Before and Afters

Matt Grunau

Matt Grunau

Adobe Demigod
As many of you know I use photoshop in much of my work. I thought I would share some of the before and after pics for you guys to look at, compare, and evaluate. Some aren't the best, but some (espcially the couple where I removed and entire parking lot) were really fun to do.


Most of the pictures you see were for Stonewall Jackson State resort.

The befores will come first in each set:



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Cntinued again:



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I hope you enjoyed them.

Comments and critiques (as long as not from Jeremy) are encouraged. Jk. dude.
 
Very cool. That's like one of those kid games where you have to circle the differences in each picture.
 
Robbie Comeau said:
Wow, you really cleaned up the little, minor things. Like:

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Good job man!
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at 30 an hour, I will clean you up proper. Just kidding. No I'm not.

One suggestoin I have is that you guys save each one and then open them in photoshop as differnent layers in the same document. You can really see more.

And the really good ones I din't post becuase like an ass I lost them.

One thing I used to tell my students and I don't want to get preachy here, it to look at the changes, find out what, if anything sticks out as being obviously manipulated, and then go back and re- work it. Also, look at what works, and think of why it works, and how to duplicate that into your workflow. What I do is not hard. It takes time, only because I pay attention to detail.
 
how do you bring the blue back into the water without majorly effecting the rest of the image?
 
PaPa said:
how do you bring the blue back into the water without majorly effecting the rest of the image?
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Th simplest way you could. I choose a shade of blue I liked, created a new layer, painted over the lake, put the blue layer's blending mode to Color, Hue, or Soft light, and then adjusted opacity.

What I should have done is use a Hue and Sat layer for just the water, beefecd the blue channel, used the Layer Mask to define the area, and set its blending more to Color. Would have maintained better shadow and highlight response.
 
It sure can, the second approach, which is the better one anyway.

Post a piece you are curious on, and I will show you.

Also, in the pic with the girl in it she usually has fantastic almost luminescent eyes. My flat lighting destroyed that, so I rebuilt them, pretty much from memeory. Not useing extra color, using nothing but copies of the eyes themselves, with the right blending modes.

Put something up you are curious about and I will make you a video for it, along with the finshed .psd to see what I have done. Or, it is is video, give me something at standard rez 24p and I will do the same, but with an After effect file.

The main problem, and I am not signaling you out, is that most people call themselves "self taught". That's fine and good to a point, but what happens when you need to work in say YUV color space and understand WHY?

Color theory and digital color theory are not self taught. I thought I knew all there was to know about Photoshop until I was a student. Then I learned some more. It wasn't until I was a teacher I really began learning. Without the basics of what makes what you are looking at the ways it does, or how this will react to that, you really are in a rut.

But, if you have questions, ask them, if you have footage you find difficult, let's work through it together. I have loads of time and more than enough patience and desire to help others learn and be of anything less than assitance for you.
 
Thanks all.

I also do requests, ahem,

*Oh where oh were as my sweet puppy gone?
Oh where oh where has he gone?*

I'de finish the song but I forget the rest.


Seriously though if somone wants a higher rez reversion of one of those to tweak or wants to play with one of the ones posted, feel free.

Except Kai, cause he may be one of the few here better than I am, and I will not suffer being shown up. So anyone but Kai, feel free.


EDIT: Here is a medium rez one to work with.

http://www.paramm.com/stonewall.jpg

What I would like you to do is deepen the overall contrast, make the water more blue, take the parking lot in the middle of the pic out entirely, with a field, trees, your choice, green up the greenery surrounding it, make sure there are no "dead" patches where the trees are lacking, replace the sky to something with nicer clouds, and get rid of any patches or places in the pic where there are flaws in either the grass, or cement, or building itself.

Have fun.
 
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I just bookmarked this thread. I will come back to your task in a few weeks I think. I seriously want to look into photoshop so this will be a good learning exercise. :)
 
Simon Höfer said:
I just bookmarked this thread. I will come back to your task in a few weeks I think. I seriously want to look into photoshop so this will be a good learning exercise. :)
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Brother, you aint seen the half of it. This software translates directly to After Effects. So what can be done here, can be done to video, but sometimtes with a little more work.

To the rest of you all, THE CHALLENGE IS ON!!! Bring what you got, and let's see some work.
 
Here's my bored at work version:

Original

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After

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Full res here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sentrosi/2342272862/sizes/o/in/photostream/


bit tricky working with this resolution, lots of pixels, but ya. What do you think?


oh and just for fun here's my own before and after photos:


Before:

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After:


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note: the before pic isn't the actual exact image but was taken a few second before, its to demonstrate what the original looked like (as you can see by the "file could not be opened" i'm at work and don't have access to all my images.)
 
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Matt Grunau said:
Brother, you aint seen the half of it. This software translates directly to After Effects. So what can be done here, can be done to video, but sometimtes with a little more work.
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I know, I know :) About the next half year I've got alot of free time so I set my goal to learn Photoshop and After Effects. I already started to watch tutorial after tutorial. Got alot to do...
 
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