I never, EVER scrap a picture anymore without editing it. My new best friend has become OptikVerveLab’s Virtual Photographer plug-in for Photoshop/Photoshop Elements. I use it on every picture! You can download it here (it’s free!) and instructions for installing it are here. Sorry Mac girls, I think it only works with PCs.

So I took my original and opened up Virtual Photographer (found under Filters). Under the Presets pull-down menu, I picked Photocopy. I picked this preset because I loved the effect it had on the greens in my picture. However, the highlights were far too bright, so I played with the sliders under the Film Type section until her skin looked a little better but the grass still had that nice color to it. (These screenshots are clickable) Note: each preset has different results on different photos. Just play around with them.

After I applied my filter, my photo looked like this. Her skin is a little too washed out for what I was trying to achieve so I took it a step further.

I then duplicated the photo (right click on it in the layers pallete and select duplicate). I started playing with the blending modes on this duplicate until I found I liked the effect that “Multiply” gave (blending modes are found in a pull down menu on the top of your layers pallette left of “Opacity”). I then changed the opacity of this duplicate layer, playing with the opacity slider in the layers pallette until I liked what I saw. In this case, I set the opacity to 70%. Just play around with the blending modes to see what suits YOUR photo. The best way to get to know your program is to fiddle around with it.

And then that was it! I really do think it looks so much better. What do you think? I hope this was somewhat helpful. I love these filters. They really make your photos go from blah to WOW!

A few tips: when using the filters I always make sure the Film Speed gets set to 25 ASA because the higher you go, the grainier the photo gets. When a preset puts the Effect to “Soft” I bring the slider down to the left to avoid the photo looking too blurry or fuzzy (some of the presets have really, really soft effects that I don’t usually want).

Well, let me know if you have any questions about that! Here’s my LO using that picture:

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Scrap pages, Tips and tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.