Red Umbrellas on Rose Street

Preliminaries

Let’s agree upfront that tintii is a tool in the toolbox, not an automated artist. Adobe® Photoshop™ and Corel® Paint Shop Pro™ are the toolboxes that provide the rich selection of complementary tools for perfecting an effect like this. Our approach uses tintii amongst these to achieve our final result. In particular, we use Photoshop CS4 on the Mac, with tintii 2.2.0. To follow along you will need Photoshop installed, a trial version is available if you need it, and a registered version of tintii so that you can use it as a plugin. You’ll still get plenty of mileage from this tutorial with Paint Shop Pro or another version of Photoshop, just keep in mind that tools and menu items may be in slightly different places. You can also just use the standalone version of tintii for the first few sections.

We’ll start by running the original photo through tintii to get the basic colour pop we want, then polish up the result with some of Photoshop’s other tools.

The pop

Start by downloading the original photo here, and opening it up in Photoshop. The first step is to run the photo through tintii, so fire it up to start with via the Filter > indii.org > tintii menu item. If you haven’t yet registered tintii you will be prompted for your registration key at this point – get one here if you need to and enter it to continue.

The tintii dialog will appear as below. tintii needs to analyse the colours of your photo first, so the dialog may not appear instantly, be patient.

The window has three major sections:

1. In the centre is the preview pane, where you can see the changes to your image as you work. It will always start out in black and white.
2. To the left is the Thumbs pane, which displays a set of thumbnail images, each representing a major colour theme that tintii has detected, with a ghostly overlay indicating the presence of that colour across the image. Selecting a thumbnail, by clicking on it, will restore that colour in the preview pane. Try it.
3. Finally, to the right are a set of additional panes for finer control, namely the Postprocessing, Colour detection and Channel mixer panes.

It is in fact possible to move the panes around, just click their title bar and drag them to where you want. This can be useful if you’re working with a landscape or panorama shot where some extra width in the preview pane might come in handy – drag the thumbnail pane to the bottom of the window, for example.

tintii saves your settings between sessions, so in case you’ve used it before (or are already playing!), click the Defaults button in the bottom left hand corner of the window. This just restores the default settings, which are actually pretty good most of the time. The Thumbs setting in the Colour detection pane lets you choose the number of colours, and so the number of thumbnails, that will appear. In the screenshot above we’ve set it to 5, you might like to do the same. The other settings in this pane are quite technical and you won’t need to use them much, consult the reference manual for more information.

One of the thumbnails – they may appear in a different order each time – should pick out those red umbrellas, so select it. You can select as many or as few thumbnails as you like, depending on the desired effect.

That’s 95% of the effect now achieved. You’ll notice, however, that the umbrellas aren’t the only touch of red in the photo, and tintii has picked up on the drab hint of red in the pavement, some skin tones and other bits and pieces. Most of this we’ll want to clean up, but one of the nice surprises of tintii is that it often comes up with the delightfully unexpected – how about those red flowers opposite the umbrellas? Their little splash of colour should balance up the photo nicely, so we’ll keep those!

Pages: 1 2 3 4

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 21:57 and is filed under photography, tintii. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.