Safely Upgrading RAM for Graphic Artists and Other Computer Lovers

Adding extra memory to your computer will keep it running smoothly and quickly. For graphics artists like me having plenty of RAM is one of the most important things to think about when buying or upgrading a computer. Adding RAM to an existing computer is easy, fast, and cost effective.

Memory Deal has taken the process a step further toward safety with their unique online service guaranteeing that the memory you purchase from them will match with the original memory installed on your computer exactly; eliminating many of the potential difficulties that so often come with memory upgrades. I have upgraded my RAM in the past without any trouble, but others haven’t been so lucky. Many people have run into problems with memory upgrades because of the many options they have to choose from in RAM modules. Problems can stem from the wrong sizes, low quality, or the wrong type of RAM altogether.

Scott Bauer, the owner of Memory Deal says that this service insures quality because the "levels of RAM modules remain the same as computer makers Apple, Dell, HP, IBM and Sun installed at the factory when the computer systems were first built."

Memory Deal is now offering numerous items including PC3200 DDR400 SDRAM Upgrade, a 2gb Memory Upgrade and other Apple Memory & MAC RAM.
The service offered by Memory Deal seems to be a very good idea to me, and I’m sure that my fellow computer-lovers out there will feel much more comfortable knowing that everything in there computer will be the same quality originally intended by their computer manufacturer.

Portrait Enhancement - Major Shadow Removal and Skin Smoothing

This photo was taken by a friend of the bride, not a professional photographer. Overall, It is a beautiful picture. The problem: It was obviously shot in the early to mid afternoon, when the sun was high and shining directly down on the bride; causing dramatic shadows and hiding her beautiful blue eyes.

The details of what I corrected included lots of detail work around the eyes, lightening shadows on the neck and chest, adding shiny highlights to each jewel on the tiara and each pearl, and a bunch of dodging and burning on the lace of the dress.

Because there were both extreme shadows and extreme highlights on her face and chest, I had quite a time coming up with the nice, smooth, light skin you see in the finished image.

Here are the basic steps I used after I had done major work on regaining the details around her eyes:

1. I selected all of the skin on her face and neck and right clicked on it, choosing "Layer via copy".

2. I selected the eraser tool with a soft brush and a pressure of 10% and, making sure that I was working on the copied layer, I ran the eraser over major facial features: eyes, outline of the nose and nostrils, mouth, jawline, and any major lines and dimples.

3. I went to the "Filters" menu, clicked on noise, and chose "Median" I increase the median until the skin looked overly smooth, to where the face looked more like a blurry painting than a photo.

4. I turned the Opacity of the Copied layer down to 50%, which created a much nicer, smoother skin and less extreme shadows to work with. Even so, it wasn't exactly right.

5. I chose a few places that still had shadows and highlights which needed to be smoothed. I selected and use the Gaussian Blur filter to smooth each one individually.

6. I now had a smooth skin to work with, but it still had tons of shadows to get rid of. So I went into "Enhance", "Adjust Lighting", and then chose "Shadows/Highlights" I ran the "Lighten Shadows" bar as far as possible, to 100. I did this several times over until I was satisfied with the result.

7. After this it was mostly small detail work. I repeated a similar process on the lips and chest. I whitened her teeth, and did a bit more detail work on her eyes, dress, pearls, and tiara.

How to Create a Beautiful Selective Black and White Photo in Photoshop

Here is and example of a soft, glowing Selective Black & White.

I will start off with this where I left off on the restoration of this same original photo (see previous posts).

This customer wanted a Selective Black & White version of this photo. She asked me to leave the flowers red and the eyes blue. So, after the restoration, I carefully selected the tulips, inverted the selection, and feathered it so that it would look like it glowed. I then inverted the selection to select the all of the photo except the flowers copied it.

After all of this I used several different softening filters to create several different “glowing” versions of this photograph, presented them to my customer, and she chose this one.

To turn this into a Black & White, I used a completely different program. You can make perfectly acceptable Black & Whites using Adobe Photoshop Elements Adobe Photoshop Elements and absolutely incredible ones using Adobe Photoshop CS3, but I prefer using another program altogether, called The Gimp. It has a great Channel Mixer, which allows you to choose the color “channels” you want to use to create your Black & White. There really is no “correct” combination of colors, it depends on the colors and lighting of your original photo, how many main colors there are, and how dramatic you want the final product to look.

To see this photo “Magically” become Black & White see www.GinisMagic.com http://www.ginismagic.com/.

How to Turn A Baby Into a Flower - Example 2

This is me again! Some people are embarrassed by their baby pictures, but I’m not. I was adorable and I know it! =)

In this case, I used my own face and put it on a picture of a daisy that I had taken earlier. It is quite an involved process, and I don’t want to reveal all my secrets, especially since I don’t know of anyone else who does portraits like these, so I won’t be explaining this one in detail. Sorry.

After adding my face to the flower, I changed the hue of the “Face” layer to more of a yellow/orange color in order to help it blend into the flower. Then I used one of my Special Effects to make it appear as if the facial features were actually coming out of the flower itself. This one was done partially in Microsoft Digital Image Pro and partially in Adobe Photoshop Elements Adobe Photoshop Elements.

There are more examples of these portraits on my website, www.GinisMagic.com http://www.ginismagic.com/.

Damaged Photo Restoration - Recreating missing Pieces of a Photo

Much of the time, repairing a photo is more difficult than it looks. This was not one of the those cases.

Though it may look difficult because such large pieces are missing, the majority of what was missing was background, so repairing them mostly involved some creative cloning and blending.

The most difficult part to fix was the piece missing from the lower left corner, because part of the child’s leg is missing. This took some time to rebuild, but it’s pretty believable, isn’t it? I used the part of her leg that was still showing in order to create a realistic vision of what the rest of her leg would look like. Also, if you look closely at the original picture you will see the dimple of her knee if half there, half missing. In the finished photo, you can see the entire dimple, which I recreated.

After fixing the missing pieces, I finished with the detail work that involved getting rid of spots on her face, and some tears and cracks that were too thin for you to be able to see in the above examples and some other small but important details.

Once all detail work was done, I wanted to give the photo a softer look, so I used my "Pure Softness" Special Effect. You can see more examples of this effect on the Special Effects page of www.ginismagic.com.

A Really Cool Special Effect

Here is an example of another one of my favorite Special Effects; Brownie Diffuse. This effect is best used on a photo like the one below, with two main colors or tones.

This effect is a mixture of two different filters, some dodging, some burning, and some good, old fashioned, tinkering with color and saturation. It was done completely in Microsoft Digital Image Pro 10, but it can just as easily be done in Adobe Photoshop Elements Adobe Photoshop Elements

Turning Friends Into Fairies - Example 1

This is another photo I took myself, of one of my best friends in my front yard. I can take pretty much any photo of a person and turn them into a fairy, but some positions are better than others. For me to turn you (or anyone else) into a fairy, just send me a picture of the person in whatever clothes you want, and make sure that there is nothing in front of the person that you don’t want in the final portrait.

Since this was a new photograph it didn’t require any restoration or repair. I was fortunate enough to be able to shoot this in ideal lighting, just before sunset on a slightly overcast day, so there were extreme shadows or overexposed areas.

Tip: When shooting portraits outside, my favorite environment to shoot in is sunny or slightly overcast weather, but out of direct sunlight, like the above portrait.

Now, to turn this young woman into a fairy, the first and most important thing she needed was a pair of wings. There are many different kind of wings and props I can use. To see some of the different props I can use in my Fantasy Portraits, please go to www.GinisMagic.com To add the wings, I had to VERY carefully select The part of the body that they would be touching; in this case the arm and back. Using Adobe Photoshop Elements, I then duplicated it on to another layer and added the wings on yet another layer. After moving the wings behind the duplicated arm and back, I adjusted the hue until I was satisfied. I chose a yellow orange because it contrasted with the purple of her blouse and complemented the flowers in photo. Then I used a diffusion glow filter on all the layers.

After that, I used different sizes of a brush with a very beautiful floral design to create the frame. I felt that a simple, square shaped frame wouldn’t complement the portrait well so I used the brushes to roughly imitate the shape of the portrait subject.