Tag: Photoshop

Richmond Castle

arch
negative

On our Ossett Grammar School school trip in the summer of 1965 we visited Richmond Castle. This is the same film as the Reeth photographs that I posted yesterday and, as you can see (left), the negatives are equally badly scratched, spotted and, in places, solarised.

I think that this works well for the Norman arch (above) but as a change from the daguerreotype effect that I went for yesterday, I decided the clean up the remaining images using the spot healing brush in Photoshop.

I soon realised that using the mouse on my iMac was impractical so, after boosting the contrast in the desktop version of Photoshop, I transferred the photographs to the iPad.

wall of Richmond Castle
Photoshop for the iPad
The iPad version of Photoshop, using an Apple Pencil, Sketchboard Pro, a PenTips Magnetic Matte Screenprotector and a PenTips Drawing Glove.

Touching up the images using an Apple Pencil in the iPad version of Photoshop makes it so much easier.

I air-dropped the image back to the desktop version to colourise it, using the Photoshop Neural Filters.

Plaque to Robert Baden Powell, found of the Scouts movement.

Sidecar, Screen Mirroring

sidecar screen mirroring
Screen mirroring in Photoshop: iMac Retina, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and Sketchboard Pro.

I’ve been struggling to use the mouse as a brush or an eraser in Photoshop on my iMac Retina with any accuracy but I’d forgotten how to set up Sidecar – the facility that enables you to use an iPad as a second screen for your Mac.

For screen mirroring, this is how it works:

  • In Systems Preferences on the iMac go to ‘Displays’
  • Click ‘Add Display’
  • Select ‘iPad’ and ‘Mirror and extend’

At this stage the screen on my iMac transforms itself to fit the narrower proportions of the iPad and the whole set up works as I’d expect it to: I can use the Mac’s mouse pretty much as normal and I can use the Apple Pencil on the iPad for the brush or eraser in Photoshop.

Note: Mac and iPad are connected to the same wifi network. In the settings the iPad ‘Handoff’ is enabled.

Unfortunately working in Sidecar doesn’t improve my drawing skills!

William Baines in Colour

Baines family
Mr and Mrs Baines with William and Teddy.

I’ve been experimenting with photo restoration and colourisation using the neural filters in Adobe Photoshop.

old photographs

I like the patina of old photographs but the sepia-toned world that they evoke can put a bit of a barrier between us and them.

Baines familyh

Besides, working on the images on the 27 inch screen of my iMac brings out details that I might miss in the original. The ‘neural filter’ seems to favour blue as the main colour for clothes. My guess is that there was more colour about.

Mr and Mrs Baines and friends

It’s freshens up the scratchy surface of this photograph of Mr and Mrs Baines with friends. Are the two women sisters? No names on the back, just a pencilled ’33’. It’s possible that they are relatives of the Radley or Naylor families of Horbury. The family portrait and – as far as I remember – this walking group, were given to me by Mrs Nora Naylor, nee Radley, of Cooperative Street, Horbury.

Mr and Mrs Baines
The North's shop

For a while, the Baines family ran this shop, demolished in the early 1960s, next to St Peter’s Church. Ann North lent me the much-blemished photograph and I’ve colourised this version from my print of it.

Primitive Methodist School Feast, 1906

School feast

Again, the original of this postcard is black and white. William appears, aged 6 or 7, possibly the boy in the flat cap in the bottom left corner.

detail of postcard

Thanks to ridiculously high res scan of the original – 2400 dpi! – I can zoom in on a small area to reveal long-gone shops.

Another close-up of the postcard
I think this would have been a Whitsuntide feast, traditionally when people treated themselves to new clothes after the winter . . . and decorated straw hats of course.

Summer

Summer eBook

The last day of meteorological summer and I’m gathering my sketchbook drawings from the last three months together for an eBook.

Summer cover

I’m experimenting with the eBook option in Adobe InDesign, going for an iPad format. This gives me a more control over the way words and images are presented than I get with my regular blog.

Lettering

Rather than use a regular typeface, I decided to use the carved lettering on one of the tombstones in Brodsworth Church as my starting point for a title logo.

Lettering: 'SUMMER'

In true Roman fashion the stone mason used the chiselled ‘V’ that you’d find on a Roman inscription to represent an upper case ‘U’, so I patched one together from the lower half of an ‘O’ and two different capital ‘I’s, keeping the slant he’d used one to fit it into the word ‘AETATIS’ (‘age’).

Colour lettering 'SUMMER'

I imported my title logo into Adobe Illustrator and converted it into three tones using Image Trace, then took that back into Photoshop and replaced the three tones with colours derived from my cover image.

Digital Colouring

Digital colouring

I like the printed look that you get using flat colours so I’ve been going through a tutorial on digital colouring. It should work well in my printed publications.

You scan your pen and ink drawing in black and white drawing at 600 dpi, using the ‘text’ setting. This is to avoid the slightly fuzzy ‘anti-aliased’ edges you’d get using the regular 300 dpi colour or grayscale settings. In Adobe Photoshop you can then go to the Channels palette (above) and press that first button at the bottom of the palette ‘Load Channel as Selection’.

Invert the selection and, on a new layer and fill with the foreground colour. For a comic strip you’d fill with pure black but here I’ve filled with brown.

Lock this line art layer you’ve created add the flat colours on separate layers, with shading, as on the wall in my top illustration, on another layer.

grayscale version of the illustrations

I tried the ‘Load Channel as Selection’ with my finished colour version then, after inverting it as before, filled it with black, producing this grayscale version.

Stoneman

stoneman

Just another Monday morning in Illingworth Park. This ageing rock star was cobbled together from details of the sandstone walls around the park.

After Robo-Parkie and Elderman, I’m getting familiar with the Photoshop techniques involved. Especially useful is the ‘Select Object’ lasso tool and for finer tuning of the edges having Photoshop on my iPad Pro and being able to draw with an Apple Pencil makes things so much easier.

Robo-Parkie

park robot
Just what is it that makes today’s parks so different, so appealing?

After the success of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s giant robot chicken, it was inevitable that rival attraction Illingworth Park, Ossett, would go one better and be the first to install ‘Robo-Parkie’, the world’s first automated park keeper.

This is another of my Monday Morning in the Park photo assignments: everything in this collage was photographed on our walk around with Barbara’s brother John and put together using Photoshop on my iPad, finishing off with Photoshop on my desktop computer. Taking it all in one session, and from the same angle where possible, meant reasonably consistent light. You might be able to spot bits of wheelie bin, bits of the railings around the football pitch, lettering from the park gates and sections from the goal posts.

Robo-Clip

Robot
pen knives and pencil sharpeners
bulldog clip

When I’m busy, it’s great to be able to turn to some state-of-the-art technology for a bit of help. Unfortunately this robotic illustrator’s helper isn’t yet available in the shops; I’ve concocted it using Photoshop on my iPad using pen knives and pencil sharpeners from my plan chest drawer. I found that coloured card worked best for selecting the background and cutting it out to isolate the shapes. Masks proved useful again in fine tuning edges but I haven’t yet worked out how to retain the masked effect when I copy and paste an element multiple times, as I did with the ‘Waverley Clip’.

The lens blur on the background image was added in the desktop version of Photoshop as filters aren’t as yet available on the iPad version.

Hedge Trimming

I’m cutting back the elder bush which has shot up this summer in the hedge beyond the herb bed. It’s so tall that even I needed the stepladder to reach it.

Experimenting with the ‘Art’ filter of my Olympus E-M10II camera, I thought that the trellis, ladder and ivy looked rather Victorian, so I used the camera’s built-in pinhole camera art filter.

History palette
History palette

In Photoshop, I used various filters to give the feel of a deguerrotype: Lens Flare and Dust & Scratches, followed by Sepia Toning from the Actions Palette.

There was no lens flare in my original, but I thought a light shining brightly through the herbage at the top of a ladder would be a suitably biblical reference for a Victorian photograph.

Admittedly, Fox Talbot wouldn’t have had access to a Black & Decker 3-in-1 aluminium ladder.

Continue reading Hedge Trimming