Hockey Player Autographs

The other day I stood in line with my son to collect some autographs on some photos I had made of our favorite Tampa Bay Lightning players. I had also a plain piece of white paper that I had brought along as a protector and at the last minute I decided to collect on it autographs of players whom I didn't have pictures. When I got home I scanned the paper into Adobe Elements and proceeded to try to extract the signatures. The before and after pictures at the end of this posting shows how well I succeeded.

The autographs were signed with a black fine point Sharpie pen making the black / white contrast as good as possible. Once the page was scanned into Elements I separated each autograph

into their own layer using the Lasso tool expecting to have better control over the extraction than by using the whole page. Each autograph was then treated the same as follows.

1. Using Enhance / Adjust Color / Remove Color I created a black and white version of the layer.


2. In order to get as much contrast as I could I created a new adjustment layer for each autograph layer with Layer / New Adjustment Layer / Brightness/Contrast and moved the Contrast slider over all the way to the right.


3. Both of these moves made removal of the white easy using the Magic Wand Tool. I set the Tolerance to about 25 and removed the Contiguous check mark to delete all of the white even within the pen strokes.


4. After each autograph layer was completed I added a team logo that I had gotten from previous scan and a blue and white gradient fill layer with Layer / New Fill Layer / Gradient.


5. Since all of the signatures are impossible to read I added extra text layers for the player's names and numbers.


6. One or two of the autographs ended up too light in spots because the player used a light pen pressure. I fixed this by using the Pencil Tool with black Foreground color. I had to use a tablet to do this as the mouse didn't give me the control and pen pressure that I needed.

I think the technique worked so well that I won't worry about having to have a picture with me in the future. I'll collect the autograph on a piece of paper and transfer it to the picture in Elements.

The Unwanted Guest

A couple of years ago my daughter asked me if I could remove a person from a picture she had and make a 5 x 7 print of the result. I looked at it and told her I'd give it a try, not really expecting to accomplish much. The pictures above show the original picture and the progression to the final result. Click on any one of them to open a larger view for more detail.

The original as seen in the upper left photo has the boy she wanted removed at the left. The other three were hockey players. The two boys, the one on the right is my grandson, Rick, played on the same team. The girl, my granddaughter, Nicole, was also a player but on a different team.

I decided that I wanted to change the background to fit the hockey theme so it was best just to simply cut out the three players and discard the rest of the picture. The second picture shows the resulting cutout layer. Copy and clone work removed the hand in the center and constructed both of the shoulders of the boy on the left. I used the clone stamp to construct the boy's left shoulder and remove the hand in the center. I then copied the left shoulder, flipped it horizontally, and placed it to create the right shoulder. The shadows and highlights were then modified so the shoulder didn't appear to a copy. The third picture shows this completed work.

The final operation was to add the background. A separate picture of the hockey rink was added as a separate layer, defocusing it with the Blur filter and adjusting the size for the correct perspective. Afterward I felt I needed to add the additional hand on the right shoulder so I copied Nicole's left hand, flipped it horizontally, and placed it on the constructed right shoulder. The final picture shows the completed project.

My daughter now has it on her wall with all of her other hockey pictures.