Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to this lesson on Photo Editing. I've got a bunch of photos open in the Organizer. I don't know if I'll be able to get to them all but I want to walk through a couple so that you can see some of the things and some of the ways you can edit photos in Paint Shop Pro Photo. Now, a lot of people use Paint Shop Pro Photo and never edit photos. They use the vector shapes, text, the drawing and painting capabilities of the program and they don't use it for photo editing. Some people use it for exclusively for photo editing and never touch the paintbrush or anything else. That's one of the great strengths of Paint Shop Pro Photo; whatever your passion is, it caters to that and you don't have to worry about the others. Let's call up this photograph of an old, abandoned church, actually that I turned into sort of a pseudo high-dynamic range shot. Now, we're seeing the finished product here. On the top layer I've got some dark sky and clouds. Beneath that is a semi-visible temporary layer. Beneath that is the layer where I lightened the building and below that is the original photograph. For this I used essentially two types of approaches. I duplicated the layers and then I applied a curves adjustment to them to achieve different effects. You can lighten, change contrast, change colors and levels and so forth with curves. It's very, very cool. Just experiment with creating dots and dragging them around to create different effects. So having done that to this layer, I liked the look on the building and I wasn't so happy about the sky so I decided to overlay that sky with something I did like there and I then erased within this layer. I used my Eraser Tool to erase everything that was part of the building to blend that in around the edges. I could have also used a mask had I wanted to but in this case I just used the Eraser. The final result is dark blue sky, light building. I really like this. That's one example of photo editing. A little more complicated than many perhaps, but that's OK. Here it's just a straight photograph of my son, Benjamin. I haven't done anything with this but I'm going to duplicate this layer and call up Smart Photo Fix. This is really, I use this a lot and I consider myself an expert at Paint Shop Pro Photo. I still use it a lot so that I can get a road map of where I might want to go with this photo. Let's just maximize this dialog box so we can just see here and I'll look at the suggested values and what effect they have on the image and if you're looking at your main screen, you could leave Preview checked. And it tells you where the brightness improvements are made and the shadows, highlights or overall. Saturation means how much color intensity it either puts in or takes out. Focus, Sharper or Original. Color Balance, if you've got some pinks or blue and reds or orange or you've got some other colors problems, you can check this box and click on white gray and black in your Original Panel and it will correct those colors and then you can also deepen your blacks and lighten your whites here. So let me change Saturation back to zero where it was and we can see that. Now, sometimes I won't accept these settings or I will modify them. But based on what I want to see in the final image. This is a challenging photo because it actually, you've got the deep shadow in the garage with the overwhelming brightness of outside and Ben is kind of caught in the middle. He's pretty well exposed, but the other two elements aren't. So this is another area where I would come in and probably apply a couple of different settings to the different sides of this image; erase or use a mask to create a final composite and then go from there. You don't have to do that much work on most photos. Alright, let's open up, oh, yes. This is an extensive photo retouching job here where I did quite a bit on the photograph. Let me hide that top layer and go all the way down to the bottom. You can see the background layer where there are a couple of problems here. Kathy had an illness and her throat was swollen so she wanted that reduced, redness in her cheeks taken out and then there's also dark corners to this photograph. So I took those out too. So I worked in layers, building the photo as I moved upwards. So the first thing I did was use the Warp Brush to warp in the hair to cover up some of the swelling in the neck. And I'm toggling this on and off in the Layers Palette, but you should be able to see it here in the image. Then I worked on her eyes to improve those and they're on its separate layer and how I did that is essentially I duplicated that layer, used my Selection Tool, let's just say Freehand Mode to select around her eyes, Inverted that, Delete and then I used my Eraser to get in close and that way I'm just working with her eyes. I do that quite a bit. So fixed her eyes, reworked some of the hair around the neck so that blended in better, cloned some things out and just kept working my way up; merged. I actually selected everything, copied it, copied it as a merge layer and then pasted it as a new layer. But I need to go because we're running out of time. This has been a quick overview to show you some things of photo editing and where you can take that in Paint Shop Pro Photo.