Eliminating Background / Black&White photography w/color spot

This tutorial covers two techniques I use to edit pictures using the free version of Picnik.com. We'll be starting with this photo:

and finishing with this:

To start off, open a new tab on your computer's browser so you can hop back and forth between here and there. In the new tab, visit Picnik.com and click the "GET STARTED NOW" button. In the new window that pops up, you'll see a tab at the right top side of the screen that says HOME and LIBRARY. Click on LIBRARY or UPLOAD PHOTOS NOW and choose the GET FROM COMPUTER option. (I've highlighted this feature in a grey circle.)

Once you have uploaded your photo, you will see a screen with your picture in it, and new tabs for you to choose from.

We want to go to the CREATE tab. In the CREATE area, you will scroll down your options in the EFFECTS tab. This tab can be found in a subcategory row of tabs just below the home, library, edit, create and save&share tabs. Scroll down until you see the DOODLE effect on the left side. Click on it, and the view highlighted in the grey circle below will show. Once you're there, change your brush color to the color you'd like your background to be. For this tutorial, I'm using black. Enlarge your brush size if you'd like to (i did) and start painting over the areas of your photo you don't want.

I use a large brush to start with, getting close, but not precisely close to the areas I'm going to leave alone. Use your mouse like a spray can of paint. Hold the mouse button down and move the mouse around to create a steady "flow" of paint, or use clicks to shoot bursts of color. For my large work especially, I hold down and spray away.

Once I've gotten all my large surface covered, I shrink my brush, and move to the more precise work of getting near the edge of the areas of image I am not going to cover over. Even though I call this work "precision" work, it's not so important that you have exact detail. Work your paint brush smaller, and fade the "hardness" of your brush as well to help you in getting as close to your edge as you can.

I actually go over the edge a little, because you can then switch your brush to ERASER and clean up the line more once you're done. As you can see, there are a few edges that I overlapped into the area I don't want covered. Erasing them is easy. Just click on the eraser button, and click on any areas you need to undo.

Once you're all cleaned up, you'll click APPLY and move up the effects list to TINT. Click into tint, and this is what you see. If you don't see the top right grey circle's information, click on the paintbrush in the larger circle in the lower left. You'll also want to move your tint OUT of the blue zone, and up to the white. This will make your photo look black and white. That's what we want.

NOW, you should take your brush, and start to "spray" over the areas you want to stay black and white in the end. For now, you're letting the color of your photo show, and eventually, we'll reverse the effect to make everything "right". You can switch back and forth between the "effect" and "original" buttons to get clean lines between your edges. Use your brush size to help you with precision areas. I don't worry about uncovering the black or white areas of photos, because they will not change when you click the REVERSE EFFECT button.

Go ahead and click. SEE?!? Isn't it cool? If you see areas that you missed, unselect reverse effect, and keep working at it! Click apply when you are done.

I love a feature called ORTONISH. I used it on the photo without edits to the effect on my photo.

THEN, I headed up the screen and into the TEXT effect. There are all sorts of fonts available for free as well as many more in the premium account features. I chose a free font for this project. To add text, enter your text into the box at the top left that says "type here to add text". Once you have the words you want, click ADD, and the words will come up in the middle of your picture. You can change color, size and some other things in the box to the right, (which sometimes shows up on the right depending on your font and it's placement) You can also click and drag your text around on your photo. When you are done, head to the SAVE AND SHARE tab, and choose where you would like to save your photo!! Happy editing!!


© Rachel Whetzel Please do not use content or images without written permissions.

Photographing Layouts

*Also published on TallyScrapper.com.

A long time ago, Minda posted about how to take good photos of your layouts... with the idea that the better you can show off those pages in a photo, the better WE could see that tallent, and not be distracted by the little things.

I thought I would revisit this, and give you a little tour of the do's and don'ts of taking photos of your layouts. I also wanted to show you that even a VERY nice camera can take a picture that's not so pretty... so I will walk you through some things to think about while taking pictures of those layouts you want everyone to love like you do!

I started with a layout I did years ago, of Ian and his first (and last) time pitching. He loved pitching, and hated baseball, so he didn't do it again...

There are few things that leave the viewer wanting in the photo above. First, I have not cleared any space for my layout. The blanket at the bottom is very distracting, and I have left the page in it's book, in the page protector. Let's try again.

As you can also see, I still have not taken my page out of my book, and the crooked page next to the one I am photographing is taking attention from my layout. The blanket is gone, but the page protector and the flash on my camera are at war. I need to turn flash off, but I'm taking photos inside, and that's just not an option. Here are a few ways to take away flash glare when turning off the flash is not an option.

1. Stand back, WAY back, and zoom in, so the flash can disperse through the air before it reaches the layout.
2. Take off the page protector!!
3. Stand back, and if your zoom is not high, make sure your camera is set to take the highest quality photo it is capable of, and crop in later.

I'll try another shot. I take some steps back, adjust my zoom in as close as I can, and shoot.

Better! I've taken care of my glare, and flash distractions, along with that of the second page beside my focal one. Still... this photo has a lot of background in it, and all the layers and bunching in my couch take away from my shot. So I have a few options.

1. Crop the photo.
2. Place a uniform background behind my photo.

I also need to lower my angle. I'm taking my shot from too high above my photo, and this distorts the way the page looks, so I'll crouch down next time, and try to take my shot from a straight on angle. Since I'm exploring all avenues with you, I'll choose 2 for my first experiment.

Turned out better.... I lined up the side of my photo with the edge of the camera's viewfinder... that will help me get a good straight shot of the photo. I got down at the same level as my layout, and took the shot as straight on as I could. That will help with page curves and things of that nature If I choose to crop.

BUT

I didn't make sure that the bottom of my layout was unobstructed... so that might come back to bite my butt. Let's experiment with that other option up above... cropping.

Using Picasa, a FREE photo editing program that I highly recommend, I used the "I'm Feeling LUCKY" setting, and then cropped the picture in MANUAL mode, so that I could cut out the background. As you can see, cropping that blanket at the bottom of the layout forced me to cut a pretty large section of the layout out of the final draft photograph. Still, it's pretty decent for a photo taken inside. I could use this one if I needed to!

Let's try some OTHER choices. Like, taking a picture outside.

This photo was taken outside, on my deck, in full sunlight. It turned out pretty good! Now to fiddle with it a little, and get a final draft that I would like to share.

First, I'll straighten the picture, to make the most of my crop when the time comes for that.

There is a grid on Picasa when you select the straighten tool, and I use one side of my layout to line up with the grid, so that I can get the most of of the feature. Be sure to save if you use the straighten tool. Not saving between straighten and crop can create problems, and you don't want those. Save by right clicking on your photo in Picasa, and selecting SAVE.

I wonder if I can get this page to look even more true to life? The photo looks pretty good... but it's a little more washed out than I think it looks in real life I'm going to use the SHADOW tool... and then crop.

When I crop, I use the MANUAL setting of the crop tool, so that I can get a free form shape. I crop just inside the page lines, so that there is no background showing when I'm finished. That's pretty good!! I could definitely use this in a gallery, but I think we should explore another option.

So what about taking photos in the shade? Or photos with a backdrop? I think I'll try that... using my white backdrop fabric to lay my photo on, in the shade.

Pretty nice, but one thing I've noticed when I take photos of things in the shade, is that they often have a blue hue to them... so I think I'll take this photo to Picasa again, and see if I can't get that taken care of. First, I use the WARMIFY tool. This will help any other tools I use to fix my photo. It will help them to fix things in the right tint. While I'm at it, I'll straighten, and save.

Next, I'll use that lovely tool... "I'm Feeling Lucky". It seems to know just what to do without a lot of fiddling. If it doesn't work, I can always undo that treatment. So here I go.

I really like the way the lucky tool took my photo, but it seems to have tried a little too hard to cool my photo down, and it was looking a little blue again. So I used the COLOR TEMP tool to adjust and bring the blues down on the layout. I don't pay much attention to the white background still looking a little blue. I think I plan to crop that out later anyway. This is pretty much the way my layout looks in real life! I think I'll crop now.

One more thing that's nice to show off... the layering of photos, embellishments and titles... the way things are matted and other details like that. It's hard to show those things off with a straight on shot. I recomend taking a photo at an angle, and off to the side. A good way to get clear up close shots, is to use your MACRO setting on your camera. Be sure, when you are taking photos of ANYTHING, to use the focus feature of your camera. Most all cameras will show you where the focus of your photo will be if you hold your trigger button (the botton that makes the camera take the picture) "halfway" down. Just lightly press it, not hard enough to take the shot, but enough to get it halfway there. My camer beeps at me to let me know it's adjusted, and in my viewfinder, I can see where the little rectangle is setting on my screen. Where it rests, is where the focus of my photo is at. If the photo isn't clear at this stage, it's not going to be if I press the trigger the rest of the way down. So I either need to re press the button and try again, or adjust my position from farther to nearer or visa versa and try the focus again until I get it right. Then I take the shot.

Once I have the shot, I play with warmify, and lucky settings like I did with the other outdoor shot... and then, I crop to help my viewer see the things I wanted to show off.

Here they are. My final shots!! First, the Indoor shot. Then Outdoors, in full sunlight, and finally, the shot in the shade outdoors.

Any Questions, just ask here in the comments section!


© Rachel Whetzel Please do not use content or images without written permissions.