How to Do Everything With Your Scanner- P38 pptx

Creating a Mirror Image of Your Photo This feature is particularly useful when you’re importing cutout images into another photo I tell you how to do this later, in the “Making a Cutout”

FIGURE 10-9 Rotating 5 degrees to the left and cropping corrects the problem

Creating a Mirror Image of Your Photo

This feature is particularly useful when you’re importing cutout images into another photo (I tell you how to do this later, in the “Making a Cutout” section) Sometimes you need a subject to be facing left, when he or she is facing right in the original photo; or you might want to copy an image upside down to create a certain effect within a photo collage

Many image-editing programs have features that allow you to do this For example, PhotoSuite allows you to invert a photo or cutout from a photo both horizontally and vertically

Rotation angle

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FIGURE 10-10 The subject now appears at the correct angle, and the computer does

not look as if it’s ready to fall into his lap

This whimsical scene in Figure 10-11 would be a lot more collegial if the sub-jects were facing each other It also might be a bit easier for the viewer to suspend disbelief if the giant butterfly were not flying upside down In Figure 10-12, each of the animals and the motorcycle rider have been inverted using the PhotoSuite 4 horizontal flip tool The butterfly has been placed in an upright position using the vertical flip tool

In Figures 10-13 and 10-14, I have horizontally inverted an entire photo to make it appear as if the photo were taken from an entirely different vantage point

FIGURE 10-11 In this scene, none of the subjects are facing each other, and

the giant butterfly is flying upside down

FIGURE 10-12 The horizontal and vertical flip tools allow you to reorient the

subjects properly

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FIGURE 10-13 The original photo appears to have been taken from the

right side of the stage

FIGURE 10-14 Horizontally inverting the photo makes the vantage point appear

to be to the left of the stage

Correcting the Red-Eye Effect

Red eye (that is the actual technical term) is a well-known unwanted effect that’s caused

when the light from the flash is so strong that it actually penetrates your subject’s eyeballs It then reflects the red color of the retina

This effect occurs most often in blue-eyed people or in dimly lit environments In dim lighting, the subject’s pupils dilate, exposing more of the red retina

Prior to the advent of scanning and digital imaging, amateur photographers had only two alternatives for reducing the red-eye effect, neither of which was very desirable The first involved purchasing a special red-eye reduction flash system that would emit a pre-flash before the actual flash This would cause the subject’s pupils to contract, but you ended up with a lot of squinty-eyed subjects, as well as people who stopped smiling or blinked after the initial flash The other alternative was dabbing a blue marking-pen over a subject’s eyes, but that could be tedious if you needed multiple copies of the shot, and it could obscure a subject’s true eye color

Most image-editing programs have a special feature for correcting the red-eye effect, which you can locate by checking the Help menu of the software under the keyword “red-eye.”

Generally, the repair process for the red-eye effect involves the following steps:

1. Locate the red-eye correction tool in your image-editing software

2. Use the zoom tool to enlarge the area with the red pixels, as shown in Figures 10-15 and 10-16

3. Paint over the red pixels using the red-eye correction tool or other touchup feature provided with your image-editing program for this purpose

If your image-editing software does not have a tool specifically for correcting the red-eye effect, you can enlarge the photo as described above and apply a gray tint to the red pixels.

Airbrushing Flaws from a Scanned Photo

Airbrushing is a term that’s historically been applied to image-editing technology that simulates the effect of using a paintbrush to cover up flaws and unwanted effects in the picture Generally, with modern scanning and image-editing technology, you can achieve

an airbrushing effect by creating patches of pixels (colored dots) from areas in the photo surrounding the flaw You cover the flaw using pixels matching the surrounding background

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