Now go back to Image to Adjustments to Invert (#3) and the black and white
image will become inverted and look like a black and white negative (#4). Next,
go to the Layers palette and up at the top where the word Normal appears, click
on the little arrowhead to get the fly-out menu where you can change Normal
to Overlay (#5). This will cause the image to turn back into a color image but
it will look sort of weird. So, to cause it to look better, go to Filter to
Blur to Gaussian Blur.
Now comes the tricky, artistic part. Slide the slider bar in the Gaussian
Blur window over to about 15 pixels as a starting point. Then, while looking
at your image, slowly move the slider bar to the right--to a setting of
more than 15 pixels--or until the image starts to look its best. You may
have to crank in a lot of blurring. It varies widely with different images (#6).
When you think you have selected the optimum amount of blurring, go back to
the Layers palette and click on the Opacity arrowhead and move the Opacity slider
bar a little to the left to reduce the intensity of the contrast control mask
that you have created (#7). In the case of the image that I used for this article,
I selected a 70 percent opacity level.
Finally, you may have to tweak the color balance a little. If you do, be sure
to click on the background layer to highlight it (that "selects"
the layer so you can then perform tasks on it), then go to Image to Adjustments
to Color Balance. I had to add in a little yellow and a little red to both the
highlights and the mid tones (#8). You may or may not need to perform a color
balance tweaking. It varies a lot with different images.
If you leave the image in Layers mode (.PSD format) when you Save it, you
will be able to go back and perform further editing on it later. Or, you can
Flatten the image and save it as a TIFF or JPEG file.
For more information on digital imaging, you might want to visit my website
at: www.colorbat.com.
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