Tutorial: Turning A Small Pic Into A Good One

Since Gettyimages has that big transparent NBA Logo on their pictures now, pictures are probably hard to find now that's actually useable for cyberfaces. Here is a way to find practically any pic, and enlarge it to a size where it's actually useable for cyberfaces.

Step 1
For my tutorial, I'll use a picture of my favorite player, Yao Ming.

The size of the image is 115x175. Now, in Photoshop, go to Image>Image Size. Make sure "Constrain Proporations" is on. In width, type in, let's say, 300. The picture would be pretty pixellated huh? Don't worry, we'll fix that soon.

Step 2
Duplicate a layer of the pic. Go to Filter>Gaussian Blur. With a 2.0 setting. Now on the layers palette, choose the Soft Light blend mode. Merge Down the layers. The picture should now look like this.


Step 3
The picture is still a bit pixellated. So we'll duplicate step 2 again, except that this time, the Gaussian Blur will have a setting of 1.0, and set the blending mode to "Screen".


Step 4
Now, go to Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast. With a setting of: Brightness: -25 Contrast:+10. Then go to Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask and apply it with settings of 50/1.5/10. The final picture should look like this:


Step 5
Final Step. Try this out and start patching! Hope this tutorial helped some aspiring patchers out there.

Pretty nice little tutorial

Last edited by Andreas Dahl on Wed Aug 03, 2005 8:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

cool