7/16/2011

Hand Tinting Your Digital Photo In Adobe Elements

By David Peters


Adding hand tinting to your photos creates amazing results, turning an ordinary photo into a masterpiece. By adding a few tints to a black and white you can transform your it into something you will want to frame and put where everyone can see .

Now the fist thing you need to do for this and any othe photo edit is to open the photo image and save it with a different name, so that you don't lose the original content. One tip would be to always save your image to the desk top so you will always be able to find it at at later date.

The first thing you want to do is open up the layers palette and drag the photo background layer to the copy icon, thereby creating a new copy of your photo on a different layer; from here you want to click on "Target" and select this new layer and remove the color from your photo by pressing SHIFT+CTRL+U. Now you want to open up your levels dialog box by either using the windows menu or pressing CTRL+L.

I also like to hit "Auto" to see what my image looks like before I begin to play around with it. If you want to darken shadows you can adjust the Black slider more to the right; conversely, to brighten the highlights you can move the White slider to the left; when this is finished you can click OK.

The top showing black and white and with the layer still selected, select the eraser tool with a soft round brush set at round 5-10% opacity and about 30 pixels breadth. You will now be able to edit the areas where you would like to see a bit more color but bearing in mind that you are aiming at a nice soft and transparent look. If you need to UNDO at any time just hit CTRL+Z.

Finally I want you to increase your brush size to enhance the areas where you would like more color and then you can either merge all of the layers or simply flatten and then save your beautifully hand-tinted digital photo.




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