Innholdsfortegnelse for Photoshop Image Editing The Complete Manual i Photoshop Image Editing The Complete Manual

Color Transfer This is a Neural Filter and is found under Filter > Neural Filters. This one is currently still in Beta so presumably it has some development and refinement to go before becoming a fully-fledged featured filter. Essentially, it is a means by which you can use the colour palette of an entirely different image and apply it to your own image in various creative ways. We have an image of a tiger and when you activate the Color Transfer filter, you are presented with a number of presets to get you started. The presets are a series of images that have various tonal and colour qualities that can be applied to your own image. We clicked on one of the more garish examples to see what it would…

Gradient Tool The Gradient Tool has been a staple of Photoshop pretty much for ever, but most recently it has had a small update in the 2022 release of Photoshop. The change may seem fairly bland compared to some of the other features available, but Adobe clearly decided it was required. Back in the days of Photoshop 2021 and older, when you chose the Gradient Tool, the method that was used to blend colours together was the so-called classic method. Now, though, when using the Gradient Tool, you have Classic, with Linear and Perceptual added to the list. What’s the difference you may ask? Our example uses a simple multi-coloured grad, and the three different blend methods are displayed side-by-side for easy comparison. Apparently, the Linear method is more akin…

Select and Mask The Select and Mask tool (originally called Refine Edge) has been with us for a while but there have been a couple of tweaks made worth mentioning. When you access the Select and Mask toolset, you will notice that on the top menu bar are two buttons. One is Select Subject (which can also be found on the main Select menu options) and also a Refine Hair button. The Select Subject button will analyse your image and make a determination as to what your main subject is and put a selection around it. With the new Photoshop update, the improved Object Selection Tool found out on the toolbar is also available within the Select and Mask panel. It behaves just as it does out in the main…

UPDATES AND IMPROVEMENTS Harmonization This is a new Neural Filter. Currently in Beta, this one should be of great interest to those Photoshop artists who like doing composite images. Composites are created by taking multiple images from various sources and cutting bits out from each and assembling those elements into a new artwork. The problem faced by the composite artist is how to seamlessly blend one image into another so its colour and lighting matches the rest of the scene. This is where Harmonization steps in. Our example is a very simple composite image of a girl sitting on the edge of a cliff. The lighting on the girl is not quite right based on the background landscape she’s meant to be inhabiting, so a little help is required. Make…

Illustrator Integration If you use Adobe Illustrator a lot in combination with Photoshop, this could be a very handy update for you. In past versions, if you had created a layered Illustrator file and wanted to open it Photoshop, you had to make do with some limited Copy and Past options. Thankfully, Adobe have come up with a very useful addition to the Copy/Paste function. In the previous versions, you would open your Illustrator file with its various groups and layers and chosen Select All and then Copy. You then opened Photoshop and created a new document that you could paste your Illustrator file into. At this point, you would have a few Paste options appear in a dialog box. Some of the choices seem somewhat odd, but they included…

UPDATES AND IMPROVEMENTS Sky Replacement If you have a photograph with a lacklustre sky or you simply want to change the mood of the image, then clicking on this option will bring up the Sky Replacement dialog panel. The image will be scanned to work out the best mask to use to accurately drop in your new sky. Firstly, you can choose from a number of preset skies from the Sky menu. You also have the option to set up named groups of skies or even use your own images by clicking the Create New Sky button and browsing to an image you want to use. That image will be added to your library ready to be used. The Sky Replacement panel has a number of useful options to help…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | MAIN INTERFACE Main Interface This is Photoshop’s graphic user front end USEFUL TIP You can set up your own workspaces to reflect the way you work and save them so that you can quickly switch from one to another.…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | THE PHOTOSHOP HOME SCREEN The Photoshop Home Screen We show you what the Photoshop user front end has on offer in the latest versions In the good old days of Photoshop CS, you had a product that you opened up and simply started using with nothing else getting in the way. These days that is no longer the case. The Adobe Creative Cloud series of apps now offer user interactive front-end environments that are more than just a list of recently opened files. Now you can browse and sort those files and display them in thumbnail or list form. That’s not all, you also have access to Adobe’s online web tutorials covering every topic you can think of. From basic videos on getting started with layers…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | YOUR FIRST CUT OUT Your First Cut Out Learn how to cut out parts of one image to use on another If we are talking about key skills that Imake Photoshop the most popular photo editing program around, then we have to talk about the ability to cut out parts of one image and then use it as part of anther image entirely. Cut outs are another staple of image enhancement and manipulation that are essential skills to have. It is lucky for us that Photoshop has a number of tools at its fingertips that can help make the process less of a chore. We are going to take two images and then cut out part of one and use it on the other. Yes, it’s…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | YOUR FIRST SET OF ADJUSTMENTS Your First Set of Adjustments The use of adjustments in Photoshop are another key aspect of non-destructive editing What do we mean when we say non-destructive? Well, in simple terms, if you open a photo shot as a jpeg file and make all your edits and enhancements directly to the image itself, you will find that unless you save the results as another jpeg file, the original will be lost to you. You have effectively overwritten the original with your edited version and there is now no way to retrieve it. Unless you specifically wanted to only use the edited version from then on, that could be a very annoying outcome. This is where Photoshop’s use of layers and adjustment layers…

LEARN AND IMPROVE | CONTRAST AND SATURATION Contrast and Saturation Using curves and blend modes to improve colour saturation and contrast in your digital photos When you take a digital photo of a scene, you are relying on your camera to be able to capture all the colours and tones that you see. Unfortunately most digital cameras simply aren’t capable of recording the full range of colours and shades that the human eye can see, so your photo of what was a bright and colourful scene may prove to be a bit of a disappointment when you see it on your monitor. Fortunately there are many different ways to improve both contrast and colour saturation, which might help to restore some of the sparkle to your photos. Let’s take a…

LEARN AND IMPROVE | CROPPING AND RESIZING Cropping and Resizing Changing the size of a digital photograph Sometimes a digital photograph can be the wrong size. Maybe you’ve got too much of the surroundings in the picture, when you wanted to concentrate on just the main subject, or maybe the whole image is too big, and you need to make it smaller to send via email or publish on a website. Doing both of these things is very quick and simple in Photoshop. We’ll use this landscape shot of an old shack and lake as the image to start with. What we want to do first is crop it down so we just have a tighter view of the shack. 01 The best tool for the job is, not surprisingly,…

MORE PHOTOSHOP ESSENTIALS | MODIFYING SELECTIONS Modifying Selections Photoshop has sophisticated tools to refine selections Photoshop’s standard selection tools: the Marquee, Lasso and Magic Wand, are fine for making basic selections of regular, well defined shapes, but they’re not so good at picking out soft-edged or very fine shapes. One thing in particular, that has always been a problem, is the edge of fine or untidy hair. Take the photo shown here for example: This image is representative of a typical studio setting, with good lighting and against a plain background. Photos like this are used all the time for catalogues, advertising posters and the like. However, in order to fit these needs the model will have to be separated from the background. With a plain background like this, it…

MORE PHOTOSHOP ESSENTIALS | THE CLONE STAMP TOOL The Clone Stamp Tool Remove unwanted elements from your photos The Clone Stamp Tool (also known as the Clone Brush in some programs) is one of the most useful items in your image editing tool kit. Despite recent developments such as Photoshop’s Spot Healing Tool and Content-aware fill, it is still the most precise and reliable way to retouch photographs, allowing you to remove unwanted elements such as dust spots, skin blemishes, lens flare, telephone lines and other intrusive objects from your pictures. Because the process is entirely manual it can be somewhat time-consuming, but the results are often superior to the output of the more modern automatic tools. The Clone Stamp works by copying (“cloning”) pixels from a selected target area…

ENHANCE YOUR SKILLS | ADDING A GRADUATED FILTER Adding a Graduated Filter Graduated filters can improve photos by adding depth and colour to the sky Photographers use graduated filters placed in front of the camera lens to selectively change the exposure and sometimes the colour of part of a picture, usually to darken the sky to bring out details in the clouds and balance the exposure with the landscape in the foreground. They come in many different shapes, sizes and colours to fit all types of camera system. As with most photographic techniques, it’s possible to duplicate the effect of graduated filters using Adobe Photoshop and as usual there are several ways to accomplish this. For this example we’ll use a landscape photo of a sunrise over a field. Graduated…

ENHANCE YOUR SKILLS | COLOUR REPLACEMENT Colour Replacement Swapping one colour for another One relatively simple operation that you can do in Photoshop is to replace one colour with another. By using some of the selection tools we looked at earlier, along with the Hue/Saturation controls, we can change the colour of individual objects in our photos, such as replacing the colour of the cat’s green eyes in this shot. 01 Selecting large areas of the same colour is one of those few occasions where the Magic Wand tool is actually useful, so we’ll use it as a starting point here. With a tolerance setting of 40-50 it should be able to pick out the items without too much trouble. 02 With the Magic Wand, it’s best to add a bit…

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED Photoshop, Lightroom and Elements Q&A When Photoshop arrived on the scene all those years ago, no-one could really have predicted just what a monumental impact it would have on the fields of design, photography, art, and of course, image manipulation. Be in no doubt that there is a lot to learn, but also comfort yourself in the knowledge that it is also easier to grasp the basics than you might think. In this section, we shall cover a Q&A session where we will try to answer some of the more common (and perhaps not so common) questions that users both new and old are asking. There are no silly questions, even experienced users don’t know every single thing there is to know about Photoshop. We can speak…

Photoshop install The latest versions of Photoshop CC lets you browse, install and manage plugins from a handy interface. From the top menu, select Plugins > Browse Plugins. This will bring up your Creative Cloud app. Here you can browse for free or paid plugins and install them with ease. For example, we clicked on the PixelSquid 3D objects browser. You can view details about the plugin of your choice and then download it. Once downloaded, you can go back to the plugins menu and your downloaded plugin will displayed at the bottom. Click on it to activate it. That’s all there is to it.…

StockSolo Free to use. No restrictions on photos. StockSolo is a stock photography library search engine that gives you access to many thousands of photos that are free for personal and commercial use. No subscription is required and you have immediate access to countless high quality, full resolution images with no restrictions. You can download the Photoshop plugin and install it. When you start up Photoshop, you can find the plugin under Plugins > StockSolo. The plugin activates and you can browse or search by keyword for images. StockSolo has the option to search for free images from a number of stock library sites. At the time of writing, it allows you to search Pixabay, Pexels and Unsplash. You simply put a subject name in the search field and hit…

ADOBE CAMERA RAW | PROCESSING RAW FILES Processing Raw Files For the best possible quality, shoot in Raw mode All digital SLRs and Compact System Cameras, and most of the better compact cameras, have a shooting option called Raw mode. You’ll usually find it in the menu as an option under image quality. Raw mode offers greatly improved image quality over the usual JPEG image file format, and is recommended for all serious photographers. Let’s take a closer look at Raw mode, find out how it works and see how it can help you produce better photographs. What is Raw 2Mode? Raw mode is a special image recording option that is available on digital SLRs, Compact System Cameras, and other high-quality digital cameras. If your camera has this option, you…

INSIDE THE EDIT 01 Surreal Images This surreal image is relatively simple in terms of composition and all the elements are free to use from Pixabay. The fish and the bubbles were transparent PNGs and the other elements could easily be cut out using your favourite selection tools.…

INSIDE THE EDIT 04 Work Smart Part of what can set you apart as an artist or image manipulator is creating images that are simple yet effective. Take this example. It only uses a couple of elements but is surreal and spooky and can be put together in 30 minutes.…

INSIDE THE EDIT 06 New Creations Compositing is a form of digital artwork creation that relies on assembling a number of different elements in one scene to look like they all belong together. One particularly effective method to combine real people into a scene is to shoot them against a grey screen. This greatly aids the process of masking and combining the subject with their new background.…

UPDATES AND IMPROVEMENTS Check out these useful new features and tools October 2021 saw the release of the latest version of Photoshop 2022 which at the time of writing is in release version 23.1.0. It has many new improvements over those tools first offered in the 2020 update. Certain additional new tools and updated features are still in beta but available for us to have a play with. So play we will. A number of the new beta filters have to be downloaded and there are also a number of tools that are as yet unavailable but Adobe ask you for input and submit reasons why a filter like this is useful to you. At first glance, some of the tools new to this version look a little gimmicky but…

UPDATES AND IMPROVEMENTS Landscape Mixer Another new filter currently in Beta added to the list is the Landscape Mixer. It seems to promise an almost magical ability to transform one landscape image into something else entirely. Imagine a green valley with a river running through it, converted into a harsh tundra wasteland with the click of a button. Well, that’s what the Landscape Mixer says it can do. In our example its claims can be put the test with an image of a lush river valley. When you fire up the Neural Filters, click the Landscape Mixer button to view the options available. There are a wintery mountain scenes. Below are a number of sliders that control the strength of effect applied and seasonal effects that can make your image…

Super Zoom This is designed to enable you to enlarge a photo by zooming in, cropping and letting Photoshop add additional pixel data to mitigate the loss of detail and resolution. If you have an original photo and you want to enlarge a portion of it to fit within your original picture dimensions, you can use the Super Zoom feature. Choose the amount of magnification by clicking the plus (+) or minus (-) magnifying glass icons. In our example, we enlarged the image by 3x. The resulting image can be moved around in the small preview window so you can compose it how you want and then, when ready, click the OK button to create a new layer with the magnified section of your image in it. As with all…

Skin Smoothing This is a Featured Neural Filter that makes quick work of skin retouching. It requires an image with an obvious face in it, otherwise the filter is not active. When you activate the filter it scans the image and places a blue bounding box around the subject’s face to show the area that will be affected. Note that partial portraits due to cropping may not work. A full face works best. You have two control sliders. One is for Blur and one for Smoothness. You can experiment with how much of each adjustment is needed and the large preview image will update accordingly. Our example used the full amounts of both options and actually didn’t look bad. Enough detail was kept in the portrait to avoid it looking…

UPDATES AND IMPROVEMENTS Smart Portrait Next is the Smart Portrait filter. This one has been around since the 2021 update and is currently still in Beta. Your image needs to contain a face which the software can detect and surround with a blue outline. Then you can start making some eye-opening alterations. For example, if you move the Be Happy! slider to the far right, after giving the filter some time to think about it, up pops a result that has transformed a neutral, unsmiling subject into one with a toothy grin! Trying a couple of different images shows that it either works well or fails hilariously. Various other emotions are available and so is the ability to change the direction your subject is looking (up to a point). The…

Makeup Transfer This is a Beta filter with quite a specific function. As the name no doubt suggests, it will attempt to apply any makeup effects found in one image, to the eyes and lips of the subject in another image. To that end, our example is a shot of a fashion model with bright purple eyeshadow and bright pink lip gloss. Our second image is another model with makeup applied. Make sure the model with no makeup is the active image and then fire up the Neural Filters and activate the Makeup Transfer tool. It shows you the current face you have selected and then you can choose the reference Image by clicking on the dropdown list and choosing the second image of the model with all the makeup…

UPDATES AND IMPROVEMENTS JPEG Artefacts Removal Jpeg compression is a marvellous thing. It can reduce the file size of an image by a huge amount. It is however a lossy format. This means that the image can be degraded if too much compression is used or if an image is re-saved a number of times. As this happens, so-called artefacts appear. Parts of the image start to show areas of heavy pixelation and there can be a large amount of detail lost too. If you have any original images that have been degraded in this way and you do not have access to an original file, you can try to save the image by running it through an artefact remover. Photoshop has added such a tool to the Neural Filters…

Lens Blur This is a useful little option if you like working with depth maps to achieve selective focus effects. We have an aerial image of a bridge and formal garden area in the foreground on a layer. We’ve gone to the Channels layer and added a new Alpha 1 channel with a black grad fading up to about halfway into the frame. With your image active, if you go up to the File Menu and choose Filter > Blur > Lens Blur, it will take you to the Lens Blur Tools. Under Depth Map, select Alpha 1 as your Source and then click the Set Focal Point button. Now you can define where the Depth Map appears by just clicking anywhere on the image. If you click over the…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | KEEP PHOTOSHOP UP TO DATE Keep Photoshop Up to Date Reap the benefits of the most current versions of Photoshop Now that Photoshop and a host of other Adobe products have moved to the subscription model, you have an application that can be continually updated, over time, without needing to buy a new version. This is in contrast to older versions of Photoshop where you bought a box containing a disk, installed it and called it done. If a new version was released, you had to purchase it or upgrade to the new version. That has been superseded; your computer now maintains an online link with Adobe so each program you have downloaded and installed can be incrementally updated. Photoshop is a good example, since you…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | YOUR FIRST PSD DOCUMENT Your First PSD Document Let’s start at the very beginning and walk you through the process of making your very first document You might think that opening or creating a new Photoshop document is a very simple task to achieve. In the days of older versions of Photoshop that was certainly true with its original start up sequence. You either opened a photo, or you made a new document and started work. These days, with the advent of Photoshop CC, it’s a slightly more involved affair and goes way beyond anything that has been seen in Photoshop before. The newest version of the program has a Home screen and a more interactive front end, offering a lot more choice from the very…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | USING LAYERS Using Layers Understanding layers is fundamental to Photoshop editing The concept of Layers was first introduced with Photoshop 3.0 in 1994, and has become the very core of Photoshop image editing, as well as being imitated by every other image editing program on the market. Layers are exactly what they sound like; the elements of the image are stacked up and displayed in descending order. Since layers can include transparency, lower layers can be visible through higher layers. Effects, adjustments and operations can be applied to individual layers, or to all the layers at once. You can: move layers around relative to one another, change the order of layers in the stack, turn layers on or off and delete layers, without affecting the others.…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | SELECTION TOOLS Selection Tools This fundamental technique allows multiple methods for isolating specific areas of your image The ability to select discrete areas of an image and change them in isolation is fundamental to Photoshop editing and to help with this there are many different ways of making that selection. The most frequently used are the Marquee tools, which allow you to select regular shapes such as rectangles, ellipses and lines. For irregular shapes there are several Lasso tools, which let you draw the area to be selected. For quicker selections there are the Magic Wand and Quick Selection tools. Common Options If you look across the top left of your menu bar, you will see there are common tool options for all of the selection…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | YOUR FIRST TYPE TOOL PROJECT Your First Type Tool Project Get to know what the various Type Tool options can do to really lift your artwork The introduction of text and type effects in Photoshop now means that you can create cool logos or even documents with paragraphs of text in them, if you want. Although you don’t have the more complex control of text that you might have in desktop publishing programs such as InDesign, you can still produce simple text layouts, and other effects with relative ease, thanks to a set of useful tools and text controls. You can produce normal horizontal text and vertical text if required, and you can also use both vertical and horizontal text to create masks. The only limiting…

LEARN AND IMPROVE | GRADIENT FILL AND PAINT BUCKET Gradient Fill & Paint Bucket Fill layers and selections with colours, textures and gradients One very useful facility that Photoshop provides is the Gradient tool. It can fill an area of a layer with a gradual blend between multiple colours. You can choose from a selection of pre-set gradient fills or create your own. It’s a great way to add gradient filters for enhancing photographs, or to create effects such as vignettes and centre-spot soft-focus. Let’s take a closer look at how it works. You’ll find the Gradient tool about halfway down the Tool Palette. It has its own unique set of options in the Tool Options bar, the main one being the Gradient Picker, which lets you choose from a…

MORE PHOTOSHOP ESSENTIALS | QUICK MASK MODE Quick Mask Mode There’s a quicker way of editing selections and masks Often when editing in Photoshop it’s useful to be able to block off certain areas that we don’t want to be affected. For that we use masks and there are several ways of creating them, but by far the easiest is Quick Mask, a fantastically useful feature that was first introduced in Photoshop 7. Quick Mask lets you create and edit masks and selections quickly and easily using any of Photoshop’s pixel painting tools to apply a brushed mask with freehand strokes of the mouse. It’s extremely simple to use, but it can produce a wide and varied range of results. You’ll find the Quick Mask mode button near the bottom…

MORE PHOTOSHOP ESSENTIALS | PERSPECTIVE CLONING Perspective Cloning Clone out items accurately using the Vanishing Point tool The Clone Stamp Tool is very powerful as we’ve already seen, but on its own, it does have its limitations. The shortcomings of the Clone Stamp Tool are most obvious when trying to clone out an item that is on top of a very regular pattern with a perspective. The repeating pattern of a brick wall or tiled floor looked at from an angle will appear to recede into the distance and get smaller, or get closer and larger. The Clone Stamp Tool cannot match this perspective on its own and your cloning will look pretty bad. It’s ok though. Photoshop has just the tool to help with this tricky form of cloning.…

ENHANCE YOUR SKILLS | CORRECTING LENS DISTORTION Correcting Lens Distortion Correct the optical distortion of ultra-wide lenses with Photoshop’s Adaptive Wide Angle One of the new features introduced with Photoshop CS6 is called Adaptive Wide Angle; this can warp and bend an image to undo the optical distortion common to all very wide angle lenses. We’ve all seen photographs taken with “fish-eye” lenses. These lenses are called ultra-wide-angle, because the angle of view that they can capture can be as much as 180 degrees. Naturally the ability to squeeze half a room into the same shot comes at a price and that is extreme optical distortion. Straight and parallel lines appear to be bent, perspective is massively shortened and familiar objects take on almost unrecognisable proportions. In the photo opposite,…

ENHANCE YOUR SKILLS | SOFT FOCUS TECHNIQUE Soft Focus Technique With a few simple steps, you can add a soft focus effect that will give your portraits a romantic feel Soft focus is an effect used widely in television and in the movies, as well as in many commercial and advertising photographs, for producing a dreamy romantic look. It’s also a big favourite with wedding photographers to give their images a soft, dreamy look. In traditional photography the effect is achieved with a special filter fitted over the camera lens. Many digital cameras now include soft focus as a digital effect, but we can produce the same results in Photoshop with ease, using Gaussian blur and layer transparency. 01 The first step is to turn the picture into two identical…

Plugins Round-up If you are new to Photoshop, you may possibly have encountered the term ‘plugin’ and wondered what it actually was and how you can access them. Plug-ins are small, self-contained programs that add extra effects and workflow possibilities to the Photoshop toolset. Plug-ins can can simply be a single effect added to your image that automates existing Photoshop effects. It could even be an effect Photoshop may not be able to do itself. It can also be something more complex, like a self-contained mini editor that you can use to modify your images and return the result to Photoshop for further editing. plugins are supplied by Adobe themselves and by many third-party vendors. There are so many to choose from, it can be a bit of a minefield.…

PLUGINS ROUND-UP Luminar 4 30 day money back period. £81 for 1 license. This is a fully featured creative photo editor, and a powerful one at that. Luminar is designed to work as either a standalone product or as a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom. It is a photo editor, browser and raw processing application all in one package. It is packed with impressive tools to turn your favourite photos into creative works of art. Luminar is designed to be as intuitive as possible, meaning you can fire it up and master its controls very quickly. The learning curve is not too steep and you can happily spend more time creating than scratching your head wondering what to next. Moreover, Luminar is not a subscription-based product. You pay for it…

PLUGINS ROUND-UP Blow Up 3 30 day trial. $79 one off purchase. Reducing an image to a much smaller size presents no problem in day to day use. A good original at 4000 pixels wide, when reduced to 800 pixels wide, will look fine. However, what happens if the reverse is true and you need to blow up a 800 pixel wide image to 4000? This is an extreme example, but of you are face with this dilemma, you have to scale the 800 pixels up and hope it comes out ok. Plugins like Blow Up 3 can help by using algorithms to upsample the image and retain as much detail and sharpness as possible. Of course, concessions have to be made since you are interpolating an image an injecting…

ADOBE CAMERA RAW | CAMERA RAW Camera Raw The new look for Photoshop’s Raw processor Photoshop comes with Camera Raw as standard. It offers a range of processing options that enable you to get the best out of your photos, including exposure adjustment, sharpening, noise reduction, colour correction and automatic correction for lens distortion. It’s regularly updated so it’s compatible with the latest cameras and lenses. It recently underwent a major update and the layout has been redesigned to match the look of the mobile version of Lightroom.…

WHAT IS RAW MODE? | RAW WORKFLOW Raw Workflow Make your images look their absolute best Ask any five professional photographers about the process they use to create their pictures, you’ll get five different answers. The amount of processing and adjustment used will vary, depending on the job at hand and the type of final image required, as well as the type of camera used to take the photo and the use to which the photo will be put. There are certain operations that will be common to most photos that you’ll want to process, so we’ll take a look at a common general purpose workflow that will be suitable for most types of photo. Our example will be using a sunrise photograph taken on a rocky formation down on…

INSIDE THE EDIT 02 Combine and Create Using your imagination, Photoshop, free assets from image sharing sites and a bunch of layers, you can put together compositions of amazing complexity. Of course, if you happen to be a bit of a photographer, you can shoot your own bespoke content not seen elsewhere.…

GLOSSARY Glossary A list of terms you may encounter as you learn Active layer The layer currently selected in the Layers panel. Adjustment layer A layer that lets you apply colour and tonal adjustments to your image without permanently changing pixel values. Use adjustment layers to experiment with colour and colour tones. You can think of an adjustment layer as a veil through which the underlying layers are seen. Adobe RGB The RGB colour space profile created by Adobe Systems, Incorporated. It provides a large gamut of colours. (See also RGB.) Aliasing The jagged edges seen at the edges of diagonal lines, arcs, and so on, caused by pixels lining up in a saw-tooth pattern. Alpha channels Masks, which let you manipulate, isolate, and protect specific parts of an image.…

Can You Update? Although many reacted against the decision by Adobe to move their products to a subscription model, what came out of it was the fact that you didn’t have to buy a new product or go through an upgrade path to get your hands on all the latest features in any given application whenever a new version came out. Photoshop is a good example of how you can at least benefit from the latest bug fixes and the addition of new tools by dropping coin every month to keep up to date. It has to be noted, if you are an owner of a pre-2012 Mac, you may find that you are in a bit of trouble. One of the Photoshop editing machines we use is a late…

Style Transfer If you fancy altering the visual style of an image by applying the colour, tone and artistic style of another very different image, then Style Transfer is for you. Take a normal image and open the Style Transfer filter. You will see a number of images under the Artist and Image Styles menu and the Custom menu where you can source your own examples. You can choose any of these and their particular visual appearance will be transferred to your target image. At its simplest, you could take an image and if you choose an image style where there is a very colourfully sketched styling, it will attempt to apply the style to your photo. We tried this with a simple landscape and chose a very colourful naive-style…

UPDATES AND IMPROVEMENTS Colorize This is a Featured Neural Filter that has had a few tweaks since its initial release in the 2021 version of Photoshop. It is a tool designed to help you add colour to old black and white photographs. You have a few options to choose in order to colour your image. You can choose Auto Color and the filter will decide what colours to apply based on what it deems right after analysing the image. You can also use colour profiles such as Retro High Contrast and others. If you prefer, you can click on areas of the image in the preview window and apply local groups of colours to suit your tase. You can, for instance, make the background yellow and the suit blue. You…

UPDATES AND IMPROVEMENTS Share for Commenting As the name implies, this feature allows you to share your work on-line for others to comment on and interact with if preferred. First of all, your image needs to be saved to the cloud otherwise others will not be able to see it. This is easy to do. Open an image that you want to share and click on the Share for Commenting button in the top right of the menu bar. Hit the Continue button and you can save the document to the cloud. Our example was named ‘Girl and Robot’. Once it is saved to the cloud, note that the file format is now a. PSDC. When you click it and open it, note that the document tab shows a small…

Depth Blur Another Neural Filter currently in Beta phase. This particular filter lets you take an original image with sharp focus throughout the scene and create custom blur to make the image look like it was shot with much shallower depth of field. The example image is very sharp, but with the filter applied, you can blur the foreground rock structures and the ones in the far distance. By clicking on the preview image and adding a focal point, the rocks in the middle ground remain sharp. You can put the focal point anywhere in your image and you can use the Focal Distance and Focal Range Sliders to alter the affect. The amount of blur can also be controlled by a slider and so too can the amount of…

UPDATES AND IMPROVEMENTS Object Selection The methods by which you can select objects in your document has been updated with the inclusion of the improved Object Selection Tool. Found in the toolbar or by pressing W, this function analyses your image and makes note of how many distinct, separate objects there are in your photo. In order for this to work, you need to make sure you have the Object Finder button checked. You can find it up in the tool properties bar. In our example, after a few seconds of scanning, most of the obviously distant elements in the image were marked for selection. You can press and hold the N key to view which ones have been chosen or click the Show All Objects button in the tool…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | MENUS Menus One look at the menus and you begin to understand Photoshop’s complexity and versatility The main interface of Photoshop has no fewer than twelve menus and a Help option, each with many options and with many additional nested sub-menus. It’s vital to become familiar with the contents of the most important ones, because once you know where to look for everything you’ll be able to work more quickly, efficiently and confidently. Let’s take a look at some of the key menu listings.…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | PHOTOSHOP PREFERENCES GUIDE Photoshop Preferences Guide Here are all the preferences and what they do Photoshop is nothing if not customisable. You can shape and adjust the user interface to suit your own needs and make it a very personalised, and customised, workspace. Not only can you choose what appears in the main toolbar, you can also arrange and group the various windows and features entirely to your preference. That accounts for the items you interact with on the screen, however there are also a number of options you can tweak to adjust various ‘under the hood’ settings, as it were, too. Photoshop has a listing of all its Preferences both general and specific, so we thought we’d share the salient points with you here. 01…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | OPEN AND SAVE YOUR FIRST IMAGE Open and Save Your First Image A quick guide on how to open new photos and images in Photoshop, and then save your edits A true Photoshop masterpiece has to start somewhere right? In order to create that masterpiece you have to be able to open and navigate to your various image assets, and then fire them up in Photoshop in order to begin working on them. Photoshop is no different to many other programs in that it allows you to bring up a browser window in order to find the files you require. It also has its own methods for both managing and locating your images in the form of Adobe Bridge, which lets you search for images as…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | YOUR FIRST COMPOSITION Your First Composition This is when you discover the power of Photoshop Now is the chance to get to the nitty gritty of what Photoshop is all about. Working with layers in a document and importing various images and graphics is a key part of how Photoshop functions. Opening a photo and then adding layers of adjustment or additional elements on top is what makes Photoshop the incredibly useful image editing program it has become. You can simply enhance a favourite photo to make its colours look more vibrant and the details a little sharper, or you can create amazing compositions by combining various images, or parts of them, in new and exciting ways that will have your viewers wishing they could do…

WELCOME TO PHOTOSHOP | YOUR FIRST LAYER MASK Your First Layer Mask An introduction to one of the key ingredients of Photoshop work Photoshop’s use of layers is one of the most important aspects of what makes it is so versatile and enables the user to unleash their full creativity. Once you include the ability to add masks to those layers, you have yet another very powerful tool that lets you blend or hide parts of one image on a layer and control how they interact with another. Masks are not only very useful in hiding or revealing parts of an image, they can also be used, in conjunction with an adjustment layer, to provide the same function of hiding or revealing parts of the effect you’ve chosen. We are…

LEARN AND IMPROVE | ADJUSTING EXPOSURE Adjusting Exposure Correcting your exposure mistakes is easy with Photoshop Even with the sophisticated technology found in the light metering systems of modern digital cameras, they are not infallible. Some lighting conditions can confuse them, resulting in pictures that are over or under-exposed. All cameras have a limited dynamic range, levels of illumination at which they record featureless pure white or featureless pure black. The tonal variation available between those two extremes depends on the quality of the lens, sensor and image processor that captured it, along with the bit-depth of the file type used to record it. For maximum bit-depth it’s always best to use Raw mode, since this will usually store images in 42-bit or even 48-bit form, capturing greater dynamic range.…

LEARN AND IMPROVE | CURVES AND LEVELS Curves and Levels The most versatile way to adjust brightness and contrast in your digital images You’ll find the Curves function in the Image > Adjustments menu, or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd+M. The Curves dialog looks a bit daunting at first; a graph with a diagonal line running up the middle of it, like a difficult piece of maths homework. It’s nothing to be scared of though and is in fact the most useful and versatile tool for making adjustments to the exposure and tonal balance of your images. We’ll use this female portrait as the image to begin with. What we want to do first is crop it down so we just have the main part of her face and hair…

MORE PHOTOSHOP ESSENTIALS | MAKING SELECTIONS Making Selections The ability to select and modify only part of an image is fundamental to how Photoshop works One of the most basic features of Photoshop is the ability to modify only part of an image, leaving the rest unchanged. The way that we do this is by using Selections, and there are several tools and menu operations that we can use to help us achieve this. After the Move Tool, the next three icons on the Tool Palette are all selection tools, giving you a wide range of methods for isolating an area of your image. Some are fully manual, while others use varying degrees of automation. The most basic selection tools are the Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee Tools. These both allow…

MORE PHOTOSHOP ESSENTIALS | HEALING BRUSH TOOLS Healing Brush Tools Clean up minor blemishes, dust spots and stray hairs with the Healing Brush Tools Even with a modern digital camera, your photos may have slight imperfections. Maybe it’s just a stray hair or an unwelcome skin blemish in a portrait, or maybe some dust has managed to get onto your sensor, causing dark spots on your photo. Whatever the reason, sometimes you need to remove some small features from your images and the best tools for this are the Healing Tools. There are five Healing Tools in Photoshop, which you can see if you click and hold on the Spot Healing Brush Tool icon in the tool palette. USEFUL TIP To get the best out of the healing tools, you…

ENHANCE YOUR SKILLS | THE PEN TOOL AND PATHS The Pen Tool and Paths Draw smooth curved paths with the versatile Pen tool The quickest and most common way to make selections is to use the Polygonal Lasso tool but since that only draws straight lines from point to point it isn’t ideal for making accurate selections around curved edges. Photoshop does have a tool for making smooth curves though, and it’s called the Pen tool (keyboard shortcut P). Rather than creating a selection directly like the Lasso tool, the Pen tool is used to create a Work Path. A Work Path in Photoshop is a vector graphic outline which can be used for several functions, including shaped text, outline strokes and of course selections. A path consists of straight…

ENHANCE YOUR SKILLS | PANORAMA STITCHING Panorama Stitching Get the whole of the landscape into one ultra-wide picture Many digital cameras have a feature known as “Panorama Stitching” or “Panorama Assist” mode. It’s there to help with a particular type of photograph, or rather series of photographs, in which successive shots are taken as the camera is panned across a scene. After you take the first shot, the camera shows the edge of that shot superimposed on the monitor so you can match up the position of features in successive shots, producing a long continuous photo showing an entire panoramic scene. You can also shoot your pan sequence manually, especially if you have a tripod handy to keep the camera level. When it’s done well the results can be breathtaking,…

Your Questions Answered There’s no doubt that when it comes to getting better at something, the best way to learn is to do. Getting hands-on is always worth doing. With applications like Photoshop, Elements and Lightroom, the same is certainly true. Dive in and see what is intuitive and what may need a little more research and possible time spent flicking through a user manual. It’s all good experience. There may be times when you encounter a situation that a manual doesn’t answer. Or, you may just have some general questions about these applications that may help you decide whether you are going to invest in any of them at all. You ask a question, you get an answer, you go from there. Simple. We would always advocate the asking…

PLUGINS ROUND-UP Get switched on with plugins As we’ve already noted, there are so many plugins available, it can be a chore to wade through them all to figure out what is best for you. Moreover, you need to be aware of what versions of Photoshop any particular plugin is compatible with. Some are fairly universal, others may need updated plugins. When purchasing, double-check version numbers to avoid disappointment. Before we dive in and regale you with some prime plugin choices. We thought we’d cover the main question asked by anyone new to plugins. If you’ve downloaded one, you have to get it installed. How do you do it? Well, there are a couple of ways you can approach it, it’s pretty easy so here goes.…

PLUGINS ROUND-UP PixelSquid Free with limited object choice. $199 per year for access to all 3D assets. This is a 3D asset browser that gives you access to the tens of thousands of design objects PixelSquid have available. They are fully realised 3D objects that you can spin around as if it were a solid object so it better matches the orientation needed to fit your image requirements. You can use the free version which gives you access to over a hundred free objects, as well as watermarked versions of everything else in their library. You will need to create an account but it is easy to set up and ready in minutes. To use un-watermarked versions, you will need to upgrade to their subscription service which runs at $199…

Aurora HDR 30 day money back period. £92 for 5 licenses. High dynamic range (HDR) images are the result of combining 3 or more bracketed photos to give you a result that contains more tonal data that you can capture in one photo alone. Once you have your set of bracketed photos, you need to be able to combine them to create your final HDR image. There are plenty of applications out there to merge your photos and produce a final result. Photoshop and Lightroom are among them of course, but Aurora HDR is an advanced HDR creation package that gives you a huge amount of control over your images and is used by a number of industry leading photographers. Aurora HDR works as both a Photoshop and Lightroom plugin…

INSIDE THE EDIT 03 Get Inspired The most commonplace images, be they photos of your family, snaps taken during a woodland walk, or assets procured on the web, can all be combined to let Photoshop do what it does best. When it comes to adding elements together into new compositions, Photoshop’s layer-based system makes the process easy.…

INSIDE THE EDIT 05 Images that Pop A few simple photographic and illustrative components from image sharing sites like Pixabay or Deviant Art and a little imagination can lead to eye-opening art. Let us show you how Photoshop can unlock your creative power.…