Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 8 i Photoshop Image Editing The Complete Manual

“Add the power of Photoshop to your digital workflow and let your creativity soar.” Photoshop has been a world leader in image editing for decades now, but Adobe have never been ones to rest on their laurels. With the advent of AI automation being integrated into many of our daily tasks, Photoshop is no exception. The new Generative options really open up so many possibilites in both image editing and image creation. We’ll take you through these as well as all the basics to help you master this amazing piece of software.…

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 of…

It’s very easy to find and open a photo, work with it, and then save it again, without the need to turn it into a native Photoshop PSD file that retains all the layers and adjustments information within it. We’ve looked at creating new documents from scratch, so now we can take our newly created blank document, start importing images and begin the process ofbuilding a basic design with just a couple of images. As simple as this guide may appear, it is a cornerstone to what makes Photoshop so useful as an image editing and digital manipulation tool for photographers and designers alike. We will use this tutorial to get used to bringing in images and working with them on their layers. 01 Opening a single image is a…

If we are talking about key skills that make 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 a very simple tutorial, but it’s also very useful. This is a skill you will need to use a lot if you wish to create…

Even though Artificial Intelligence is a very new technology, it seems to have taken the world by storm in an amazingly short time. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was only launched in 2022, but already similar “large language model” AI systems are being built into web browsers, mobile phones and online help centres, and new applications for this technology are being developed at a breakneck pace. Related to this is Generative AI, which is capable of creating digital images from natural language descriptions, known as “prompts”. The three best-known systems are Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, both launched in 2022, and DALL-E, which was added to ChatGPT in 2023. They all differ slightly in their exact method of operation, but produce similar results: high-quality digital images which, in some cases, are all but indistinguishable…

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…

01 Let us say, for the sake of argument, that we are preparing an image that requires a coloured background. The subject of the image has been removed from its original background and you need to place a colour behind it to complete the document. 02 If you go to the bottom of the Layer Palette and click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon, you can choose from a number of layer adjustments. In this case, choose Solid Color. When you do, the Color Picker (Solid Color) will open. 03 The default colour for Solid Colour is usually black, unless you have a colour chosen which is the active foreground colour. The new ‘Colour Fill 1’ layer will be placed above your cut out subject. Click and…

Although it is primarily designed and best known as an image editing program, Photoshop also offers a range of versatile tools, allowing you to create original artwork as well as adapting existing images. The brushes, pencils and eraser are designed to behave as much like their real life counterparts as possible, to make using them an intuitive process. If you have a graphics tablet and a pen, this helps even more. The Brush Tool The most useful drawing implement is the Brush (keyboard shortcut B), which is a multi-purpose tool that can emulate almost any type of drawing tool imaginable, be it a fine pencil, a felt-tip marker pen, a soft-bristle brush, an airbrush, or anything in between. The Brush tool has received a major upgrade for version CS6 and…

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 anglewill 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 Point…

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 2025, 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 indescending 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 layers,…

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…

Firefly is what is known as a text-to-image Generative AI. What that means is that you can tell the system what image you want it to create using a short description in plain, natural language, called a “prompt”. What happens next is massively complex, but in layman’s terms, Firefly uses that description to choose elements from its vast database of images, and then synthesise them together to create a new image that will hopefully match what you were looking for. It can imitate many different art styles, from realistic-looking photos to simple line drawings, add a wide range of filters and effects, and the range of image subjects is limited only by your imagination and one obvious rule; at present, since Photoshop is not age-restricted, Firefly cannot be used to…

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…

Although there are many editing options in the Image > Adjustment menu, they all have one thing in common. When you apply them to an image the effect they have is destructive, because they discard information from the original image. For example, if you apply Curves, then Hue/Saturation, then add a Photo Filter effect, that’s three operations that have discarded information, each one degrading your image quality. If you apply an operation repeatedly, such as multiple Curves corrections, you’ll actually be able to see the degradation. The only way to undo the damage done by these modifications is to revert to an earlier version by using undo or the History palette, but that also undoes all your subsequent editing as well. This degradation is much worse with 8-bit than with…

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 main elements of the Photoshop Toolbar haven’t changed all that much since the introduction of Layers and the Move Tool with version 3.0, back in 1994. The shape has changed a bit, elongatinginto a single column to take advantage of today’s larger monitors and a few more tools have been added, but anyone who’s familiar with any previous version of Photoshop will soon feel right at home. Move Used to move pixel information on the active layer or selection. You can also create multiple layouts using the Artboard feature. Marquee The Marquee is used to select an area of the active layer. Alternative options include an elliptical shape and single row or column selections. Lasso The Lasso is also used to make area selections from the active layer by…

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 thevarious 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 2025 > Settings > General (Cmd + K) you will see the list of preferences available. The General…

A true Photoshop masterpiece has to start A 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…

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 it too. 01 This new artwork starts with the opening of a base image. In this case, we chose…

01 We have our example target image cropped and sized, to our preference, in the shape of a peacock. This is the first image document opened and we want all subsequent images cropped to the same proportions and the same pixel dimensions, to match this one. 02 The peacock photo is 2000 pixels wide by 1125 pixels high. By comparison, the next image of a barn owl is 3544 pixels wide by 3132 pixels high and the third image of a parrot is 2019 pixels wide by 2694 pixels high. The last two need to match the peacock and there is a smart way to do it. 03 Go back to your target image (the peacock in our case), go to the toolbar and click on the Crop Tool (C).…

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, theycan 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. In…

If there is one area that really helps artists to show off their skills, it is in the creation of unique images and fantasy artworks. Websites like DeviantArt and Pixabay are full of images that have been assembled in Photoshop, using many disparate components to create a final, cohesive end result. Part of the attraction of those websites is that artists and photographers create content and allow others to download their images and use them for their own artworks. If you find yourself wanting to createyour own brand new fantasy image, then Photoshop is perfect. It lets you put each image element on its own layer and with some careful editing and masking, you can blend them to produce a final image worthy of any fantasy genre. So why don’t…

While a Quick Mask function is an easy way to selectively edit your pictures, the more traditional method is to use Layer Masks. The advantage to this method is that it is non-destructive, so if you don’t like the results you can just go back and start again. It is also repeatable, because you can use the same mask for multiple effects, saving you time and effort. For this quick tutorial we’ll use a Layer Mask to apply a selective monochrome or colour extraction effect. We’ll start with this bright image of a lady in a red dress. The red tones will remain in colour while the rest of the picture will be changed to black and white. 01 To start with, right-click on the thumbnail of the photo in…

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 if…

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…