Slomo (and other Photoshoppers)

[Gerryatrics]

I picked up a copy of Photoshop CS2 a while back, mostly as a way to crop and touch up photos without too much hassle. I've messed around with some of the more advance features before, but never figured out... well anything, so I gave up. A couple of days ago I decided to give it another try, I needed to make an image for a contest, and I can't sketch or anything like that, so I decided to edit it together with Photoshop. I actually did better than I thought I would, the end result was more or less what I was going for, though pretty sloppy as far as photoshops go. I think I used the clone tool more than anything else, both to color certain areas that I couldn't figure out how to color otherwise and to blend stuff together that didn't blend too well on their own.

Here's what I started with:



And here's what I ended up with:



No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get the pants the same color as the upper part of the shirt, same with the sides of the shirt. All the white stuff looks really bad and I smudged a couple of areas trying to get everything to match up correctly. Trying to change one color to another was by far the hardest part.

So, any tips on how to improve my photoshopping? Feel free to be brutally honest. Any tweaks that can be made to the final product? Now that I'm starting to get comfortable with using Photoshop I want expand my skills as much as possible.

[fraga]

That actually looks pretty good...the outlining could use some work. As far as the colors, make sure you're painting them on different layers and not directly on the picture itself. Use different settings to get the look of the colors just right, Multiply, Overlay, Desaturation, Brightness and Contrast. The more you practice, the more you pick up. Keep up the good work.

[Borosai]

I was thinking what I could recommend, but I figured I would give it a try and see what steps I would take. I warn you, my methods aren't very good...I'm sure there are better and more efficient ways of doing this.

I used the Wand tool to select the individual red squares to change their color (edges are still red though. That would take time to clean up, but can be done). Then I used the Hue/Saturation tool to change them to blue. I also couldn't get the legs to match with Hue/Saturation, so I just picked the blue from the top and with a brush at around 50%, I painted over the dark blue areas that I wanted to match with the top (I selected these areas beforehand to avoid spill, which I ended up with anyway, so that would have to be cleaned up also). However, by painting over, the colors matched better, but most muscle definition and shadow was lost, so I used the burn tool (at about 20%) and using the original image as reference, I added some detail back.

What a mess right? Like I said, there must be easier/faster/better looking methods around. This was mine.