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Add instant appeal to your images with selective toning and blurring techniques. |
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by Jennifer Gidman Zumpano |
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Whether you’re trying to draw attention to an article of clothing, tone down saturated colors, or simply place your subject in sharp focus, using selective toning and blurring can prove the ultimate in image enhancement. And while hand-coloring prints used to be the standard touchup M.O., today’s digital tools make the process even easier, allowing you unlimited flexibility and a myriad of creative options. |
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These image-enhancement techniques came in handy recently for André Costantini, who was able to punch up the plethora of subjects making their way in front of his lens in assembly-line fashion. “We were doing a project that involved shooting about 150 people in one day—it was a studio setup with strobe lighting,” he explains. “It was basically two or three quick shots of each person, and then onto the next one.” |
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To add appeal to some of the images from this assignment, Costantini hyped up the hues in the subjects’ sweaters, vests, and other apparel accoutrements. “You have to figure out how to make the pictures even more interesting,” he says. “If you were doing a fashion spread, say, and you wanted to focus on the clothing, then you’d put just the clothing in color; if you wanted to focus more on the people, then you’d put the people in color.”
Sometimes you can even use toning techniques to soften an image. “One image I shot of a woman in a red evening gown was originally shot in color, but the original was much more saturated,” he explains. “I wanted to mute the colors and soften it a bit, make it more like a painting than a photograph.” |
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To create muted tones and selective toning in your own images, Costantini suggests these three basic steps in Photoshop: |
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1. If you have a black-and-white image, you can easily tone it any color you want by choosing “Midtones”; you can then adjust the “Fine/Coarse” values and the saturation amount by clicking on the desired color. If you want to mute the colors of a color image, choose the Saturation option. This allows color to be removed from (or added to) your image. It’s possible to mute the colors only slightly, or to remove all of them. |
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2. To achieve selective toning, choose “Duplicate Layer” under the Layer menu. Remove the color from the top layer, either by using the Channel Mixer (Image>Adjust Channel Mixer>Monochrome), or choose the Saturation option (if you want to mute the colors of a color image). It’s also possible to decrease saturation here using the method described in Step 1, but make sure that the color layer is duplicated first. |
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3. Erase the top layer (black-and-white or desaturated), revealing the bottom (color) layer for everything that should appear in color. |
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Little Boy Blur |
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Sharpening just a portion of your image while keeping everything else nice and soft (blur toning) is a variation on the above techniques that helps you dictate what you’d like the viewer to focus on. “When you have a 4x5 camera, you can create your selective frame of focus—you can say ‘This is what I want in focus, this is what I don’t want in focus,’ and it can all be done optically,” says Costantini. “Now this can all be done digitally as well. |
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| You use the same technique in Photoshop: If I wanted just part of a person in focus, then everything above and below that specific plane I have in mind would be out of focus.”
To achieve selective blurring in Photoshop, follow these simple steps: |
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1. Start with a nice, sharp image—or, at a minimum, an image where the eyes alone are sharp (“if the eyes are in focus, it’s going to be a killer image,” says Costantini). Create a duplicate layer (under the Layer menu). |
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2. Add a very heavy Gaussian Blur filter to the top layer (found under the Filters menu: Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur). How much Gaussian Blur to add depends upon your individual taste and the size of the file (Gaussian Blur is applied with respect to pixels). But go pretty heavy on the blur—you can always reduce its effect later using the opacity control of the blurred layer. |
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| 3. Use the Erase tool to uncover the parts of the image you’d like to appear in sharp relief to the rest of the image. In a whimsical image of a young girl he shot, Costantini took the Erase tool and set it to 100 percent. “I made sure the edges were soft and the tool was set to a large-enough size to more than cover the entire eye socket and then some,” he says. “In three quick strokes, by erasing the top blurred layer over the first eye, then over the second eye, and then over the nose/mouth region, I created an engaging image with selective focus.” |
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Tip Box Color My World When shooting digitally, it’s always best to shoot everything in color. “You should do this even if you know that you’re going to convert your images to black and white later on,” says Costantini. “Shooting in color simply gives you more options down the road.” |
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