I don't know what color of eyes Audrey had before, but I like green cat's eyes. I'm sure I could have perfected this more, as well as the other pictures, but I really learned a lot using these tools, and knew I could play with them for hours. So I made myself stop :) Tools used here included magic wand, freehand selection, airbrush at about 30% opacity, gaussian blur, retouch soften.
Flawed Picture
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| Original Iris, JPG compression 1, size 36,251Kb. | Original Iris, JPG compression 11, size 15,889 Kb. | Iris after editing brightness, background, using clone brush and retouch. JPG compression 1, size 28,155 Kb. |
| The finished jpg file was smaller than its original, and I am assuming this is because I replaced so many colors with black. | ||
This picture was very dark, and no amount of lightening by "brightness/Contrast" would bring out a dark area in center, left. Plus there were things I didn't want in the picture. I considered leaving the background in, and just removing the white wire basket at the right. But I liked the black effect better.Before using retouch and cloning, I brightened the entire picture, gave that dark section special attention and gaussian blur to little effect, and used the histogram function "stretch".
The original iris file was 649 x 600, size 1.18 MB. I worked with the large file, then resized the finished work to 200 x 185, which was 77 Kb in .psp format. Pictures of the original, untouched, but resized, are shown above.
I used the retouch to brighten the area on the left middle of the iris, then lessened the saturation. I tried burn, dodge and lighten, but did not like the effects, so undid them. It took a while experimenting with brush size: I found I could use a much larger brush size even in a small selected area, than I would with a paintbrush. Also, to be on the safe side, I had opacity set low so I could make and undo several passes, if I wanted to. I cloned two of the areas in that same space, as well as a few other small touch-ups in both the flower and the leaves. I also used retouch soften to get rid of some jagged edges, and to help the retouch and cloning blend in with the rest of the flower. Then I exported the resized file in the following formats:
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| Using JPG Cruncher to define areas for compression: 11,362 | GIF, 256 colors, 0 dither, used windows colors, size 11,530. | GIF, Optimal Median cut, 127 colors, used windows colors, size 16,718. |
Cropping and Resizing
Here, the original image was 1472 x 800, file size 515,412. I thought it was a bit big to post here, so I am only showing the resized version. It was resized to 200 x 109, file size 25,801. Normally I would crop it so the white edges wouldn't show, first..
An area cropped within the original, large picture to a size of 276 x 238, file size of 39,962.
