Photoshop Tip: Dials

[Pugwash]

This article was inspired by some excellent shots my friend By-Tor did of his beloved Planet Ocean. It should show you how to, in a very short space of time, clean up dials and crystals in your watch photos. It's not the only thing you should do, but it's part of a large suite. I prefer to do hardly any photoshop or a hell of a lot, and I want the results to look similar. If you can tell what's been photoshopped, my mission has failed.

On to the lesson. I apologise for the cramped screen shots, but I have to assume you don't all have 1920x1200 HD-TV 24" LCD monitors and therefore I switched to 1024x768 and reduced to 800x600 so as the menus are still readable but that it takes as little space as possible.

Firstly, we get the photo we want:

Then we change the selection tool to Ellipse, this being essentially, the 'trick' in this lesson.

Select an area around about the size of the area you want to select, which is the crystal. We're just covering up what lighting causes problems with. We're not adding anything that's not there.

Click on Transform Selection:

Nearly right ... needs rotating some more ...

... and there we are. Mathematically, it's important to remember that a circle viewed from any angle will always be an ellipse. Geometry really, really saves our bacon here. There is always an ellipse that fits your round watches.

Feather the selection, just so we don't create any knife-edge harsh visible changes.

4 pixels does for my photos at 5mp. You may need 8 or more at higher resolution.

Go to Levels. If you don't know the keyboard shortcut to the Levels palette, learn it NOW. It's one of the most important features in basic photoshop.

Adjust to what looks good to you. Don't try to make it unusually dark or over-clean and crisp as all you want to do is show what the watch really looks like. If you have the watch next to you while you're doing this, use it as reference.

That's all folks.

Once you've done this a few times, it gets very, very quick. You don't need layers, you don't even need to save the selection as you get better at creating the perfect ellipse.

The next step after this would be to invert the selection and do the levels for the rest of the photo, but that's another tip ...

[Pugwash]

Replies and questions, as usual, to the thread, not by PM.