Calling PShop Gurus

[Bee_Jay]

Hi,

I'm tryin to put together a collage as a present, and I need the same look and feel to all the pictures.

Can someone please help, as this is stretching my Photoshop knowledge to the limits...

How do I make this:



Look all blown out and contrasty like this:



No matter what I do it seems to look crap... ????

[Bee_Jay]

Turns out the "Virtual Photographer" plug-in by optikVerve is the answer...

[parrot of doom]

Like this? Took me about 2 minutes.

[Bee_Jay]

Cool, how did you do that?

[ehasler]

30 seconds in PS gets you this:


To do this, I simply selected Image, Adjustments, Levels and moved the sliders until it looked like this:


Give it a try, and see what effect moving the 3 sliders has. If you move the one on the right inwards, it turns more of the picture to white (colour 255,255,255). You can see what will turn white by holding down "Alt" as you move the slider, and if you move the left hand slider inwards it turns more of the image black (colour 0,0,0).

The middle slider basically changes the brightness.

[Bee_Jay]

Great, thanks...

It seems I also need to saturate some colours a bit more too...

[parrot of doom]

If anything you need to desaturate some colours mate.

[Ex-biker]

I spent about 5 - 10 mins and got this:



I saturated it, added brightness and contrast, played with the colour balance, then pulled in the levels.

Not sure if it is what you want or anywhere near what others have done. Thought I'd try.