A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Photoshop

I entered the Photoshop universe as a neophyte, not knowing a layer from a filter. I was completely clueless about brushes or hues or vignettes. In short, I did not know what I did not know. Now, after many hours and gallons of Starbucks coffee, I begin to see the light. Life is good, people are wonderful, and Photoshop is my friend. I began this Photoshop adventure with my long-time friend, Sally Tompkins. I have an exquisite photograph of her from the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. This is the only known portrait “Captain Sally.” I obtained this image from the museum and am permitted to use it on my website. This will replace the inferior web image of Sally that I used on my earlier assignment, so I decided to use this image for this assignment. I began by scanning the image into Photoshop (with the help of Sayma Saleem). The first step was to resize the image to 160 px wide and a resolution of 72 px. Here is the scanned and resized image:

Next, I vignetted the image using the same blue as I will use on my final project. I kept the square shape instead of going to an oval as I think it will look better for the final project. I may decide to change this at a later date. Here is the vignetted image:

For the next operation, I chose to crop a portrait of Sally from the shoulders up. This will be useful in building my final project. Here is the cropped portrait:

I then chose to hand color and restore this image. Ii selected a color and used a small brush to color the face, ears, and neck a flesh-tone. Then I colored her eyes blue (although I am not sure of their actual color). I highlighted her lips with a very soft red, and painted the brooch at her neck blue to match her eyes. I retouched the photo using the clone stamp tool. Specifically, I removed some of the grey from her dress to make it a more uniform shade. I also removed some hairlines or fuzziness above her left shoulder. Here is the colorized and restored portrait of Sally:

Next, I needed to work with an engraving. As there are no known engravings of Sally Tompkins, I went to HarpWeek and found an engraving of another famous Southerner, John Wilkes Booth. This image was taken from the cover of Harper’s Weekly published the week after Lincoln’s assassination:

First I cropped the image of Booth out of the page and resized it as follows:

Next I began to work with the background using the matting tutorial on Archiva.Net. I was able to remove the background with some minimal distortion of the image.

Finally, using the hue and saturation tool, I changed the color to – you guessed it – blue! Here is the final colored version the Booth image.

Although I was somewhat apprehensive about this project at the outset, I became more comfortable with Photoshop as the work progressed. Going from Photoshop Elements on my computer to Photoshop 6.0 or 7.0 depending on the computer in the Webstar lab can be a little frustrating. However, generally I feel that I am able to do most of the tasks I will need to do for my project. I was fortunate to have the able assistance of Ms. Sayma Saleem whose help proved to be invaluable. I also purchased a tutorial manual by Katrin Eismann that helped with several of the operations.