A wallpaper I made

[Chris]

Dunno if anyone else here is a perv like me, but I like to get all my desktops from Skins.be. Basically, I have a whole folder full of them on my hard drive, and have a wallpaper changer that rotates through them, changing my desktop every x minutes, so I never get bored of one thing.

Occasionally I come across some hot girl who surprisingly has no wallpapers online, at least not decent hi-res widescreen ones. But there's always shitty low quality images, or magazine scans.

So I found this magazine scan of Nicky Whelan. Look at it fully, it's a bad scan - very grainy, imperfections are more prominent, and there's random colour inconsistencies on her bikini top. I eventually made this image suitable for a wallpaper and I just wanted to post what I did here, so those of you who know more than me in photoshop can point out what I did wrong, and how I could have done something better etc.

Here's the original scan I just talked about (not scanned by me - I actually know how to use one properly so it wouldn't look like this ). And on the right is the photoshopped version I used in the wallpaper

First of all I applied a Gaussian Blur or less than 1 pixel, this got rid of the graining and softened the image. Then I adjusted contrast/brightness and maybe levels/curves I can't remember exactly, but that got it looking a lot better.

Next I used various healing tools. Spot Removal tool got rid of skin imperfections on her left arm. Also used the Healing Brush on parts of the background that had become unwillingly more visible - there were a few white scratches or something on that wooden looking background. I also used the healing brush to get rid of those mysterious white patches (you have a filthy mind) on her bikini top.

Finally I used the Patch Tool to select around the magazine text on the left of the image, and select a part above it to replace it. This didn't look good so I cleaned it up for the wallpaper, but on the image I uploaded you can see how it didn't really work very well. On the right there was some text too, but on my wallpaper I cropped just above it so I didn't need to remove it anyway.

If you quickly switch between both images I think you'll agree my photoshopped version is a hell of a lot better for a wallpaper.

Moving on to the actual wallpaper where I got a little lazy. I wanted it widescreen, I use 1680x1050 but I thought I'd make it 1920x1200 in case I ever upgrade. So I resized the picture of Nicky to 1200 in height, which made the width of it 792px. This meant I had just over 1100px to fill

So, before resizing the image, I cut a piece of the wooden background. I pasted this into a square, mirroring it below and to the left. And then pasted that again and to my surprise it actually worked fairly well. Only problem was it was obvious it was repeating on the left of the wallpaper, so I just applied a light gradient over it to hide it

Another problem is that if you look at the scan, the image crops right at her right elbow - there's no shadow around it because of this close cropping. This looked shit on the wallpaper, so I used the clone stamp to put shadow around it in the most natural way I could. I think it looks ok. Now I've pointed that out you can probably spot it really easily... but here's the final product:

So how do you think it turned out? Is there something I did in a shitty way that I could have done better?

[Huckleberry Pie]

I see you have a liking for hot chicks, but this, is really epic...

[MrLlamaLlama]

I likez, and you did a good job making it look less flat, but not too keen on the whole brown fade-in gradient on the far left.

Also, I'd have lessened the saturation of the red on her lips (the ones on her face, rofl), and increased (slightly) the saturation of blue on her eyes.

The scan resolution should have been higher when whoever scanned it did. If you lurk carefully, there's horizontal lines across the pic.

[Chris]

Well yeah I wasn't sure what to do so I was just like, lolgradient cover up... and did it.

And I did think about how saturated her lips looked but decided it was ok, same with her eyes. Might change that though because it would be pretty quick to do.

[MrLlamaLlama]

I use the cheat's method. Duplicated a section of the background (which is probably noticeable one you know it's there), then just used a gradient that darkens it to near - black (w/ darken blending mode).

[TOXIC]

Isn't she the girl you had in one of your previous Sigs, Chris?

[Chris]

Yeah last year sometime.

[Harwood Butcher]

That's probably the best you could make it, but if you wanted to try to make it a little better for some reason, you could always use the smudge tool to smooth out the spots that still look scanned. Using the smudge tool for things like that gets very tedious and works 5% of the time. So make backups if you plan on doing that.