PS Mobile vs. Photoshop CS4 Extended | When to Tweak On-the-Go and When to Go 3D

It’s only one week after Halloween and I’m already editing the photos. Let’s take a few of those photos taken on the iPhone while trick-or-treating and give them some loving with PS Mobile and Photoshop CS4 Extended. We’ll explore why PS Mobile is better on the go, but why you should still touch up in Photoshop.

The first photo is of a young soldier.

pint size Marine at your service

My iPhone captured this soldier protecting the neighborhood on Halloween. It’s an ok shot. Let’s crop it a bit with PS Mobile. Then we’ll tint it to add some interest.

The monotone color scheme makes his expression stand out

Cropping out the fairy wings and making the photo monotone really makes his stoic glare stand out. This photo is certainly worthy to be emailed to the grandparents, but I can’t do much more to enhance it on the phone.

Now let’s look at what I did in Photoshop CS4.

This marine means business

Keep in mind, there are probably several ways to achieve this look but here’s what I did:

1. Use the quick selection tool to cut out our marine and copy him to a new layer.
2. Turn the bottom layer black & white, then add a hue/saturation layer with a hue of 45 and saturation of 60.
3. Turn the marine himself into a smart object. Use the quick selection tool to cut out his face and paste it to a new layer.
4. Add a hue/saturation layer to his body and hat, with a hue of  38, saturation of 25 and lightness of -18.
5. Lastly, blur the bottom layer of the composition with a slight gaussian blur.

The next photo is the kids’ horde of candy

don't worry, this was from more than one kid

Ok, that’s a lot of candy, but it’s also a kind of boring shot. I wanted to quickly send it to the grandparents, so they could see how gluttonous the kids were. The composition of the shot made cropping a bit of a challenge. The majority of the candy is stacked on the right side and there is too much of the room.

the best I could do with PS mobile

For the sake of speed and efficiency, I first played right in PS Mobile. I cropped it tight, to cut out the extraneous parts of the room. Although this cuts out much of the candy, you still get a feel for the mounds (excuse the pun) of sugar. I also used the vibrance filter to boost the color.

This candy needed some added sweetness from Photoshop

This was a really subtle difference. I still added the vibrance filter, but also added the spherize filter to make the candy seem a bit more mountainous. This is certainly a subjective change and many may not like the distortion of the Crunch bars. If you wanted to get super fancy, you could make a 3D map of the candy using Photoshop extended.

Now that looks yummy!

This image may not be to everyone’s taste, pun intended. It’s more an artistic 3D rendering of the mountain of candy. I used the tutorial from the Russell Brown show (3D mesh from grayscale) as my guideline for this photo.

This is not for the faint of heart. I’ll paraphrase his tutorial here along with any tweaks I added. Make sure to watch his excellent video tutorials if you have Photoshop.

1. Duplicate your photo layer.
2. Go to the channels tab and select the channel with the greatest contrast.
3. Duplicate that channel and copy it back into your layers tab.
4. In this case, I then boosted the brightness and decreased the contrast to make for a lighter, smoother grayscale.
5. Blur the grayscale. I used a gaussian blur of 7 pixels. Omitting this steps will cause a jagged, jarring grayscale map.
6. Under the 3D menu (with your grayscale layer selected), click on new layer from grayscale.
7. Your new 3D layer will be a smart object. Double click the file under the diffuse heading of the object (in this case called Contrast 1). This will open the .psb file for editing.     
   

   Diffuse layer of 3D object

8. Paste your photo layer onto the top layer of the diffuse file (in this case, contrast 1.psb). This will force Photoshop to use the photo itself (instead of the grayscale image) as the surface for the 3D grayscale model.
9. Your 3D photo will still look dark. There are a couple of options here. You can change the render settings for the light (in the 3D scene palette) to unlit texture, as Russell Brown recommended. I found that this looked too flat. So I added a point light, which gave it a more artsy than realistic look.

This is certainly not for the casual or novice Photoshop user, but it is a lot of fun to explore the possibilities.

PS Mobile is an excellent on-the-go option to quickly tweak the photos from your iPhone prior to emailing them. However, when I want to include photos in my family’s year in review movie, I will always tweak them in Photoshop first.