosen image, duplicate it and close the original. If you just want an image to practice on, you will find the start file HERE I’m using PS3, so my next step was to use a B&W adjustment layer to convert this particular image to B&W, I then used a Curves adjustment layer and then a Levels adjustment layer. You don’t have to convert to B&W, I just chose to do so because the original image sucks :-) How you want your image to be is fine, it is not going to affect what we are going to do next. So, whatever it is that you have done make sure that the top most layer is selected then I want you to create a new layer above. You can click on the new layer icon in the layers palette, or you can press shift+ctrl+n to bring up the new layer dialogue box and name the new layer. Now I want you to fill the new layer with black. If your f/ground and b/ground colour are set to the default you can press alt+backspace on your keyboard for window users and I’m not sure for mac users LOL probably option backspace. Now is starts to get fun. Making sure that you new black layer is active, I want you to go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise – below are the settings that I have used on this image, so punch in the same settings if you like. Go straight to Filter>Blur>Motion Blur and you can apply the settings that I have by punching in the same figures as the image below. If you want the rain to go straight down, or from a different angle altogether, just rotate the little angle wheel around till you get want you want. Next I want you to go to Image>Adjustments>Levels. In the image below you can see what the starting point will be for this particular image. I have made no adjustments as of yet. By bringing in the black slider toward the middle of the bar we start to creat the rain. The rain will be the white lines that you see in the image. You can see in the image below that I have taken the black slider in toward the middle and I have also moved the white slider in toward the middle slightly. How much you move each slider is entirely up to you. It will depend on how much rain you want in the image etc., So that’s the part where you get to play around because each image will require slightly modified settings. Right, so thats a mess LOL But, here comes the great part. Go to the Blending Mode option at the top of the layers palette and I want you to change it to Screen ….. look at that ….. magic! :-) Screen mode knocks out any black pixels and the multiply blend mode is the exact opposite to Screen if you want to knock out white pixels. All that is left to do now is change the opacity slider if you want. I’ve changed the opacity to 50% in the image below. And here is our completed image. View large file HERE
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