Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 3 i Photoshop Image Editing The Complete Manual

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. File The most important options here are New… to create a new document, Open… to open your file, Save to save your current project in its default file format and location and Save As… which gives you the option to save in a different format or location and to change the file name. Also in the File menu are the important Automate…

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 and cutting out images, to more advanced topics, you have a library of knowledge at your beck and call. Even creating a new document has a huge wealth…

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 comes in very handy. Something simple like a boost to brightness and contrast need not be applied to the image itself. You can use an adjustment layer…

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 look at some of the alternatives. 01 As an example we’ll use this snapshot of a parrot. In reality the colour of the scene is…

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, the Crop Tool. You’ll find it in the tool palette, fourth down from the top. It looks…

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 would be tempting to use a normal selection tool such as the Magic Wand. However…

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 and placing them over the unwanted objects. Using the Clone Stamp, it is relatively straightforward to remove even…

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 Filter in Camera Raw Since this photo was taken using Raw mode, we can use the Graduated Filter tool in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). ACR…

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 at a time. Click on an area that’s a mid-tone for the…

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. First, download the Photoshop plugin and install it. When you start up Photoshop, you’ll 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 Search to access the libraries of the stock image sites.…

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 Mode? 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 have access to much higher image quality than the standard JPEG file format. Essentially, Raw mode is just what…

Photoshop has a great interface, with a dark slate grey work area, slightly lighter menu and palette bars and sharp white text. It looks great and really makes photos stand out from the background. Let’s see what it has to offer. Menu Bar You’ll find all the menu options here and many more nested menus to control all aspects of Photoshop. Read on for more details. Tool Palette Here you’ll find your main editing tools. The following pages look at the individual tools and what you can do with them. Tool Option Bar For each tool on the palette there are options, such as brush size or softness. You’ll find them in this area. Document Window Each window you open will have its own tab to identify it. It includes…

One of Photoshop’s best features is its huge list of fully customisable keyboard shortcuts. Almost all of the program’s functions can be accessed quickly by pressing various combinations of keys and once you learn those shortcuts your workflow will speed up immensely. You can even make up your own for your most frequently-used operations. Customising Shortcuts You’ll find the Keyboard Shortcut preferences menu at the bottom of the Edit menu, although naturally it has its own keyboard shortcut, Alt+Shift+Ctrl+K. You’ll find an exhaustive list of all Photoshop functions, broken down into category headings matching the names of the main menus. You’ll find that many operations already have their own default shortcuts. You can easily change these, or even add your own new ones. To apply a shortcut to an operation,…

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 moment you open the program. Let’s start at the very beginning, dive in and have a quick look at what the Home Screen has on offer for the new user,…

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. Some people seem to have a hard time getting their head around the concept of…

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 tools. After the Home button and the Tool preset picker are the selection options. The row of four buttons are: New…

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 factor is the number of fonts you carry on your system. The more fonts you have, the more choice you have. 01 Having opened an image, in the form of…

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 list of pre-set gradients. Next to this is a row of buttons that create different gradient shapes. The default setting is a straight…

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 of the Tool Palette. Clicking it will toggle Quick Mask mode on or off. The most basic way to…

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. It can be found under the Filter menu and is called the Vanishing Point Tool. The Vanishing…

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 “fisheye” 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, the straight uprights of the pillars and floor seem to curve strangely, everything appears to bulge outwards and the whole effect is…

Reducing an image to a much smaller size presents no problems 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 if you are faced with this dilemma, you just 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 and injecting pixels where there were none to begin with. Results of our…

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. Film Strip This shows all the files you currently have open in thumbnail format and is displayed on the left side of the screen. You can alter its orientation and display it along the bottom of the screen if preferred. Click the one you want to work on. Image Window The image you are currently working on…

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 the coast. 01 If you look at the histogram at the top right of the screen…

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 Under Photoshop CC > Preferences > General (Cmd + K) you will see the list of preferences available. The…

Atrue 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 well as keyword them making future searches much easier. This is all useful stuff, so get ready to try it out. 01 Since we’ve covered how to create a new document, it seems worthwhile just…

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 getting ahead of ourselves however. Let’s take a look at how you can use a simple mask to produce a very cool effect.…

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. We’ll look at improving the exposure of the more common JPEG images from a compact camera.…

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 with some trees beyond. The Curves graph is a histogram showing the relative strengths of different tones within the image. It shows the…

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 you to manually select a simple shape of any size, or of a fixed size or aspect ratio. You can select several areas, either separately…

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. Healing Brush Tool The Healing Brush is a legacy from older versions of Photoshop. It does much the same job as the Spot Healing Brush, but is rather less sophisticated. It works in much the same…

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 an extremely useful 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 and curved lines segments connected with points. You can leave a path open to form a straight or curved line, or…

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, but getting a satisfactory result isn’t as easy as it looks. 01 Having downloaded our panorama pictures from…

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 per year. Personally, we feel this is a little steep for a niche product, but if you…

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 than 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, as well as a standalone application. There’s no subscription, it’s just…