Cleaning up a client's bad art

All right, last I left this image Opposite effects.psd, I had set the wrestlers layer to Subtract and I don't want that. I ultimately want to work with Linear Burn, so I'll go and choose that mode right there. Now, let's say, you are doing this work for a client and they tell you that they want a light bulb right in the center of things there. So, that these two people are brainstorming, they are coming up with ideas. They don't want just any old light bulb; they want this specific light bulb here. So, they actually give you a file and this is not the least bit uncommon. You will, if you have not already experiences get some rotten artwork from clients and this could be a logo.

This could be like the best version of a company's logo that they have. But let's just say that somebody printed out a light bulb. They've found a picture, this comes from the Fotolia Image Library actually and they printed it out and then they drew using a sharpie some lines and that's what they want. This is going to be the piece of artwork you need work with and not only that. They thoughtfully went ahead and save the file with the worst possible JPEG compression settings that they could. So, we have all kinds of compression artifacts all over the place and they expect you to use this wretched piece of artwork in your beautiful composition so far. And Guess what? No problem, it's going to happen lickety-split, this is a really easy job.

It's not going to involve any masking or anything like that. We are going to simply composite this light bulb against a new background and make it look totally at home. So, for starters let's go ahead and clean up this artwork. So, we don't need the color that's inherent in the artwork. This purple for example isn't going to do us any good because the artwork has this kind of sepia cast at the moment and we can remain true to that composition by sticking with a grayscale image. So, I'll go up to the Image menu, choose mode and choose Grayscale. Notice that I'm not trying to elaborately mix a black-and-white version of this image using the Channel Mixer or the Black & White command or anything like that.

I am just converting it to grayscale. I'll get this Alert Message that's says, Hey! Do you really want to do this? I'll say Yes, Discard those colors please. Now I need to enhance the contrast because I need to get this light bulb against a white background. So, I'll press Ctrl+L or Command+L on the Mac. I am working totally static here as opposed to with Adjustment layers because really this is not such a high-quality image. It doesn't deserve that kind of respect and attention. So, I'll just go ahead and drag this white point slider triangle over to the left in order to clip a whole bunch of colors inside the image.

If I want to make that modification automatically, I could take advantage of my white eyedropper here. So, I'll go ahead and click let's say right about there in order to set anything that's brighter than that clicked color to white and that ends up looking pretty good. I might have gone a little too far with the change. So I am going to increase that White Balance number to 95 actually; it seems to work out pretty well. Then I'll increase the black point as well in order to darken up the light bulb, give it just a little bit of heft and that looks pretty good to me. We have a nice solid boundary of white around the light bulb now.

Click OK in order to accept that change. Now, I am going to switch to my Magic Wand tool just so that I can check things out here, see what I've done. I've set the Tolerance value to 0, Anti-alias is turned off and I am going to go ahead and click in the light bulb to make sure that I've at least selected everything I need to. It looks pretty darn good at this point. It looks like I have a good margin between the light bulb and all this garbage that's surrounds it. Let's get rid of the garbage, like so. I'll go up to the Select menu and I'll choose the Inverse command or I could press Ctrl+Shift+I, Command+Shift+I on the Mac in order to reverse the selection.

Now, what I need to do is deselect the light bulb. So, I've selected all the garbage and I've selected light bulb stuff. So, I need to deselect the sharpie lines and the light bulb photo and so on and I'm going to do that using the Lasso tool. So, I'll get my Lasso tool by pressing the L key and then I will Alt+Drag. So, I press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and then I'll just start dragging around the stuff that I want to keep, like so. If you end up running out of room like this just press and hold the Spacebar and drag down a little bit.

Then release the Spacebar to return to the Lasso tool which is a great trick when you're working tight inside of an image. I'm just continuously dragging here, you don't have to release at a certain point. Just keep dragging around the entire light bulb image, like so. So, it's not the most exciting work but it's going to get the job done pretty quickly here. I'll drag down underneath a light bulb over like that and I have now deselect the light bulb which is good because everything else is garbage inside the image.

So, I'll confirm that, I have my default colors by pressing the D key and then I'll press Ctrl+Backspace or Command+Delete on the Mac in order to fill that area with white. We now have this unfettered light bulb image. That still looks horrible. Check out all of those compression artifacts right there that's just an awful wretched image. And yet, we can make it look so good with the help of some trivial blending and I'll show you how to apply that trivial blending in the next exercise.