How to Edit Out Glare From Glasses Using Photoshop

Picture source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/877183

As you can see in this picture, there is a lot of glare in this boy's glasses. Although it may be tricky, you can remove the glare using Photoshop.

Step One: The Tools

There are a couple of tools that people like to use to remove glare: The clone stamp tool and the healing brush. The shortcut for the clone stamp tool is "S" and the shortcut for the healing brush is "J". For both tools, you need to collect a sample area. Press the ALT key to select a part of the picture that you want to copy over the glare with. Ideally, you want the sample area to be very close to the affected area. That way the same color and texture is being copied over. It's important to take very short strokes and keep selecting new sample areas as you progress.

The clone stamp only fixes the affected area with the source sample. The healing brush takes some of the texture that surrounds the affected area and mixes it with the source sample. That is the only difference between the healing brush and the stone clamp tool. You should experiment with both because not every picture can be cured using the same methods from previous projects.

To effectively remove glare, you want to use these tools in very short strokes and the picture should be zoomed in to work more efficiently.

If an eye was affected by glare, I would copy the other eye to place over the glared eye and touch it up with the healing brush or clone stamp tool. However, both eyes are glare-free, so it is not necessary for me to make copied selections of an eye.

Step Two: The Process

Select the clone stamp tool and make a copied layer of the original. You always want to save your work to protect your project. You want to make the first copied layer to work with. Save the original for reference and backup.

Zoom in until you feel like you have enough canvas to work with. Your canvas should primarily consist of the glare and sample sources you can use to remove the glare. If there is too much glare, you may to select some copies of similar skin textures with the lasso tool to place over the glare. Since there are a lot of sample sources in this picture, I did not need to select copies of skin.

Make sure you zoom out once in a while to see how your work is going. You may need to backtrack and redo some parts. By now, I have used both tools, but I'm primarily sticking with the clone stamp tool. The healing brush is taking texture samples that do not mix well.

Make sure the new skin tone matches other skin tones around it. If it doesn't, the picture won't look authentic. You may want to lower the opacity of the clone stamp tool to help the skin tones blend and match.

Step Three: The Finishing Touches

About midway through it, I made another copied layer. It acted like a "save point." The boy's right eyebrow was the hardest to effectively fix since there was not much sample sources for it.

I used the healing brush for a couple of spots near the frame. For the most part, I just made sure that the skin tones were even.

Removing glare may be a little tricky for beginners, but with enough practice, it is possible. Not every picture can be treated the same way, so it's important to learn different ways to remove glare. One technique I did not use was copying other patches of skin or textures. This can be an effective way to remove glare as well.

Sara Roberts writes for Just Eyewear, a discount eyeglasses and prescription sunglasses online retailer.

Book Review: The Photoshop CS3/CS4 Wow! Book (works with CS5)

Photoshop CS3/CS4 Wow! Book, The (8th Edition)

What's Good: A large book filled with many detailed tutorials. DVD included has tutorial files, layer styles, patterns, custom tools and other useful tools.

What's Bad: Visuals are small thumbnails. Not ideal for beginners.

Verdict: Clunky navigation and inconsistent visuals don't prevent the detailed content from hitting the mark. A great book for day to day reference on very commonly used effects.

Full Text Review

Do you need to apply an image to a texture surface? Have a design concept that includes styling photos into a vintage, old time look? Or just need to tweak the lighting for a photo? These are the kind of day to day problems that the can be solved by The Photoshop CS3/CS4 Wow! Book by Linnea Dayton and Cristen Gillespie.

The massive book is broken into 11 sections starting with "Fundamentals of Photoshop" and "Photo Skills", diving into specific sections of tips and tricks and moving into a chapter on "Putting it All Together".

The first chapters ease you into Photoshop with an introduction to the program and its tools. There are better books for beginners, however, so if you have this book you probably know quite a bit. The essential skills discussed includes many new features that are new in these versions. The book also touts that it will work with CS5 so you'll be ahead of the game if you brush up on smart objects, filters and some of the newer selection tools.

The next third of the book is about enhancing photography. This isn't yet the "Wow" set of tutorials you'd expect from the book title. These are a great reference, however, for day to day photography or design work. In depth discussion on fixing common photo problems, such as an overdetailed background, the content aware scale feature to independently move a photo's background, and toning effects.

The painting section is when the magic starts to happen. Some very impressive and convincing art techniques are discussed and the examples are inspiring for a designer. I only wish that the book would take advantage of it's space and show larger more eye catching images. Tutorials are easily missed in the large walls of text without an image to draw you in. The "Wet on Wet" Acrylics is one of my favorites as it shows a fairly convincing painting technique. The pastel and chalk tutorials are pretty nice as well. Illustrators will be interested in the real life examples of artists using Photoshop to create works and the detailed text describing how they did it.

The clip art effects section looks either dated or amateurish. The techniques behind them are probably useful, but the examples don't look like anything I could imagine being in a real design. This is a set of chapters dealing with using vector graphics and applying effects to them. We don't arrive to the eye candy again until the second half of the type and graphics section which again reviews over illustrators discussing their works and the effects they use.

Finally, we reach the section that puts it all together. It's some of the standard tattoo and object mapping that you'd hope for in any of these books. The info graphics discus using the photomerge techniques to create a panorama. It's pretty informative and explains the concept well. There are tutorials on mapping objects in perspective which you can imagine using to mock up a banner or signage in a photo.

Largely, these book ends up being more of a reference than anything you'd expect to read from cover to cover. The navigation of the book is a bit clunky in that case, but the content is there and if you like what you've read, it's definitely worth it's price.

This post is part of an ongoing series of book reviews. To suggest a book for review, send a message via twitter @sketchee or leave a comment.

Portfolio: Summer Programs & Camp Guide 2009

Summer Programs & Camp Guide Illustration

Last February, I finished designing the Summer Programs & Camp Guide 2009 edition (Patuxent Publishing/Baltimore Sun). It was just the year before that I had taken over the supplement/special sections design position and so this was my first time completing the Camp Guide from beginning to end. The interior pages are grayscale, so I had to come up with some texture. I decided on using a crumpled paper that was created in Photoshop. I don't know if I've ever said, but most of these publications are designed using InDesign to put together the pieces.

The cover montage was decided on to cover the scope of the editorial pieces, but I did illustrate an original cover (see below). Both also use the crumpled texture effect. It's all over the place. The sports and skating stories had new photos taken. (by Justin Kase)

This was the alternate cover for the Summer Camp Guide. (Original Illustration by Brian E. Young)

Book Review: Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook

Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook: 53 Easy-to-Follow Recipes for Digital Photographers, Designers, and Artists

What's Good: Very useful and utilitzarian effects. Nice "Tip" boxes scattered throughout

What's Bad: Busy layout, some examples aren't very inspiring

Verdict: While the book doesn't show off the effects like you might expect, there are some really useful tips and tutorials

Full Text Review

While you can spend a ton of time looking online for the latest photoshop tutorial, sometimes it's nice to have a few cool ones on hand. So something like the Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook sounds like a good idea. The book starts with an introduction which covers many of the improvements added in CS3 as well as an overview of the Photoshop tools you'll need to be familiar with throughout the book. It's broken up into "Tonal and Color", "Graphic Art Effects", "Lighting Effects", "Natural World Effects, "Traditional Photographic Effects", "Distortion Effects", "Texture Effections" "Presentation Effects" plus a Glossary

The book is a collection of tutuorials all of which are useful, even if some of the examples aren't pretty to look at. Don't you want to look at the final product and think, "I want to do THAT!" (like on abduzeedo.com which has some stunning tutorials, in my humble opinion) The halftone effect is often used to really cool effects, but the "psychedlic poster effect" tutorial has a pretty silly looking final result that is more like a powerpoint presentation. The books cover shows some of the mediocre examples. Still, the effects are useful and in the right hands would be pretty spectacular.

The tutorial for converting color into black and white is a pretty simple tutorial. The author stresses the importance of not losing the dynamic range. Many pages have a "tip" box related to the "recipe". These are the kind of thoughtful ideas that make the book worth it. Overall, you have a collection of useful concepts and the examples are just ways of teaching the techniques. Your imagination will be required to make them actually useful. They are explained in a detailed step by step fashion. Most importantly, they tell you why you're using these. So you can improve or change the idea presented with that understanding. These aren't just techniques that you would have to always reproduce exactly as shown in the book to ever even use.

The graphic arts section has some really nice end products, some of the best in the book, including Warholing and watercolor. These are very convincing as are many of the lighting effects. The neon sign effect is one of the coolest ones. If you visit the Amazon link and look at the back cover and excerpts you can see more examples.

The nature and world effects will show you how to change the seasons: make leaves change to autumn, rainfall on a sunny day, rainbows, waterdroplets, lightning, snow in the summer. Many of these are really well executed and all are easy enough to follow.

The traditional photographic effects have very interesting introductory paragraphs for each "recipe" explaining how film grain, tinting or whatever it may be would have been done in traditional equipment. This really sets you up to understand what you are trying to reproduce.

The distortion effects will help you do things like clone with perspective, turn a photo into a caricature or add a tattoo. These aren't tutorials that I would use too often, but there aren't many of them anyway. The texture effects are a bit flat. I would have expected more distortion maps which are so easy to use and add a lot of depth and realism. I don't think there were any used however. Flat layer effects seemed to be more favored. That's kind of weird.

If many of these effects sound like ones you might use, then it isn't a bad book to keep hand. I know that there are a lot of really great tutorials on the web, but sometimes it's nice to have a book compiled with consistent quality. This book might fit that need for many readers.

You can visit the author's website at TimShelbourne.co.uk.

This post is part of an ongoing series of book reviews. To suggest a book for review, send a message via twitter @sketchee

Graphic Design Meets Open Source Software

Being a graphic designer can be a pretty pricey thing. We like to have powerful computers and expensive enterprise software. I'm looking at you Adobe Create Suite .... There are alternatives that aim to meet the needs of our profession and products. Graphic design is an art and software is just a tool like a paint brush. Open Source software development has come up with such cool free products as Mozilla Firefox, Apache and Linux. I know they all sound kind of geeky and in that way there's something inaccessible sounding about it, but hopefully what you see here will help you get past your fears, uncertainty and doubt. It's all free to use so there isn't much risk involved. Open Source isn't the solution for everything, but it's as a public service that we can often tap into. We're an adventurous bunch, so let's try something different.

Here are some free graphic design programs that might just bring graphic design to the artists who can't or don't want to spend the money on the insanely priced corporate versions.

GIMP

GIMP is the most widely known Photoshop alternative. Most of the functions that you might use in Photoshop are implemented; you can crop, adjust colors, save as different file formats, use various filters and brushes. CMYK support is there but fairly weak and difficult to handle which may be completely unacceptable for most of us in the print industry. However for web design this won't be a problem since it natively supports the RGB color space. Photoshop users may want to look into GIMPshop, a modification package which is intended to help GIMP mimic the Photoshop user interface. GIMP is available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

GIMP Screenshot. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers

PDFCreator

This handy program adds itself to your Windows printer menu. Anything you print can be converted to PDF format or various other graphics formats for you to manipulate. Very handy to have on any system.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector editor similar to Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. It uses the standard [[SVG]] format which makes it compatible with other graphics programs. The interface is streamlined and familiar since they focus on usability. It includes tutorials and tooltips too to ease your transition. They've reduced the number of palettes and all palette options are available as keyboard shortcuts. The interactive tutorials and simple interface make it very easy to start using, especially if you are familiar with other drawing programs. It's definitely a good one to look into. Inkscape is available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Screenshot of the Inkscape 0.46 user interface. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Book of Inkscape: The Definitive Guide to the Free Graphics Editor

Scribus

I'm a heavy InDesign user and since it's what I use at work, that's not likely to change. It is good to know that there is an open source alternative for InDesign, Pagemaker, QuarkXPress or even the unfortunate Microsoft Publisher. It's designed to be print ready and runs on Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows. If your printer accepts PDFs or any of the other formats supported by the program, you're pretty much set. It's designed to work with professional equipment in a prepress environment. If you're interested in designing books, brochures, business cards this seems like a great idea. A lot of designers have Photoshop and/or Illustrator and attempt to use them for publication layout.

Scribus. Screenshot courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Scribus: Open-Source Desktop Publishing

KompoZer

KompoZer is a WYSIWYG html and css editor, think FrontPage or Dreamweaver. It's based on the same rendering platform as Firefox. It's meant to be easy to use for newcomers and non-technical users. Advanced users of Dreamweaver will miss some features, but everyone else can do well with the free alternative and save some serious money. It even creates nice and valid html adhering to the standard of your choice.

Kompozer screenshot provided by Wikimedia Commons

Wordpress

Wordpress gives designers an easy to manage system for implementing hugely complicated websites. It's community creates many plugins, templates and widgets that give it a lot of weight. So I couldn't leave it off of this list!

WordPress Theme Design: A complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes

FontForge

FontForge is a nifty font editor that supports the very common TrueType, PostScript, OpenType formats among others. Besides allowing you to edit your fonts, it supports automatic format conversion and transformations. The documentation seems straightforward to follow so you can dive into developing your font project.

FontForge screenshot courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Open Source Fonts

Fonts are software too. And not too cheap either. Luckily Open Source efforts have stepped in to provide some relief. Typeforge is a project that aims to use Fontforge to create new fonts and provide support in helping designers of various levels create typefaces. You can help them out by simply using their fonts and providing feedback. DejaVu and Linux Libtertine are open source fonts that are freely distributable and free to use in your projects. Junicode is an open source Medieval style font that looks pretty versatile. Free UCS Outline Fonts collects a variety of open fonts of this type. Open Font Library collects public domain fonts.

A few endnotes

I still love the commercial design software out there. Open Source software is still in its infancy compared to commercial software that has been developed over decades. In many ways, these programs just can't compete with that right now but in any case still serve an important niche market in our industry as an entry point for new designers, experiments for those of us who want to escape to something a little different and a as playground for innovation.

No one ever thought Quark would ever go away, now we have InDesign. While those are commercial products, Firefox is an open source project that is now a major player in the web browser world. There is also a ton of little open source programs that make my life easier, but aren't necessarily design related. It's kind of a cutting edge and fringe kind of thing sometimes and on the productivity side at other times.

One last thought, damn does the open source community really need to recruit some designers or what ... These things too often have ugly programmer created technical looking skins that is just the biggest turn off in the world... Someone get on that!