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Photoshop Image Editing The Complete Manual January 22nd, 2025 Digital Back Issue Cover

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64 Articles

Adobe Photoshop USER MANUAL

This powerful software is your one-stop destination for all your photo editing and image manipulation needs. Whether you are new to Photoshop or looking to expand your skills, this essential manual is packed with fully illustrated, step-by-step tutorials, guides and tips to help you along the way. So jump in and immerse yourself in Adobe Photoshop, and learn how to master the professional techniques and create amazing images. It’s all in The Adobe Photoshop User Manual! Master your tech @ www.pclpublications.com…

Adobe Photoshop USER MANUAL

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…

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…

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…

Keyboard Shortcuts

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,…

Keyboard Shortcuts

Photoshop Preferences Guide

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…

Photoshop Preferences Guide

The Photoshop Home Screen

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…

The Photoshop Home Screen

Your First PSD 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 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,…

Your First PSD Document

Open and Save Your First Image

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…

Open and Save Your First Image

Placing and Importing Images

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…

Placing and Importing Images

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,…

Your First Composition

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 imageediting 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 File…

Your First Composition

Your First Cut Out

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 itsfingertips 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 works…

Your First Cut Out

Selection Tools

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 allowyou 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 Selection,…

Selection Tools

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…

Using Generate Image in Photoshop

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…

Using Generate Image in Photoshop

Your First Layer Mask

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.…

Your First Layer Mask

Your First Set of Adjustments

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…

Your First Set of Adjustments

Your First Type Tool Project

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…

Your First Type Tool Project

Non-destructive Enhancement Part 1

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…

Non-destructive Enhancement Part 1

Non-destructive Enhancement Part 2

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…

Non-destructive Enhancement Part 2

Brushes, Pencil and Eraser

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…

Brushes, Pencil and Eraser

Making Selections

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…

Making Selections

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

Modifying Selections

Quick Mask Mode

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…

Quick Mask Mode

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. 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…

Healing Brush Tools

The Clone Stamp Tool

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 removeunwanted 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 quite…

The Clone Stamp Tool

Perspective Cloning

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…

Perspective Cloning

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 from experience to…

Your Questions Answered

Adjusting Exposure

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.…

Adjusting Exposure

Contrast and Saturation

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…

Contrast and Saturation

Gradient Fill & Paint Bucket

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…

Gradient Fill & Paint Bucket

Curves and Levels

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…

Curves and Levels

Cropping and Resizing

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…

Cropping and Resizing

Generative Fill Content Removal

Probably the most useful of Photoshop’s new AI-powered tools is Generative Fill, a powerful feature which we can use to remove unwanted objects from your photos quickly and seamlessly. Previously, we would have to spend time painstakingly applying the Clone Stamp brush to cover up unwanted objects, and even then the results would often be disappointing, with obvious patches of texture repetition or mismatched shadow. Generative Fill can produce vastly superior results in seconds using the amazing power of AI image generation. Generative Fill is quick and easy to use, requiring nothing more than a selection tool and a few menu choices, and produces unbelievably good results. Let’s give it a try on this photo of the famous Avebury Stones in Wiltshire, England. Let’s see if we can remove the…

Generative Fill Content Removal

Use Generative Expand to go big

Up until now, if you shot a photo in either vertical or horizontal aspect ratio, then that was a decision you’d have to live with. You could change the aspect ratio by cropping the frame, but that would mean losing a large proportion of the image, usually not a satisfactory solution. Now, however, the new Generative Expand feature allows you to change the aspect ratio of your image by adding new AI-generated content, calculated to blend in seamlessly with the previously existing image. Although the quality and authenticity of the additions will vary to some extent depending on the content of the original image, under most circumstances the results are astonishingly good. Let’s take a look at how this apparent miracle works. As our example, we’ll use this vertical-format shot…

Use Generative Expand to go big

Content-aware Fill and Scale

Photoshop CS4 introduced the world to an amazing new technology called Content-aware Scaling, which can resize an image while preserving the proportions of important image elements. It works by analysing the image and removing lines of pixels that contain relatively little information, so that a plain background will be affected before the main subject. The best way to illustrate the effect is with examples, such as this image of a tree and clouds. Content-aware Scaling 01 If we resize the image vertically by 60 percent using the standard Photoshop Image Size menu option, the tree and clouds will end up looking flattened and out of proportion, since their height has also been reduced by about 60 percent. 02 However if we use Content-aware Scaling, the clever algorithm detects that the…

Content-aware Fill and Scale

The Pen Tool and Paths

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…

The Pen Tool and Paths

Adding a Graduated Filter

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…

Adding a Graduated Filter

Correcting Lens Distortion

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…

Correcting Lens Distortion

Colour Replacement

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…

Colour Replacement

Processing Raw Files

All digital SLRs and Compact System Cameras, and most of the better compact cameras plus many new smart phones 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,…

Processing Raw Files

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…

The Toolbar in the newly updated layout of Camera Raw sits vertically in the top right side of the interface. It is broken down into a series of buttons that you can click. Each button you click, willdisplay its particular tools in the main control panel situated right next to the Toolbar. This version now looks more like Lightroom, the mobile-focused version. Edit First in the Toolbar is the Edit button. Clicking on this displays the main tools that you will be using to edit and adjust your photos. Edit is broken down into nine sections that cover all your typical adjustment tools such as altering Brightness and Contrast, Hue and Saturation, Detail and Noise Reduction. There are also tools to correct optical flaws in camera lenses and alter image…

The main interface of Camera Raw is comprised of a series of menus, each with a series of control sliders and some additional menu tabs to access further features. Although you will no doubtspend most of your time working in the Basic panel, when used in conjunction with adjustments from the other control panels, you will be able to enhance your images beyond what you thought possible. Basic The Basic panel in Camera Raw is probably the one you will spend the most time in and also making the most important global image adjustments. You can adjust White Balance, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights and Shadows as well as Whites and Black. To bring out detail, you can use Texture, Clarity and Dehaze to reduce haze in your photos. You can also…

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 andthe 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 you’ll…

Create Specular Highlights

01 We have a science fiction image of a sleek android in a futuristic setting. Although it has been well lit and rendered at high resolution, it could do with a few extra highlights to create some stronger visual cues and enhance the metallic look of the armour. 02 Create a new layer above your base image and name it ‘specular’. Choose a fairly soft white brush and place a brush mark where you would like a brighter specular highlight to appear. Choose a few to begin with. It is just a white daub at the moment, but we can enhance that. 03 If you double-click the ‘specular’ layer, you can open up the Layer Style panel. Under the main General Blending option, choose Linear Light as the blend mode.…

Create Specular Highlights

Any Colour From Anywhere

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…

Any Colour From Anywhere

Black and White Colour Control

01 A colourful portrait image provides a perfect example for this case in point. There are a number of strong reds, blues, yellows and greens, with which we can work. As mentioned already, this is a useful non-destructive method, so your base image remains unaffected. 02 Go to the bottom of your layer palette and click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon. A dropdown menu will appear with a list of adjustment choices, click on Black & White. An adjustment layer, called Black & White 1, will be added to the layer stack above your main image. 03 As you would expect, the image will be converted to black and white, but, bear in mind this is a non-destructive adjustment. Keep the ‘Black & White 1’ layer…

Black and White Colour Control

Advanced Clone Stamp Control

01 We have an image of an aircraft at an airshow display. We can use the Clone Stamp Tool to create more versions of the aircraft and place them in the shot, but more than that, we can have a measure of control about how the cloned copy is placed when you stamp it onto a layer. 02 It is always a great idea to place any cloned samples onto a new layer. Create a new layer called ‘clone’ and select the Clone Stamp Tool from the toolbar. In the Menu options panel, make sure that Sample is set to Current & Below. This will clone from the Background layer onto the new layer, without issue. 03 Set a size for your Clone Stamp Tool. Our example is a brush…

Advanced Clone Stamp Control

Colour Match Your Images

01 We have here two example images. The first is of a forest scene comprised of warm colours, which give it an overall orange colour cast. The second image is of a young girl’s portrait taken in a studio. The tones in this image are much cooler with more of a blue cast by comparison. 02 The image of the girl has been cut out and placed on a layer above the forest scene. Now you can appreciate the difference in the two images and how much the warm image of the forest stands out against the cool tones of the girl. We need to alter her colours to match her environment. 03 With the girl’s layer active, click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer button and choose…

Colour Match Your Images

Combine Adjustment Layers

01 With your base image active, go to the bottom of the layers palette and click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer button. From the dropdown menu that appears, you can start choosing various adjustments to alter the tone and colour of the original image. 02 This example used four adjustment layers to get the final look that we liked. Now, if you wanted to transfer that same look to a separate image, it would normally mean having to replicate all the adjustment layers you’ve used for the original image and apply them to the new one. 03 However, we can actually combine all four adjustments and turn it into a single effect that can be applied to any other image without the need for multiple adjustment layers.…

Combine Adjustment Layers

Precise Lens Flare Placement

01 Normally, to add lens flare you would go up to the File menu and choose Filter > Render > Lens flare. This opens up the Lens Flare panel, from where you can choose the Brightness and Lens Type for your flare effect. The preview window allows you to drag the centre of the flare around. 02 Alternatively, create a new layer above your base image. In our example, we have named it ‘flare’. Go to Edit > Fill and fill the layer with 100% Black. Obviously, this will obscure your main image on the layer below. Now set the Blend Mode for the ‘flare’ layer to Screen and your main image will be visible again. 03 To call up the information panel go to: Window > Info. You will…

Precise Lens Flare Placement

It’s a safe bet that most people have had an encounter with Lego or by a few degrees of separation, knows someone who has. Lego is the popular construction toy, consisting of coloured interlocking plastic bricks for building just about anything you care to mention. With that as our inspiration, we are going to create a portrait that looks like it was made out of Lego bricks. 01 First, we are going to make a basic Lego-shaped pattern. Go to your File menu and select New (Cmd + N) and make a new document that is 50 pixels wide x 50 pixels high. Click OK when you are ready and the document will be created. 02 The document is very small but if you press Cmd + 0, it will…

Artwork Compositing

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…

Artwork Compositing

Double Exposure Effect

Double or multiple exposure photography is another reference to the more traditional methods of image capture where a photographer would expose one frame of film more than once to achieve a surreal look in the final image. A downside to this method was that you could never be certain of what effect you were actually achieving until the negative was developed and a print was made in the darkroom. An alternative method was to stack two negatives in the enlarger at the printing stage. These days, of course, we can explore the creative aspects of combining multiple images on our computers with effects that can be edited and adapted precisely to suit our needs. For our example, we are going to combine a graphic image of a woman and a…

Double Exposure Effect

Torn Paper Portraits

Tear it up! Give portraits a whole new look.…

Torn Paper Portraits

Dual Lighting Effect

Dual lighting, as the name suggests, is a technique used by photographers to add two separate, coloured lighting effects to a subject. Most typically, they are used in a studio setup and can add a lot of drama to a portrait session. One coloured light is used to strongly illuminate the subject from one side and then the second light is brought in to add a cross-lit effect, with another complimentary colour, on the other side. This can be done with just the head and shoulders or the whole body, depending on the subject. Of course, not all of us are photographers with access to expensive studio space and photographic equipment, but with a good source image, Photoshop can turn a normal portrait into an image with just as much…

Dual Lighting Effect

If you are out and about doing landscape photography, there are times when you are faced with some compositional and technical challenges that could affect the quality and overall impact of your photos. One area that regularly demands your attention is that of exposure and getting a beautifully balanced tonal range. When trying to photograph scenes of very high contrast, that can be a very tall order. A lot of photographers will employ the HDR (high dynamic range) technique. This is where they will shoot the scene at three ormore different exposures, capturing a much larger range of tonal values that can be merged at a later time on the computer. Great, but what happens if you are also tasked with shooting a very wide panoramic shot that cannot be…

Perfect Portraits

Before the advent of digital technology, it was the job of the makeup artist to get the skin looking perfect on set or in the studio. Now, thanks to Photoshop you are the makeup artist. You can control exactly how you want your model to look in the final image. As ever, there are numerous ways you can go about retouching skin. Some techniques are very simple but do not give natural results. Some take it to extremes and end up with their models looking like mannequins. Of course, there has been much debate about theuse of retouching and manipulation of body shape. All we are looking to do is make our model’s skin look as healthy and glowing as possible. We are going to use a technique called frequency…

Perfect Portraits

The Midas Touch

King Midas was a character from Greek and Roman legend who wished that all he touched could turn to gold. When he got his wish, he nearly starved to death since his food was also turning to gold. He then realised his error and quickly wished for an end to the golden touch! Well, thanks to Photoshop, you can turn things into gold and not worry about your next meal being inedible. Using some fairly simple techniques, you can turn subjects in your photos into golden objects, that have a beautiful lustre that only comes from solidgold. We will take a photograph and manipulate it in such as way as to give it shine, highlights and the colours you associate with this precious metal. A couple of layers, a few…

The Midas Touch

Enhancing Your Photos

Here’s a scenario to ponder. You’re out with your camera, taking shots of some beautiful scene. It’s sunrise down by the water’s edge. The light is amazing, the clouds are well defined and lit by the rising sun, there is a glow along the horizon and some cool reflections in the wet sand at your feet. You compose a strong, yet simple shot and click off a few frames. When you get home and download them to your computer, you open them up and you’re surprised at how different the images look tohow it was in real life. The images are a bit washed out, the colours seem a little weak. Did you get your camera settings wrong? There’s every chance you didn’t. Sometimes what you see with your own…

Enhancing Your Photos

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. In Photoshop, alpha channels are called saved selections. To save an alpha…

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