Many of the negatives that I am now working on have never seen the light of day. Why not? Well, for a range of reasons and negative quality is a common one. In conventional photography to get a good quality 16*12 print from the darkroom process usually takes a pretty good quality negative to start with. Sometimes our expertise lets us down and the exposure or development is not quite what it should have been resulting in a negative that is passed over for something of better quality. I now revisit some of those negatives and look at them again with a digital eye and with Adobe Photoshop in mind.

I had the basic image above scanned onto a Kodak Photo CD and retrieved the file into Photoshop 5 at the highest resolution of 3072 by 2048 pixels per inch (PPI) giving a file size of 18 megabyte.

The resolution you are working on depends largely on what you are going to use the end product for. Photo quality prints at 16*12 will need all those 300 pixels per inch, while images for a web site need only be a fraction of that size at 72ppi. I didn't like the black background of the original image and I also wanted to adjust the contrast of the white plumage separate from the dark plumage. To do this I decided to separate all these elements getting rid of the background and placing the white plumage on one layer and the dark plumage on another. This would allow me to adjust each part separately before placing them on a new background.

I decided to use the pen tool shown below and make a path around my subjects.

Making a path is easy, you just draw round the object or parts you wish to remove, convert that path to a selection and remove the unwanted material. However, there are a few tricks and tips to this process to make life easier and the resulting image that much better. The pen tool, like all Photoshop tools needs just a little practice before you get the hang of it, but persevere with it as you will find it is one of the most useful tools in Photoshop. The best way to use the pen tool is with your image greatly enlarged. Draw round your subject in short steps as though you are making a series of dots. Every time you click the mouse Photoshop will place an anchor point and you can then make the next step. If you are making a path round tight corners, simply make the steps smaller, but in other areas the steps can be considerably longer.

When you have created your path and joined up with your starting point you will need to convert the path into a selection. Call up your path palette from the windows menu. To convert the path to a selection drag the path thumbnail over the selection icon at the base of the palette.

Before choosing copy and paste that will copy just the selected area of the white plumage to another layer I added a degree of feather to the edge of the selection.

I chose 3 pixels for my 300ppi file.. This left the first part of my Eagles head floating on a transparent background. I repeated the exact same process for the dark feathers which left me with three layers. I still had the original picture, but I now had two other layers one holding the Eagles head and one the body. At that stage I felt able to dump the original image I was copying from in the bin at the base of the layers palette. Remember that the F7 key toggles the layers palette on and off

I then decided to import the new background for my image and I chose one taken in the lake district. I retrieved the file and added it to the two layers which made up the Eagle. Selecting my Eagle body I called up the levels palette by selecting Image/Adjust/Levels from the menu bar or you can use the shortcut keys Ctrl+L. Try the auto button first if you are new to the levels palette as it often gives very good results. Try moving the sliders manually to get the best contrast while retaining detail. I repeated this process with the Eagle head.

I had chosen to place my black & white Eagle over a colour background and this required me to add some colour to the Eagle. Choosing the Eagle body again I called up the hue and saturation palette via Image-Adjust-Hue-Saturation. Making sure the colorize box was ticked I adjusted the hue and saturation sliders until I was happy with the degree of colour I had introduced. I repeated that process again with the Eagles head.

At this stage the image was nearly complete, but I wanted to see what effect flipping the image horizontal would have. We read left to right and it is said that images like this are better with the subject looking in the direction we naturally read. I tried it and felt it was better. I also made a selection of the eye and with the airbrush set to a very low pressure and hard light chosen from the menu I added a little more colour to fit in better with the overall colours of the image. My final task was to add the small silhouette of another eagle into the sky and shade the sky just a little at the top. I drew the Eagle with a marker pen on a plain piece of paper and scanned it with my Epson flatbed scanner.