Towards Liberating Women from Corsets
At the end of the 19th century, it was customary for ‘properly’ dressed women to spend their days imprisoned in ornate dresses with padding and layers of underclothes including corsets which restricted movement and were very confining.
It was Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel who used her fashion genius of design and scissors to set women free by changing the reality of what was considered the only socially correct way that females should dress in polite Western society.
As she herself explained, “I gave women a sense of
Cornfield
The technique of making an antique effect in Photoshop is to start with the image you want to change and lay another image over it. Then blend the two into one finished image using the Blending Modes in Photoshop.
The image you are going to overlay – the texture image – will determine what the final image looks like.
The difference between making a grunge effect and an antique effect is in the texture image you choose and the way you use the unsharp mask. I am going to look at creating an antique effect.
Obtaining The Texture Image
You can find full-resolution images, ready to download, dotted about the web. My advice is to make your own. Once you have made a couple you will get to know what works best – and they will be your own creations.
If you use one of the techniques I describe, then they are also an opportunity to get your hands dirty, which is something that is lacking when working in Photoshop.
One way to obtain a texture image is to go out and photograph one.
Unless you are specifically looking for a grunge effect, don’t shoot anything that is too gritty looking. An old stone wall may have an interesting pattern but the gritty look will dominate your final image, and you don’t want that if you want a more subtle antique effect.
Of course if you are making a grunge image, then the grittier the better.
Also, don’t make a texture image that is dark or has a lot of black in it. The reason for this is that the blending mode you will use most is the Multiply mode. This mode multiplies the base color by the blend color to make a darker color. The effect of multiplying any color with black is to produce black.
I made this test texture image from solid blocks of color. Notice how the solid black area used with the Multiply blending mode produces a solid black in the final image. In other words it obliterates the original image underneath, which is almost certainly not what you want.
For an antique look, yellows and sepias are the colors with which you are likely to have most success. But try others.
I have found that it is best to avoid patterns. Bricks may make an attractive pattern but the pattern will dominate the final image. So choose something that is abstract, with gradual color changes.
Tea and Coffee
Which brings me to the technique I use to make texture images, which is to make them with a piece of heavy art paper and some color. Tea, coffee, drawing ink, and water-based paints are all suitable colorants.
Paper
Thick paper – the kind that is used for watercolor painting – is a good choice. Your paper is going to get wet, and thicker paper doesn’t cockle so easily. You do not want the paper to cockle or wrinkle because if it does then the raised areas will produce shadows when you scan the paper or photograph it.
I have had success by laying paper on a worktop and pouring a strong mix of instant coffee onto it. There is a temptation to stick your fingers in the mix and swirl it about. My advice is to avoid pouring all the liquid in one spot and then leave the sheet to dry on its own, without touching it. It will dry forming a natural pattern, which is what you want.
This is one of the textures I use.
You need to scan or photograph the texture image in order to get it into the computer.
A third method is to paint on a blank sheet directly in Photoshop with Photoshop brushes. I don’t like this method because the brush effects are too predictable and it takes a lot of time to try to achieve the effect that is so simply achieved by letting nature create the texture image.
The Technique
It is very simple. Open your original image. Open the texture image. Copy the texture image and paste it over the original. The default blend mode in the Layers palette is ‘Normal’. Change that to Multiply. You’re done.
You may want to lessen the opacity of the top layer in order to reduce the antique effect or because the image is too dark. My experience is that if the original texture image is light in color, then you won’t need to reduce the layer opacity and the image will look just fine without it.
Of course you can add a layer mask to the texture image and selectively cut through the texture image to reveal the original below. That is what I did with the two fish. I set the opacity of the layer brush to around 40% so as not to cut back all the way to the base image. Two Fish
Sharpening
When you sharpen an image normally, you probably keep the radius low, probably less than one pixel. Well, experiment a bit. Put the radius up to say 50 pixels and set the amount to somewhere around 80. See how unsharp masking (which increases the local contrast between light and dark adjacent areas) alters the image because of the way the Multiply mode combines the colors of the two layers.
This final photo of the Dome Of The Rock in Jerusalem is in our ecard catalogue and the others will be included in our catalogue shortly.
This article is one of a series of Photoshop techniques here on the Quillcards Blog. For another Photoshop technique article showing how to remove a messy background from a photograph, take a look at Darkening Down Around A Soft Outline.
If you are a photographer then, like me, you may have been put off attempting close-up photography because of the difficulty of getting sharp focus from the front to the back of the object you are photographing.
Sometimes it is desirable to have part of the object out of focus, but what do you do if you want to photograph a fly or a bee and have its head and its back legs all in focus?
Depth of Field Depth of field as used in photography refers to how much from the front to the back of a scene is in acceptable focus. The scene further behind and nearer than what is in focus is, of course, out of focus and blurred.
We expect some things to be blurred and the way our brains are wired, we expect that blurring to show in a particular way. Because of the way we perceive reality we expect – for example – a tree in the foreground to be sharp and hills in the far distance to be out of focus.
In fact, if we saw a photograph with the tree in the foreground in focus and the hills in the distance also in focus, we would think the scene looked artificial. This is precisely because it breaks our internal rules about what should be in focus and what should not.
The nearer we get (or the camera gets) to an object, the smaller the depth of field. In other words the front-to-back distance of what is in focus, is very small. We see this when we hold a book open in front of us with the page at an oblique angle. Some of the print is in focus, but some that is only a few inches nearer or further away is not in focus.
One thing about the way our brains work though, is that with objects that are very near, we don’t have rigid views about what should or should not be in focus. Therefore, if we were to see a close up photograph of a flower that was all in focus, we wouldn’t think it looked artificial.
But the fact remains that the nearer we get to an object, the smaller the depth of field.
So what is a photographer to do if he or she wants to photograph something that is very near the camera – and wants to get everything in focus?
Small Apertures
One way is to set the aperture of the lens to the minimum possible. The aperture simply describes the hole in the lens through which light enters the camera. The size of the hole can be made bigger or smaller to suit the photograph that is being taken. Most modern lenses can be closed down to a very small hole.
But even at the smallest aperture the depth of field for objects that are very near the lens can be just a fraction of an inch. That isn’t enough to make everything from front to back of an object that is near to the lens appear sharp.
Also, for subjects that are very close to the lens, small apertures degrade the image because of the effect of diffraction. Diffraction causes the light around the edge of the hole in the lens to scatter and spill light all over the image, blurring it.
As a side note, we might wonder why lenses that can shut down to small apertures are made if they suffer from this diffraction problem? Well, for objects further from the camera the effect of diffraction is not so noticeable. Also, small apertures are useful for cutting down the amount of light that enters the camera – for example when a photographer is shooting a scene in bright daylight.
However, if depth of field is small and diffraction is a problem with objects close to the lens, we need another approach.
Focus Stacking
One way is to take several shots working from back to front, each time focusing on a different part of the object. Then combine each photograph to make one photograph with everything in focus.
It’s not as easy as it sounds because each time the camera is re-focused, the size of the object changes slightly. So what is needed is an automatic way of stacking the individual frames to produce one sharp image.
That’s where focus stacking software comes in. Feed several images in and the program creates a composite based on the sharpest plane of focus of each of the images.
These two images of a yellow gerbera flower were both taken with a medium aperture. The first is just one photograph. The second photograph is a composite of several photographs, each focusing a slightly different distance into the image.
Focus Stacking Software
I’ve just started to use a program called ZereneStacker to produce this kind of photograph. I need to refine my technique because the program is unforgiving of small errors. But I am hooked on the idea because making close-up photographs is something I have been interested in for a long time, but until recently I didn’t know this kind of program existed. There are a couple of other similar programs I want to look into, and I’ll post the results here. If they work out well, we will add the photographs to the Quillcards ecard collection.
You can send distinctive ecards featuring our photographs by Joining Quillcards.
My advice is to avoid pouring all the liquid in one spot and then leave the sheet to dry on its own, without touching it. It will dry forming a natural pattern, which is what you want.
