Adobe Photoshop CS6 for Photographers - Item Preview
Looking for:
The adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free -The Adobe Photoshop CS6 book for digital photographers | eBay - See, that’s what the app is perfect for.
English Pages [] Year Since Lightroom 1. Scott Kelby, Editor and Publisher of Photoshop User magazine—and the best-selling photography book author in the world t. Scott Kelby, the best-selling. Are you ready for an amazing new version of The Photoshop Book that breaks all the rules? Scott Kelby, Editor and Publi. This book for Windows and Mac breaks new ground by doing something for digital photographers that's never been do.
Designed with digital photographers in mind, Photoshop Lightroom offers powerful editing features in a streamlined inter. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom was designed from the ground up with digital photographers in mind, offering powerful editing. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, sdobe or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Trademarks All terms mentioned in this book that are known to be trademarks or service marks have been appropriately capitalized. New Riders cannot attest to the accuracy of this information. Use of a term fhe this book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service mark.
Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc. Macintosh is a registered digifal of Apple, Inc. Windows is fres registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. Warning and Disclaimer This book is designed to provide information about Photoshop for digital photographers.
Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and photogrsphers accurate as possible, but no warranty of fitness is implied. The information is provided on an as-is basis. The author pbotographers New Riders shall have neither the liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book or from the use of the discs, electronic files, or programs that may accompany it.
Daddy loves you very much!!! It also, hands down, takes me longer than any other pages in the book. I also know why it frer so long—you type a lot slower with tears in your eyes.
You truly are the type of woman love songs are yhe for, and as anyone who knows me will tell you, I am, without a doubt, the luckiest man alive to have you for my wife.
To freee precious little girl, Kira: You have been blessed in a very special way, because you are a little clone of your mom, which is the most wonderful thing I could have possibly wished for you. To my big brother Jeff, who has always been, and will always be, a hero to me. So much of who I am, and where I am, is because of your photogrpahers, guidance, caring, and love as I was growing up.
Thank you for teaching me to always take the high road, for always knowing the right thing to say at the right time, and for having so much of our dad in you. I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am to her for being my Editor, and to Felix for finding her. I guess great people just attract other great people. Thanks Jess! She runs a whole side of my business life, and a big chunk of our conferences, and she does it so I have time to write books, spend time with my family, and have a life outside of work.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. It means more than you know. Thanks to Matt Kloskowski for all his input and ideas for this edition of the book. Most importantly, I want to the adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free God, and His Son Jesus Christ, for leading me to the woman of my dreams, for blessing us with two amazing children, for allowing me to make a living doing something I truly love, for always being there when I need Him, for blessing me with a wonderful, fulfilling, and happy life, and such a warm, loving family to share it with.
His book, The Digital Photography Book, vol. Try Applying a Camera Profile. We can skip all that and moreif you take two minutes now and read these seven quick things.
I promise to make it worth photographerz while. I designed this book so you can turn right to the technique you want to learn, and start there. However, the short intros at the beginning of each individual project, up at the top of the page, are usually pretty important. So, just make sure you read it first, and then go to Step One. What this means to you is that some things are covered twice in the book. A version of Bridge is built right into Photoshop itself.
Well, barely anything which gives you some hint as to the future of Bridge, eh? Anyway, they did greatly improve приведенная ссылка streamline Mini Bridge, but since some of you may still be using Dugital Bridge for at least a little while longer at least until you fall in love with Mini BridgeI did update two Big Bridge chapters, and put them on the web for you to download free.
In fact, I had a hard time finding any photographers I know still using Curves, which just shows how Photoshop has evolved over time. You can find it at photograpers web nook just mentioned in 6. These are in addition to all the other tips, which already appear throughout the chapters you can fs6 have enough tips, right? Remember: He who dies with the most tips, wins! Or, d you you kidding me?
You call that a Curves adjustment? Oh, by the way: pee pee. Hee hee! I loved that it was more powerful, but I hated that it fgee a totally separate program, and now I had to leave Photoshop to get to my images. Step Two: background, Mini Bridge comes alive, displaying your images in a horizontal filmstrip layout as seen here.
On the left side of the panel is the Navigation pod, which is where you navigate to the photos you want to appear in Mini Bridge. Here, I chose my Pictures folder, and below the pop-up the adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free, it lists the folders I have inside that folder. If you click on the little right-facing arrow to the right of the adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free folder in the Path Bar, a pop-up menu appears with a list of the subfolders inside that folder.
By the way and this may seem insanely obvious, but…to open any of these images in Photoshop, just double-click on one. Clickand-drag the top of the panel upward and, as you do, the thumbnails grow to fill in the space по этому адресу seen here.
Step One: By default, Mini Bridge is set up in a wide the adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free layout, and is figital to the bottom of your screen, like the one you see adobe cs6 full crack sinhvienit. However, you can undock it and have it work like any other floating panel in Photoshop. Step Two: corner of the Mini Bridge panel shown circled here in xdobe.
Again, if you want your thumbnails bigger, you have to drag the left side of Mini Bridge out to the left, and as it gets wider, the thumbnails grow to fill vmware workstation for windows 8.1 bit the space. Instead, you can get an instant full-screen preview by clicking on a thumbnail, and then pressing the Spacebar on your keyboard.
That image goes full screen as shown hereso you can get a phofoshop look at it. To see thr next image in the filmstrip, just press the Right Arrow key on your keyboard and, of course, to go to a previous image, use frre Left Arrow key. By making the adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free images much larger onscreen, it makes it much easier to find your fgee shots, and Review mode really makes whittling things down to just the best shots from your shoot so much easier.
Step Two: When you choose Review Mode, it enters a full-screen view with your images in a cool fere rotation as seen here. This mode is great for two big reasons: The first being it makes a really nice onscreen slide photographere presentation.
You can use the Dogital and Right Arrow keys on your keyboard to move through the photos or the arrow buttons in the lower-left corner of the screen as a photo comes to the front, it becomes larger and brighter. If you want to open the image in front in Photoshop, press the letter O. To open the front photo in Adobe Camera Raw, press R.
To leave Review mode, press the Esc key. If you forget any of these shortcuts, just press H. Start by Command-clicking PC: Ctrl-clicking on just those photos in the filmstrip to select them, and enter Review mode.
In Review mode, you can zoom in tight pxf a particular area using the built-in Loupe. Just move your cursor over the part of the photo you want a closer look at, and click to bring up the Loupe for that photo as shown here, in the image in the top right.
To move it, click-and-hold inside the Loupe источник drag it where ca6 want it. To make it go away, just click once inside it. That way, you can view them as slide shows, post them on the web, send them to a client for proofing, or prepare them for printing. If photosuop want to change how they are sorted, click on the Photograpbers icon it looks like up and down arrows near the left end of the Toolbar, and a pop-up menu of options will the adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free as seen here.
Now, use the Left the adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free Right Arrow keys on your keyboard to move through the fullscreen images.
For all the rest of the photos, you do absolutely nothing. So, why not use the entire star rating system? What about your photoshhop ones? We wdobe them, too. Click-and-hold on the Filter Items by The adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free icon at the right vree of the Toolbar it looks like a funnel and choose Show Rejected Thf Only as shown here to see just the Rejects.
Click it, and it brings up a dialog where you can name and save your images to a collection. You can use the same shortcut to remove the Reject label. Step Eight: When you click that Save button, a collection of just these photos is saved. Now these best-of-that-shoot photos will always be just one click away. Or, 3 you can use a standard Bridge search which searches just the filename and any embedded ditital to narrow things down digiyal just your current folder. To leave the search results and return to your previous folder of images, just click the Back button the left arrow at the top-left corner of the Mini Bridge panel.
Now, Mini Bridge and Big Bridge will both display the same folder of images. You can also do other things from this pop-up menu, like add dkgital the adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free free label to your image, or add a star rating, or rotate the file.
Dragging-and-Dropping Right from Mini Bridge If you already have a ;df open digitak Photoshop, you can drag-and-drop an image directly from Mini Bridge right into that document and it appears as a smart object not как сообщается здесь shabby!
(PDF) Basic Adobe Photoshop CS6 Tutorial | Loreanne Damasco - .
When it comes to image editing and manipulation, Photoshop is the first software that crosses our minds. Whether you are a professional editor or layman, Photoshop is something that is not unfamiliar to you. With its amazing features and user-friendliness, even along with many other latest software programs , Photoshop enjoys matchless authority.
Check Update Creative Cloud apps for additional details. The version was known for better user control. Improved search capabilities and a vigilant Histogram palette that detects even minute changes in the image were other specialties. Match color was another innovation that ensured uniformity in a series of images. The version made its grand entry into the market with a fresh group of Photoshop tools and features, and facilities.
Launched in May , it was an expansion of the earlier form. Added benefits were things like Image Warping tools and vanquishing point. Users were happy to save time as they could make own custom presets. Vanquishing point deals with perspective correction in photographs containing perspective planes.
After specifying the planes in a particular photograph, processes like cloning, copying, pasting and transforming are performed. Here, you get results that are closer to real-life.
Image Warping allows a picture to be distorted or converted into a different shape. You can drag control points and achieve this condition. Both tools offer relief to artists or photographers who are involved in time-consuming and hectic photo retouching jobs.
Above all, the version offers a user-friendly experience due to the ease of selecting features for specific purposes. Camera Raw version 3. Other characteristics are better spot healing brush and smart objects. The addition of non-destructive editing was the highlight. It was the long-term demand of professionals from several industries. The third version in the Creative Suite saw the introduction of quick selection wand. Several popular tools underwent thorough overhaul, including brightness, contrast, curves, vanishing point etc.
Camera Raw Files were greatly supported. The Black and White Conversion tool was another benefit. Before, users had a hard time converting color photos into black and white ones. There were few options to do it, but all of them produced results which were far removed from reality.
The Black and White adjustment breathed a whiff of fresh air and allowed even the less skilled users to engage in the process in an effective manner. Available as stand-alone application, CS3 Extended presented everything in CS3, with much more additions. This promise came just one year after the launch of CS4.
The version which included Windows Vista 64 support came out in October It is more convenient to handle with the simplified interface. It allows quicker photo editing because of the simpler zooming and panning. The content-aware scaling and mask panels were added, along with adjustments.
Fluid Canvas rotation and file display options were other options. The content-aware scale and fluid canvas rotation were appreciated. The tool allows photographs to be reduced in size without allowing details to be cropped or excluded.
The Canvas Rotation tool offers unique editing experiences. With the tool, one can work on a particular image from any angle as it is possible to rotate it. Also, improvisations are visible in the color correction tool. Photoshop CS4 Extended brought out scientific imaging techniques too. Windows Vista bit support was also added. This was the twelfth version of Photoshop and launched in April The version sparked huge expectations even before its official release as the development team had offered a sneak peek into the upcoming innovations through their Facebook page.
The version stood out among the rest as it had incorporated few properties based on the suggestions and demands of users. More than 30 features come under the category, namely color pickup, rule of thirds cropping tool and another one for straightening images automatically.
The Content Aware fill tool was much appreciated by tech reviewers, media and customers alike. It allows users to keep good content, while avoiding unnecessary blank space through clever resizing of images. The new tool allows you to delete the unwanted element while maintaining the beautiful background unblemished. With the introduction of Adobe Mini Bridge, the process of viewing, arranging and editing the image library had become simpler.
All these steps can be executed without closing Photoshop. Three-dimensional brushes and video editing features were included in CS5 Extended. The Shadow Catcher tool ensures perfection of 3D objects.
Options to convert 2D images into 3D ones are another crowd pleaser. Options like Chrome, Glass and Cork were added in the materials library. The version supports more than camera models and provides highly-developed facilities for deleting unwanted noise, while adding attractive effects like grains and vignettes. The Mixer Brush tool caught the special attention of creative minds as it almost made the mouse feel like a real paintbrush. The version came out with a revamped interface.
Many design tools were newly introduced. The first one successfully removes unwanted elements of a photo. Flawless blending with surrounding areas is facilitated through this tool. Content Aware move enables users to move or extend the selected pixels to a desired area. The usage of masks and layers are no longer required. In addition, the version surprised users with a set of tools meant for video editing. After editing, it can be exported into other Photoshop file formats.
Background saving was another innovation introduced. It allows editing to continue even while another document is getting archived. A big relief in the form of auto-save feature was brought by the version. It perfectly safeguards all your efforts and no more worries about works getting accidentally deleted.
The straighten tool was yet another specialty of CS6. The tool enables any line drawn on any part of the image to automatically become horizontal. The version gave a facelift to the overall performance of Photoshop.
Meanwhile, Adobe stopped supporting Windows XP with the version Therefore, only the versions upto Another major announcement was that CS6 would be the last suitemarketed with licenses supporting Creative Cloud subscriptions. This was the year when Photoshop underwent a change in nomenclature as Adobe switched over to the Creative Cloud System in Although met with stiff resistance, the system enabled users to receive the brand new version without further delay.
Photoshop CC Fresh additions in the version included Smart Sharpen, Intelligent Up sampling, and Camera Shake Reduction for reducing image distortion due to camera shake. A new update to Adobe Camera Raw 8. Content-aware tools were enhanced in the version. It witnessed two new blur tools namely spin blur and path blur. Spin blur adds radial movement to motionless images. Directional motion to photos can be achieved through Path blur tool.
Another exciting feature was the Focus Mask. Focus Mark generates a layer mask based on parts of the picture under focus. It works well when a particular portion is under focus and another portion away from it.
The speed of a handful of tasks has been improved. The version marked the 25 th anniversary of Adobe Photoshop. It was released in June with the Photoshop latest features at that time. An easy browsing of stock images without leaving the platform was facilitated through the introduction of an integrated Adobe Stock Marketplace.
Discounts in prices and in-app purchases were there. Other additions were improvised art boards and dehaze tool to help blurred images. It was creative like never before due to the facility for using ten shadows in a single layer. Other updates included Exports As and a better look of the entire software. The ease of operating the software from touch enabled devices was greatly improved.
Another attraction was the facility to search tools. Articles written to help tackle problems while using Photoshop were incorporated.
- Photoshop Resource
Scott Kelby, Editor …. Get savvy with the newest features and enhancements of Photoshop CC The newest version of Photoshop …. Skip to main content. Start your free trial. Book description Scott Kelby, Editor and Publisher of Photoshop User magazine—and the best-selling photography book author in the world today—once again takes this book to a whole new level as he uncovers more of the latest, most important, and most useful Adobe Photoshop techniques for digital photographers.
Show and hide more. Nothing drastic, but I did do a few little tweaks here. Go ahead and click it to open this image in Photoshop as a smart object.
This makes a duplicate of your smart object layer, but it is no longer tied to the original layer, so we can edit these as two totally independent RAW images. This changes just this duplicate layer back to the old process version, so it has the controls from Photoshop CS5. Now, go to the Basic panel and, lo and behold, there is the old Fill Light slider.
Go ahead and crank that Fill Light slider up here, I dragged it over to However, you can see the weird look it gives the rest of the image, which is why Adobe thought this control needed some improvements.
When it looks good to you, click OK. Step Four: With the top layer active in the Layers panel, Option-click PC: Alt-click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the panel to hide this newly processed layer behind a black mask. Now, get the Brush tool B , make sure your Foreground color is set to white, then paint over the areas you want to have the old Fill Light look for example, here I painted over her hair and earrings, which is primarily what I wanted.
If you open up the shadows a lot using the Shadows slider, Blacks, or in some cases, even the Exposure slider , any noise that was already in the image is going to become magnified. There are two different places you can reduce noise in Photoshop: The Noise Reduction controls in Camera Raw rock, however the Reduce Noise filter in Photoshop under the Filter menu, under Noise does not. My advice— only use the Noise Reduction in the Detail panel of Camera Raw, and avoid the other altogether.
Rotating Your Images Finally, a shortcut that makes perfect sense: To rotate your image to the left, press L; to rotate to the right, press R. Luckily, now when your canvas rotates, your brushes stay intact. Get Automatic Auto Corrections The Auto correction one-click fix feature got dramatically better in previous versions of Photoshop.
Not great, not amazing, but decent. You do this by clicking on the blue link beneath the Preview area in Camera Raw. This brings up the Workflow Options dialog, where you choose which color profile gets embedded into your image you choose it from the Space pop-up menu.
Click it, and any images that have either a star rating or a label will be instantly selected for you, letting you get to your best images fast. Very handy! Click on it, and it marks your selected image s for deletion.
Finding Your Best Images Fast I mentioned in the last chapter that if you have multiple images open in Camera Raw, you can assign star ratings and labels to photos just as if you were in Mini Bridge you even use the same shortcuts.
It just sounded like a bunch of noise. But this by hip hop artists Trick Trick and Jazze Pha. In iTunes, this time it was me. I was sad. I jumped up out of my chair, but then I grabbed understand a word they were saying. However, I recommend that you do all the regular edits to your photo in the Basic panel first exposure, contrast, etc. So, start by clicking on the — minus sign button to the left of the Exposure slider, which resets all the sliders to 0 and lowers the Exposure the midtones control to —0.
Notice how the sky gets darker as you paint? Try lowering the Exposure to —1. More on this coming up. That way, you can paint right up against them, filling in all those areas, without accidentally painting over the blades and wings. Now that you know where you painted, you can go back and paint over any areas you missed.
If you want to keep the mask turned on while you paint, just press the letter Y on your keyboard. The ability to paint over one area, and stack up a number of adjustments on just that area, is what gives this tool so much power. First, click the New radio button at the top of the panel, so we can paint over a new area otherwise, the plane would get the same settings we used on the sky.
Now, with Auto Mask turned on, paint over the underside of the plane and the propeller blades as shown here , which lightens those areas because you increased the Exposure amount by quite a bit. Now, just paint the area where you spilled over and it erases the spillover as shown here. You can also switch to Erase mode by clicking on the Erase radio button at the top of the Adjustment Brush panel.
Note: I felt I needed to make one more change to this image. If you look back at Step 10, the yellow nose cone looks too bright, so I used the Erase brush to erase over it entirely. Now, move your cursor over the blemish and just click. So, click on the green sample circle and drag it to a nearby area and it redoes the retouch as shown here.
Now, remove the rest of the blemishes with just a single click each, adjusting the position of their green sample circles, if necessary. Now, drag the Exposure slider a little to the right, decrease the size of your brush, then paint over the whites of her eyes as shown here. Once that looks good, click the New radio button again and zero out the sliders, so we can work on adding contrast and brightness to her irises.
However, with the way Adobe implemented this feature, you can use it for much more than just neutral density gradient effects although that probably will still be its number one use. When you click on it, its options panel appears shown here with a set of effects you can apply that are similar to the ones you can apply using the Adjustment Brush.
Start by dragging the Exposure slider to the left, or just click on the — minus sign button two times to get to —1. Generally, you want to stop dragging the gradient before it reaches the horizon line, or it will start to darken your properly exposed foreground. You can see the darkening effect it has on the sky and the photo already looks more balanced. Note: Just let go of the Shift key to drag the gradient in any direction. You can also have more than one gradient click on the New radio button at the top of the panel and to delete a gradient, just click on it and press the Delete PC: Backspace key.
Start by pressing the Delete PC: Backspace key to get rid of this adjustment pin and start over from scratch with the original color image. Get the Adjustment Brush and click the — minus sign button beside Exposure to zero everything out.
Then drag the Exposure slider almost all the way over to the left. Step Six: Turn off the Auto Mask checkbox and, using a large brush, paint over the entire image as shown here to greatly darken it. That way, it builds up more gradually as you click the brush.
If I try to warm up the white balance, she is going to turn really yellow. Luckily, now we can adjust the white balance in just one area. I also decreased the Highlights a bit to finish it up. This technique lets you paint noise reduction just where you need it, so the rest of the image stays sharp. It definitely looks better now well, to me anyway , but if you look at the inset, you now see lots of noise that was once hidden in those shadows.
This noise reduction only affects that wall area where you painted, and the rest of the image keeps its original sharpness. Next, fully paint over just the two circular headlamps. Really handy when working on hard edges, like the edge of a building where it meets the sky. The trick is to click on the Color swatch in the middle of the Adjustment Brush options panel to reopen the Color Picker, then drag the Saturation slider down to 0.
Want to bring them all back? Then you can jump back to how the image looked when you took that snapshot by clicking on it in the Snapshots panel. Click that little bucket on any one of the swatches, and it changes the swatch to your currently selected color. Anyway, I also a great title for a movie about evil corn is almost ideal found a band named Cash Crop, which would make a great for this chapter, except for the fact that this chapter also title, too, but when I looked at their album, every song was includes resizing.
So, I thought, what the heck, and searched marked with the Explicit warning. The Designers, and motion picture soundtrack for the movie Sorority Row , and it literally is an long background music track with two I immediately knew what kind of the music they did. Naughty, European-sounding women whispering the names of menu naughty music. Anyway, while I was listening, and wincing commands from Adobe products. I am not making I realized that someone at the iTunes Store must have the this up I listened to the free second preview.
I imagine, at this point, that person has commands set to music. Now, just grab one of the corner or side handles and start dragging inward to start cropping as seen here and it crops in toward the center of the image the area to be cropped away will appear dimmed.
If you want to keep the image proportions the same in your crop I usually do , just press-and-hold the Shift key while you drag any of the cropping handles. Also, you can reposition your image within the border by clickingand-dragging on it.
When you do this, the cursor will change into a double-headed arrow. Just click, hold, and drag up or down and the cropping border will rotate in the direction you choose. Want to take it up a notch? The other options here only kick in if you do have that dimmed cropped away area visible called the Crop Shield , and you can make it lighter or darker by changing the Opacity amount, or you can turn it off altogether by turning off the Enable Crop Shield checkbox.
Of course, now you can tweak the handles just like before. One quick thing to check first: if you want a white background for your canvas area and my guess is, most times you will , then before you even click on the Crop tool, press the letter D on your keyboard to set your Background color to white. Then, once you click on the Crop tool, make sure Unconstrained is selected in the popup menu at the left end of the Options Bar, otherwise the cropping border will be constrained to the aspect ratio of your image in this case, we want the bottom section to be deeper than the sides and top.
Now, grab a cropping handle and drag the border outward to add canvas area. Step Here, I dragged the right side out and then dragged the bottom-center handle down quite a bit to add a fine art poster mat look around my image. How cool is that? You get to decide if the part of your image that gets cropped away from view is: a gone forever, or b just hidden from view and, if necessary, can be brought back.
With it turned on, when you crop, the stuff outside the border is cropped away and you get a smaller file size. Step Once you have the cropping border right where you want it, press the Return PC: Enter key to crop your image. The final cropped image is shown here, where we cropped off some of the crowd on the right side, and the lens peeking into the frame from above my shooting position down on one knee , and some of the excess grass on the tee box.
More times than I care to admit. Type in the custom size you want in this case, 20x16" at a resolution of ppi, which is pretty ideal for most color inkjet printing. Now press the Return PC: Enter key and it crops your image to that size. When the New dialog appears, enter 20 inches by 16 inches, and enter for Resolution, then click OK to create a new blank document in the exact size and resolution you need as seen here.
All you have to do is crop the other image, and it will share the exact same specs as your ideal-size photo. Step Four: Now, get the Move tool V , click on the image you want cropped to that size, and drag it onto that new blank document.
The one you like best. In fact, once you set them up, they will save you time and money. Then, when we want to crop to 5x7", all we have to do is grab the 5x7" Crop tool preset.
In the Width field, enter 2 in, then press the Tab key to jump to the Height field, enter 2. This brings up the New Tool Preset dialog, in which you can name your new preset. Name it, click OK, and the new tool is added to the Tool Presets panel. If you need to change the name of a preset, just double-click directly on its name in the panel, and then type in a new name. In the resulting dialog, choose Tools from the Preset Type pop-up menu, and scroll down until you see the Crop tools you created.
Now just click-and-drag them to wherever you want them to appear in the list, and then click Done. A tool preset picker will appear. Click on a preset, and your cropping border will be fixed to the exact dimensions you chose for that tool. When the New dialog appears, click on the Preset pop-up menu to reveal the list of preset types, and choose Photo.
Then click on the Size pop-up menu to see the preset sizes, which include 2x3", 4x6", 5x7", and 8x10" in both portrait and landscape orientation. The only problem with these is that their resolution is set to ppi by default.
First, choose Photo from the Preset popup menu, then choose Landscape, 5x7 from the Size pop-up menu. Choose your desired Color Mode below Resolution and Color Profile under Advanced , and then enter a Resolution I entered ppi, which is enough for me to have my image printed on a high-end printing press.
Once your settings are in place, click on the Save Preset button. In the Preset Name field, enter your new resolution at the end of the size.
You only have to go through this once. Photoshop will remember your custom settings, and they will appear in this Preset pop-up menu from now on. A warning dialog will appear asking you to confirm the delete.
The trick is to decrease the physical size of your digital camera image and increase its resolution without losing any of its quality. As you can see from the rulers, the photo is about 59" wide by 39" high. Under the Document Size section, the Resolution setting is 72 ppi. That way, when we type in a Resolution setting that we need, Photoshop automatically adjusts the Width and Height of the image down in the exact same proportion.
Pretty cool! In fact, I never print with a resolution higher than ppi. As you can see, the Width of my image is now almost 24" and the Height is now almost 16". Note: Do not turn off Resample Image for images that you scan on a scanner— they start as high-res images in the first place. Turning Resample Image off like this is only for low-res photos taken with a digital camera.
That way, when the Image Processor opens, it already has those photos pegged for processing. Then, in the second section, decide whether you want the new copies to be saved in the same folder or copied into a different folder. Just turn on the Run Action checkbox, then from the pop-up menus, choose which action you want to run. If you want to automatically embed your copyright info into these copies, type your info in the Copyright Info field.
Click on that menu and choose Percent as shown here. So, which one is the right one for you? Thankfully, now there is just that. Click-anddrag the Straighten tool horizontally along this straight edge in your photo, starting from the left and extending to the right as shown here.
Now, just press the Return PC: Enter key to lock in your straightening, and it straightens and crops the image down to just what you see inside the cropping border the final straightened image is shown here below. Luckily, maintaining image quality is much easier when sizing down than when scaling up in fact, photos often look dramatically better—and sharper—when scaled down, especially if you follow these guidelines.
Making Your Photos Smaller Downsizing Downsizing photos where the resolution is already ppi: Although earlier we discussed how to change image size if your digital camera gives you ppi images with large physical dimensions like 24x42" deep , what do you do if your camera gives you ppi images at smaller physical dimensions like a 10x6" at ppi?
The image will be scaled down to size, and the resolution will remain at ppi. When the size looks good, press Return PC: Enter. If the image looks softer after resizing it, apply the Unsharp Mask filter see Chapter 10 for settings to bring that sharpness back. You have two documents open, and they look approximately the same size as seen here, at top , but when you drag the sunflower photo onto the blank document, the sunflower photo appears really small as seen below.
The sunflower photo is a low-resolution, ppi pixels per inch image, but the blank document is a high-resolution, ppi image. Try gang scanning fitting as many photos on your flatbed scanner as you can and scanning them as one big single image , and then you can have Photoshop automatically straighten each individual image and place it into its own separate document.
No dialog will appear. Instead, Photoshop will look for straight edges in your photos, straighten the photos, and copy each into its own separate document. Press-and-hold the Shift key, then grab a corner point and drag inward to scale the image down, so it fits within the 8x10" area as shown here on top , and press Return PC: Enter. This is where Content-Aware Scale comes in. Grab the top handle, drag straight upward, and notice that it stretches the sky upward, but pretty much leaves the jet intact.
Note: The button that looks like a person in the Options Bar tells Content-Aware Scale that there are people in the photo, so it tries to avoid stretching anything with a skin tone. Step Three: There are two more controls you need to know about: First, if you try ContentAware Scale and it stretches your subject more than you want, get the Lasso tool L and draw a selection around your subject as shown here , then go under the Select menu and choose Save Selection.
When the Save Selection dialog appears, just click OK. Then bring up Content-Aware Scale again, but this time, go up in the Options Bar and choose your selection from the Protect pop-up menu as shown here to tell Photoshop where your subject is. Now you can drag up or down to fill the empty space with the least possible stretching. The nice thing is the Amount control is live, so as long as your handles are still in place, you can lower the Amount and see live onscreen how it affects your resizing.
In the Layer Style dialog, enter your own settings like changing the glow from yeech yellow to white, or black, or anything but yeech yellow , then click on the Make Default button near the bottom of the dialog.
To return to the factory default yeech settings, click the Reset to Default button. In CS4, they changed the shortcuts, which totally bummed out a lot of longtime users, but you have the option of bringing those glory days of channel shortcuts back to the pre-CS4 era.
Click on it and it brings up the Blend If sliders in the Layer Style dialog. When you crop a photo in Camera Raw, you can see the final cropped image without having to open the image in Photoshop.
That has changed and JPEG is now a choice, but what it does is makes a copy of the file, which it converts to 8-bit, and saves that instead. This the Pen tool all that much, so he used the letter P for Picker.
To hide it again, press V again. Assign a Keyboard Shortcut to the Color Picker leaves your bit image still open onscreen and unsaved, so keep that in mind.
Click on whichever one you want, and type in the shortcut you want. I have to tell you up front: most of the good shortcuts are already taken in fact, almost all combinations of shortcuts are already taken , but my buddy Dave Cross came up with a good idea. The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers Photoshop Killer Tips Working with Tabbed Documents When working with multiple documents while using the Tabs features, to see any tabbed image, just click on its tab at the top of the image window or press CtrlTab to cycle through them one by one.
You can find them by clicking on the pop-up menu at the right end of the Options Bar. To create your own custom workspace layout, just click-and-drag the panels where you want them. To nest a panel so they appear one in front of another , drag one panel over the other.
When you see a blue outline appear, release the mouse button and it nests. More panels can be found under the Window menu. Instead, you have to go into that pop-up menu and choose Reset [your workspace name]. When the Match Color dialog appears, just turn on the Neutralize checkbox in the Image Options ssection.
Change Ruler Increments If you want to quickly change the unit of measure in your ruler say, from pixels to inches or from centimeters to millimeters , just Right-click anywhere inside the Rulers and choose your new unit of measurement from the pop-up menu that appears.
Switch the Stroke position or location to Inside. Remember the song: Umlaut. The page is white. Kidding, Kim. Just a joke. So, the best advice I can give you is to get out of this panel just as fast as you can.
That basically means making the whites whiter and the blacks blacker, which has been made easier to do in Photoshop CS6 now that the Basic panel has both Whites and Blacks sliders not to mention a Contrast slider that now actually does a good job.
So, start in the Basic panel. Now, drag the Blacks slider to the left until it really starts to look nice and contrasty as shown here, where I dragged to — Now, drag the Shadows slider to the left and then paint over the towers as shown here. Pretty striking difference, eh? Otherwise, I would do it in Camera Raw, because you have more control. However, we can add another click or two and take this conversion up a big notch. All you need to do is change the layer blend mode of this adjustment layer from Normal to Soft Light at the top of the Layers panel, as shown here and look how much more contrasty, and just generally yummy, this photo looks now.
Step Four: In the Layers panel, click on the Gradient Map adjustment layer the middle layer to make it active. Once it appears, click once directly in the center, right below the gradient ramp as shown circled here to add a color stop it looks like a little house right below your gradient. As you slide up and down that left side, let go of the mouse button and look at your photo.
Of course, this is all optional [you could have stopped back at Step Three], but now we have some extra editing power if we want it. For example, to darken the photo, you drag to the right, toward the white end of the gradient, and to lighten the photo, you drag left toward the dark end.
Freaky, I know. At this point, dragging either the Highlights or Shadows Hue slider does absolutely nothing because, by default, the Saturation sliders are set to 0. Note: I made some adjustments in the Basic panel shown here , before I turned on the checkbox. There is one more control—a Balance slider, which lets you control whether your split tone favors your highlight or shadow color. Tritones use three inks, and do I really have to mention how many duotones use?
Quadtoning effects seem to look best with but are not limited to two kinds of photos: 1 landscapes, and 2 people. Now, before you can make a quadtone, you need to convert this image to Grayscale mode by going under the Image menu, under Mode, and choosing Grayscale. It will ask you if you want to flatten your layers, so click the Flatten button. It will also ask you if you want to discard the color info.
Click Discard. So, go under the Image menu, under Mode, and choose Duotone. How about a nice duotone? It uses black and it adds a reddish brown to the mix. Just remember—anytime you come up with a look you like, you can save it as a preset. Now, just turn on the checkboxes for the adjustments you want copied to your preset as I did here , give your preset a name, and then click the OK button.
Keep in mind, though, because the exposure is different for every photo, if you save a preset where you had to tweak the exposure a lot, that same exposure will be applied anytime you apply this preset. Switch to the other document, then go under the Edit menu, under Paste Special, and choose Paste in Place. Now it will appear in the exact same position in the other document provided, of course, the other document is the same size and resolution.
This also works with selected areas—not just layers. This was destiny, my friends. Step Four: Now we set up the camera to shoot bracketed, which tells the camera to shoot the regular exposure, and then extra photos that are exposed both brighter and darker. The minimum number of exposures you can use for HDR is three, but I generally take five bracketed photos for my HDR images although some folks take as many as nine. So, with five, I wind up with one shot with my normal exposure, then two darker shots one 1 stop underexposed and one 2 stops underexposed , followed by two brighter ones one 1 stop overexposed and one 2 stops overexposed.
Then use the main command dial to choose how many exposures to bracket the control panel on the top of the camera shows the bracketing settings; choose 5F, so you get five bracketed shots.
Use the sub-command dial in front of the shutter button to set the bracketing amount to 1 stop as seen here. Okay, on to the setup for Canon cameras.
Now, use the Main Dial to choose 2 stops brighter, then press the Set button again this automatically sets the bracketing to also shoot 2 stops darker. Now set your camera to High-Speed Continuous Shooting mode, and then press-and-hold the shutter button and your camera will automatically shoot all five bracketed photos once all five are taken, you can release the shutter button.
They contain enough depth to make the HDR actually, the darker image is more important than the lighter one , and by only using three photos, the processing is much faster. Hang on—here we go! My buddy RC Concepcion had a couple of his presets included here, as well. If part of your HDR image looks pretty dark like the courtyard in the center does back in Step Three , then you can open up those shadows a bit by dragging the Shadow slider way over to the right as seen here.
Now, you can see the trees in the courtyard pretty well. When the High Pass filter dialog appears shown here , I generally enter 4 pixels and click OK for a nice snappy sharpening. Note: When the filter dialog appears, it will turn your duplicate layer solid gray with just an outline of the edges in your image. It helps to take away some of the harshness of an HDR image and gives the image a little bit of a surreal feel to it in a good way, not in an over-the-top, crazy surreal HDR way that drives people nuts.
Enter 50 pixels to blur the heck out of it, and click OK as shown here. This is what blends the glow effect in nicely and gives you the final effect you see at the bottom right. These actually come into play if you turn on the Auto Ghosting feature—more on that later in the chapter. Any way, ignore those for now, and just know that, instead, a lot of your editing work will be spent finding a good balance between the two Edge Glow sliders.
The Radius slider controls the size of the edge glow, and the Strength slider controls the contrast of that glow. In my Scott5 preset, I set the Radius at and the Strength at 0. For this image, which is going more in the hyperreal direction, set the Gamma to the right at 0. Step Six: The Exposure slider controls the overall exposure, much in the same way the Exposure slider does in Camera Raw dragging to the left darkens the overall image; dragging to the right brightens it. In this case, go ahead and drag the Exposure to 0.
Now, keep in mind that these are two sliders that will change some from image to image. Most of the time, I wind up lowering the Highlight amount either a little or a lot depending on the image , and raising the Shadow amount to keep the shadows from getting too dark. But, again, it just depends on the image. Basically, these make the colors more punchy, so if your image needs more color, try dragging the Vibrance slider to the right.
Be careful about adding too much Vibrance or Saturation at this point, because in the next step, when we add contrast, that usually makes the colors automatically more vibrant. You see that diagonal line going across the curve grid?
Well, we bend that line into a subtle S-curve and that adds contrast. The steeper we make this S-curve, the more contrast it adds. So, start by clicking once in the center of the line and it adds an adjustment point there see bottom left. Now, add another point halfway between that center point and the top right, then clickand-drag it upward a bit as seen in the bottom center.
Remember, if you need more contrast, click-and-drag the top point up higher and the bottom point down lower, which makes the curve steeper. By the way, in the previous step, when we increased the contrast, it made the highlights a little too bright, so I went back to the Highlight slider and pulled them back to —80, since the stone floor was starting to blow out in some areas. Note: At this point, you could save this as an HDR Pro preset click on the icon to the right of the Preset pop-up menu and choose Save Preset to add it to the list.
Step Now, click the OK button at the bottom right to have Photoshop process the image. How do you get your image back into Camera Raw? When the dialog appears, click on the image you just saved, and from the Format PC: Open As pop-up menu at the bottom, choose Camera Raw as shown here to have the image open in Camera Raw for processing, and then click Open. Okay, the image looks brighter, but it also looks kinda flat, so this is where you want to bump up the Contrast.
That brings in a lot more detail, too. And, to keep the image from looking washed out, we need to lower the Blacks. Anytime I see an image looking washed out, the first thing I think of is I need to lower the Blacks, so drag that slider to the left to — To do this, click on the Effects icon the fourth one from the right at the top of the Panel area, and go under Post Crop Vignetting.
A before and after is shown below. It actually looks like it has an effect applied. In fact, if you look at the side of this building, you can see an edge glow around it. Nothing screams HDR like an edge glow. Step Two: Surprisingly, the one that looks the most photorealistic to me is the preset called Default. So, choose Default from the Preset pop-up menu, and take a look at the image.
The edge glow is gone, and look at, for example, the grass, trees, and left side of the building. You also might want to add a little bit of contrast using an S-curve, as shown here see page in this chapter for more on this. Below is a before and after, comparing the normal-exposure image and the HDR image. Again, notice how the HDR image reveals so much more in the details, and in the texture of the building, without it getting clogged up and turning to black in areas.
Now go under the Filter menu, under Other, and choose High Pass as shown here. Now, drag the slider to the right until you can just start to see the color peek through the solid gray as shown here — the farther you drag, the more intense the effect will be here, as an example, I dragged to 7 pixels, and you can see lots of edge detail starting to appear.
Get the Brush tool B , and make sure your Foreground color is set to white. Start by opening the image in Camera Raw. Step Two: Drag the Highlights slider all the way to the left.
Then, drag the Shadows slider all the way to the right, which tends to make the image look washed out. Click on the Adjustment Brush K in the toolbar up top, and then click three times on the little — minus sign button to the left of Clarity. This resets all the other sliders to 0, and then sets the Clarity to a negative amount —75 , which creates a softening effect. However, you at least should know where HDR Toning is and give it a try to see what you think. In the Tone and Detail section, set your Gamma to 0.
Crank up the Vibrance and Saturation a bit to add in some color. Lastly, add an S-Curve see page earlier in this chapter for more on this to add more contrast to your image. In this handheld photo of the Forbidden City, there are people moving in the scene, but in most cases, fixing that is just one click away. Here are some settings you can use for this image: Radius: , Strength: 0. Lastly, turn on the Edge Smoothness checkbox to enhance the detail and smooth out the edges.
Merge to HDR Pro tries to deal with the ghosting by looking for things that are in common in all your exposures to lock onto and it does a pretty amazing job of it. If you want to try one of the other images, and see if using it does a better job than the one Photoshop chose, just click on it down in the filmstrip. Here, I clicked on the first image, but it actually looks worse.
When you do this, you can see some of the funky stuff I was talking about up in the intro—a fakey-looking sky, glows around the mountains and the two colorful glass creations on top of the two columns in the foreground. Also, the photo looks a little bright to me, anyway , so lower the Exposure to —0. Step Six: Click the Open Image button to open your regular-exposure image in Photoshop, and now you should have two images open: 1 the HDR image with its problems , and 2 the normalexposure image with its problems.
Note: If you hand-held your HDR bracketed shots, and Photoshop had to do some layer alignment as it applied the HDR effect, holding the Shift key may not be enough to line these two perfectly up. At the top of the Layers panel, change your layer blend mode from Normal to Difference. This highlights any alignment differences between the two layers. You do this, with the Move tool still active, by hitting the Right Arrow key on your keyboard once and the Down Arrow key once.
Next, click on your top layer, so that only it is active, press-and-hold the Option PC: Alt key, and click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to hide the HDR image layer behind a black mask.
Get the Brush tool B , choose a soft-edged brush from the Brush Picker in the Options Bar and, since your mask is black, you need to paint in the opposite color, so make sure your Foreground color is set to white.
Now, begin painting over the parts of the image that you want to have a more HDR look. All that detail is coming out now, but look at our sky and the mountains—they look realistic.
I painted over the sidewalk, as well, to bring out half the HDR in it. But, I avoided that shadow of the railing, because once I painted over it, it got a funky-looking edge, so I just pressed Command-Z PC: Ctrl-Z to undo my painting, and then repainted the sidewalk while avoiding that shadow.
I painted over the other walkway on the left, too, but when I painted over the red glass ornaments, it looked weird, so I used Undo, and painted those columns again, but not the red glass. Then, finally, get the Spot Healing Brush J and click once on each of those sensor dust spots in the sky to remove them, giving you the image seen here. Also, look at the glass ornaments on top of the columns—too dark in the top shot, then they have those awful glows in the middle one, but this one has the right mix.
Shown here is the regular exposure—one of the five bracketed photos taken for an HDR image. I actually briefly covered these two effects earlier in this chapter when I applied them to our projects as finishing moves.
To get to this feature, in Camera Raw, click on the Effects icon the fourth icon from the right at the top of the Panel area. The Midpoint slider determines how far that darkening extends in toward the center of your photo so I dragged it just a little to the left to make the dark edge bigger. To get to this, go under the Filter menu in Photoshop and choose Lens Correction. When the dialog appears shown here , click on the Custom tab near the top right.
In the Vignette section, drag the Amount slider to the left to darken the edges, and then drag the Midtone slider to the left a bit, too. These same controls are also found in Camera Raw and do the same thing if you go to the Lens Corrections panel and click on the Manual tab. It still looks really blurry, but what gives this the right look is when you change the blend mode of this blurry layer from Normal to Soft Light.
Now, you get that soft glow across the image that takes the edge off the harsh HDR look. A dialog will appear and, if you click the Yes button, it disables any third-party plug-ins. Now, not only is it off by default, but you can edit the size and color of the grid itself. Just go to the Layers panel, Command-click PC: Ctrl-click on the layers you want duplicated to select them, then use that same shortcut to duplicate all the selected layers this is new in CS6.
I usually use five images as I explained at the beginning of this chapter , but an interesting tidbit I learned from one of the Photoshop product managers is that, for the best results, you need more darker photos than lighter ones. Correction dialog, a Size field and a color swatch become available to the right of the checkbox. Press it again to bring them all back. Renaming Multiple Layers Fast Want to rename a bunch of layers? The Tab key takes you to the next layer down; to jump back to a previous layer, press Shift-Tab.
You can find Kuler built right into Photoshop in its own panel. Just go under the Window menu, under Extensions, and choose Kuler, and browse some of the most popular color combos right within Photoshop. If you see a set of colors you like, double-click on it to see them as larger swatches in a panel. To make any of those color swatches your Foreground color, just double-click on it.
Instead, move your cursor outside the Layer Style dialog—over into your image area—and just click-and-drag the shadow itself right where you want it.
It brings up a simplified color picker where you can choose your color I find it easier to choose the hue first, from the bar on the right, then choose the tint and saturation of the color from the box on the left. Cell phone photos are notorious for color noise, which Camera Raw cleans up really well. The first movie Nope, it has to be human flesh, even though you know and was about zombies. Then, in their bombed-out claimed to be in his resume.
Open a photo where your subject is in the shadows it can be a person, or a building, or anything backlit. To do this, first go under the Filter menu and choose Convert for Smart Filters. This lets you apply the adjustment as if it was an adjustment layer meaning you can re-edit it later if you need to, or even delete the adjustment altogether. This brings up an expanded version of the dialog as shown here.
I would say that most of the time I set the Radius to around to TIP: Save a New Default If you come up with some settings you like, click the Save As Defaults button in the bottom-left corner of the dialog, and now it will open with your settings. For example, to darken the sky behind him a bit, go to the Highlights section and drag the Amount slider to the right as shown here; I also increased the Radius slider quite a bit, as well. If you drag too far, you might start to see some banding in the sky where you start to see lines where the colors change, instead of a smooth transition between colors , so just keep an eye on the sky as you drag.
Just make any changes you want, then click OK. Before After opening up the shadows and pulling back the highlights Chapter 8 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers Fixing Shots with a Dull Gray Sky Nothing ruins an outdoor shot like a dull gray sky, but luckily, in many cases, you can save the shot by darkening the midtones a bit, and adding a blue tint or gradient to the sky.
So, this technique will work pretty well for this image. So, get the Quick Selection tool W from the Toolbox, click it on the far-left side of the sky, then drag it over to the right side, and—BAM! To do this, go under the Select menu, under Modify, and choose Expand.
The bottom half of the inside ring shows the old color, and the top half shows what your Foreground color would change to if you clicked right now. Once you open the image, switch to the Eyedropper tool I , and click once on the brightest blue area in the image as shown here to make that your Foreground color. Now, press the letter X to swap your Foreground and Background colors, then click the Eyedropper on the darkest blue in the photo higher in the sky , so that now your Foreground is a darker blue, and your Background is a lighter blue.
The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers Step Four: Go back to the original image, then go to the Layers panel and add a new, blank layer by clicking on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the panel, then switch to the Gradient tool G , and click-and-drag your gradient from the top of the photo down to the bottom of the sky the light blue color should be at the bottom of the gradient.
This fills the new layer with a gradient made up of your Foreground and Background colors as seen here. For some images, you can leave this gradient as is or maybe just lower the layer opacity a little to let it blend in , but I think it usually looks a little too fakey, which is why there are two more steps.
Keep holding the mouse button down as you paint, because the Dodge and Burn tools have a build-up effect—each time you release the mouse button and start painting again, the amount of Dodge or Burn builds up.
Now look at how much brighter the gondola is here, compared with the original image in Step One. Now get the Burn tool as shown here , and paint over the buildings on the left. By darkening those areas, it takes the focus off of them, which helps lead the eye to the gondola. Do that, and Photoshop will make this fix absolutely simple. The ideal situation is to tell your subject that after you take the first shot, they need to freeze for just a moment while you or a friend, assistant, etc.
But, luckily, I had shots in the same shoot both with and without her glasses on of course, that was luck—you should definitely plan to shoot some with them on, then some off, during the shoot. So, I had to look for one where her head position was somewhat similar.
Now, if you planned ahead and took shots with and without the glasses one right after the other , then you can take a shortcut and use Auto-Align Layers to perfectly match up the two shots. Leave the Auto option selected and click OK, and in just a few seconds, they will be aligned right on the money.
So, press Command-T PC: Ctrl-T to bring up Free Transform, press-and-hold the Shift key to keep everything proportional , then click on a corner point and drag inward until her shoulders look about the same size in each of the photos. Now, we can rotate the top photo, so her eyes better match up.
To rotate this top layer, go ahead and zoom out to shrink the size of your image window , then pull out the corners of the image window, so you see some of the dark gray canvas area around your image as seen here.
Now, when you move your cursor outside the Free Transform bounding box, it will change into a two-headed rounded arrow, so you can click-and-drag in a circular motion to rotate the top layer. Note: You may need to move your cursor inside the bounding box to reposition the top layer, as well. Now, all we really need from the image on the top layer is the area that appears inside her frames.
So, press-and-hold the Option PC: Alt key and click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to hide this rotated layer behind a black layer mask as shown here.
Continued Fixing Common Problems Chapter 8 The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers Step Seven: Now, with your Foreground color set to white, get the Brush tool B , choose a small, soft-edged brush from the Brush Picker up in the Options Bar, then simply start painting over the lens on the right, and it reveals the version of her eye without the glasses on as seen here. Step Eight: Once the eye on the right is done, do the same thing for the eye on the left.
Make sure you use a small brush and be careful not to accidentally paint over any of the frames. If you do make a mistake, no biggie, just press X to switch your Foreground color to black and paint the frames back in. Now, remember, this whole process would be made a whole lot easier you could skip Steps Four and Five altogether if you remember, once you get a look you like in the studio, to have your subject freeze, remove their glasses, and take another shot.
Then, Auto-Align Layers can do its thing and save you a lot of time and trouble. A before and after are shown on the next page. Of course, you could just take their expression from another frame and combine it with this one, but that takes a lot of work. Well, at least it did before the Auto-Align Layers feature. This thing rocks! You do this by going to the Layers panel, Command-clicking PC: Ctrl-clicking on both layers to select them as shown here , then going under the Edit menu and choosing Auto-Align Layers.
When the Auto-Align Layers dialog appears, leave Auto selected at the top, and then click OK to have Photoshop align the two layers for you and it usually does a pretty darn amazing job, too! Press-and-hold the Option PC: Alt key and click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to hide the top layer with the guy on the right looking at the camera behind a black layer mask. Keep painting until his head, shirt, and basically as much as you need, look natural in the photo in this case, his body position shifted a bit, so I had to paint over his neck, chest, and shoulders, as well.
The final is shown below. This is, hands down, one of the most useful, and most powerful, tools in all of Photoshop. Then, get the Quick Selection tool W from the Toolbox as shown here.
If it selects too much, press-and-hold the Option PC: Alt key and paint over that accidentally selected area to remove it from your selection. Also, you can see where I stopped before some areas where the hair is finer.
Go up to the Options Bar and click on the Refine Edge button shown circled here. This is where the magic happens. This shows your selection as a standard layer mask.
Smart Radius is the edge technology that knows the difference between a soft edge and a hard edge, so it can make a mask that includes both. This checkbox is so important that I leave it on all the time if you want it always on, as well, just turn it on and then turn on the Remember Settings checkbox at the bottom of the dialog.
But, I just wanted you to see the incredible math at work. Anything that appears in gray will be semi-transparent. Here, I rolled back the Radius to around 47, but you might be able to bring it up a bit more, maybe to somewhere in the mids. By the way, for simple selections, leave the Radius amount down low. So, just remember: trickier selections mean higher Radius amounts.
You need to tell Photoshop exactly where the problem areas are, so it can better define those areas. You do that with the Refine Radius tool E; shown circled here. This is what picks up that fine hair detail. I also increased the Radius amount a bit. I figure you want me to tell you when to avoid stuff, too.
Just below that, you get to choose what the result of all this will be: will your selected subject be sent over to a new blank document, or just a new layer in this document, or a new layer with a layer mask already attached, etc.? I always choose to make a new layer with a layer mask in the same document. You can also see it does a pretty amazing job. Pressand-hold the Option PC: Alt key and click directly on that layer mask thumbnail in the Layers panel to see just the mask you can see it in the next step.
So, get the Brush tool B and, with your Foreground color set to white, choose a small, hard-edged brush from the Brush Picker in the Options Bar, and then paint along that edge, right over the grayish area, to make it solid white. You can see some areas on the inside of her legs here that need a cleanup, as well. Next, press X to switch your Foreground color to black to clean up that mess on the right side of her leg where the white has spilled over onto the black.
That should be solid black in the background areas. This just makes things a little easier from here on out. Get the Move tool V , then drag-and-drop your subject right onto this background image as shown here. Note: This is easier if you have the Application Frame turned off and can see at least part of both images on your screen. If all else fails, copy-and-paste it onto this background; it will appear on its own layer. Now, you see our next challenge here?
When the Defringe dialog appears shown here , enter 1 use 2 pixels for a higher-megapixel image , click OK, and that fringe is gone! This trick gives you more detail and brings back some of those lost wisps of hair by building up some pixels. Suddenly, it looks more defined, and it fills in some of the weaker wispy areas. Once the selection is in place as seen here , add a new blank layer by clicking on the Create a New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel.
Then, 2 lower the Opacity to the point where you see the color image start to emerge, but it has enough of the green tint to it that it really looks like she was photographed there on location at least colorwise, anyway. The last step is to unify her tonally with the background. This is a multi-step process, so jump to page in the special effects chapter to see how this is done, or if you already learned it, you can follow this shorthand version: Duplicate the subject layer, change the blend mode to Vivid Light, and then Invert by pressing Command-I PC: Ctrl-I.
Now, apply the Surface Blur filter set at a Radius of 40 and a Threshold of Delete the middle layer Background copy 2 , then change the blend mode of the top layer to Overlay as seen here. Lastly, make the Background layer visible again, flatten the image, then go to the Lens Correction filter and add a dark edge vignette. Step Two: When the Adaptive Wide Angle dialog opens shown here , it reads the lens data embedded into the photo by your camera see the bottom-left corner of the dialog , and it tries to apply an Auto correction.
If you know the image is a fisheye, or if you just want to try to fix perspective, choose either from the Correction pop-up menu in the top right to give you a better starting point.
Step Four: Once you click your mouse near the top of the column like I did here , it straightens that column.
Comments
Post a Comment