Episode 136: Shrinking a Bass Player

I got the planned episode 136 nearly ready – a photography trip to Hamburg. But then came an urgent job from Chicago and overturned the schedule. (No, John, it wasn’t urgent, it was convenient to have a bit more time to edit the Hamburg show).

A big portrait had to be downsized from 3504×2336 to 95×125 pixels. And of course this postage stamp then should still have some atmosphere and style. How much damage this does to the details is visible in the animation on the right.

I never have done this before in such an extreme way and found out, that scaling down in steps is really better than doing one big step.

Beware, this is not the last word about downscaling. There are plugins at the Plugin Registry and we have a discussion about this in the Forum.

For making the image interseting and informative enough for web use I tried to change the contrast with the curve tool, burned and dodged and even made some duotone images.
The TOC

01:48 Find a crop / crop tool and aspect ratio
03:00 What has to be in?
06:00 Cloning out a disturbance
08:20 Make a copy and add an alpha channel
08:40 Curves tool to change contrast
09:45 Dodge and burn to give more light to the bass
14:00 Second approach
14:15 Give names to layers
15:00 Curves again
16:15 Make a Duotone
17:00 Adding two layers with layer masks
18:30 Chose colours
20:00 Fine tuning with the opacity slider
20:30 Instructions for experiments
22:40 Scaling down
25:00 Correcting scaling artefacts
27:00 Better scaling down in steps
29:30 Why is it better?