Photoshop 101 – Lesson 6 – Beach Girl

Lesson 5 was long and painful because many new concepts were introduced. This lesson will go a bit faster and maybe be more interesting (for the guys, anyway).

First, download the PDF working file: Girlie-1.zip

This is the picture we start with:

This is what we will finish up with:

Preliminary Step:
Make a working copy layer of the background layer. (you saw how to do this in Lesson 5.

Step 1:
Make the horizon straight.

Before cropping or composing at all, the first step is always to get the rotation correct. In this case, when we have a horizon in the picture, it must be straightened.
Using the measure or ruler tool (Refer to Lesson 5 for more comprehensive instructions), draw a line along the horizon:

And rotate the value that Photoshop suggests in “arbitrary”.

You wind up with something like this:

Step 2:
We get the proportions, crop and composition right.

Just like in Lesson 5 we’ll plan our final image to be a printable picture size of 5″ x 7″ (130mm x 180mm). We use the crop tool to define the proportions in the “width” and “height” boxes, and then drag the rectangle out and move it around until the crop and the composition looks right.

In this case, the head of our bikini-nymph is looking slightly backwards over her shoulder, but only very slightly. If possible, we want to have her torso as large as possible and not too stick-like, however, there are some constraints. We don’t want her hands or her head chopped off, although we can lose some leg. Her glance is directly towards the viewer, so my gut feeling is that the crop must be on the extreme left with head ever so slightly left of centre.

Why should we clone the sea to fill in some white, when this could have been achieved by cropping bit closer? It’s all a matter of composition and compromise. First of all it’s subjective – my call was that her head must be slightly left of centre. To zoom in closer might have eliminated the white area, but then the bikini bottom or part of her head would be chopped off – bearing in mind the 5″ x 7″ constraint.

So, once cropped, it will look like this:

The final crop

And it will therefore entail adding in some fake sea details into the white areas on the left.

Step 3:
Add in any missing detail:
Again just like in Lesson 5, we’ll use the clone tool to clone the sea, but this time we will click the first cloned location exactly parallel to the sampling area:

If this picture doesn’t make any sense, just use the clone tool and you will soon see what it means.
Clone the sea with short vertical strokes until the whole area is covered. Your result should be something like this:

But notice the horizontal banding of the cloned areas.

So we clone again, but this time with the angle of the clone-sample-point-and-the-first-click set to more or less the angle of the waves and with the cloned area somewhat larger (using the “[" and "]” keys to change the brush size) as follows:

Clone with short vertical strokes only in the area where the banding is most visible. Short strokes at random intervals do the trick. It is easy to overdo this, so be prepared to make liberal use of the “history” panel. Your result should now be something like this:

Save the image as “Girlie-2.PSD”

Step 4
Fix that tummy !

She actually doesn’t really have a fat tummy, it’s just the unfortunate way that she breathed just as the shot was taken. Let’s keep on her good side by giving her some virtual cosmetic surgery and pushing the tummy in giving her sleek slightly concave shape.
We’ll use the Liquify (Photoshop spells it this way!) command, which brings up a copy of the image in its own window with all the specialized Liquify commands.
Please Note, the Liquify tool takes some getting used to – don’t be afraid to experiment. The tool is located in slightly different areas depending on which version of Photoshop.

In Photoshop 6:
Image –> Liquify…

In CS4:
Filter –> Liquify…

Or in all versions, just simply type [Ctrl][Shift]X

The liquify command has its own zoom tool. Zoom in to the tummy. Although there are many Liquify tools available, we will just use one of them. Click the warp tool (in the upper left corner – ringed in red) like this:

Adjust the warp circle tool size (using the “[" and "]” keys) to be approximately this size:

Move the centre of the warp circle over the edge of the tummy, click and drag it a short distance inward and release the pick button. Move the circle up, click-drag-and-release, then move the warp tool down and click-drag-and-release again. You will find that it takes quite a few short stokes before you can get her tummy flat. If you make a mess-up, cancel out of the Liquify window and you will land up back in Photoshop without any changes. Then try it again. Try using the tool with different warp tool diametres until you wind up with a nice flat tummy like this:

Now you will have to clone some sea into the area where the liquify tool has corrupted the sea texture. First we must isolate the sea area from her body. We only need to select just the area that we want to clone. The easiest way to do this is to click the magic wand selection tool  and click in the sea close to her tummy button. Most of the sea area will be selected.
Now simply clone the sea by sampling in the sea area and clicking diagonally to the right of the sample point at about 20 degrees of angle. Clone the sea, and you will see that no matter how close you get to her body, it doesn’t get any sea pixels spilling over onto her body because the body area is not selected.
The result after cloning should look like this:

De-select the selection with [Ctrl]D

Now adjust the image with the “levels” command (Lesson 5, part 3) so that there is a full tonal range, add a bit of sharpening with the unsharp mask filter.
Save the file as “Girlie-3.PSD” and create your PDF as discussed in Lesson 5 – Printing.
The final result should look something like this: