Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i Practical Photoshop

“Welcome to issue 120 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99?” Creating digital images can be a great way to escape from the wider world into one of your own making. This issue we explore some of the ways in which Photoshop can offer a few hours of blissful escapism. Elsewhere, learn how to control Clarity, and create wonderful portraits with color shadows. james.paterson@futurenet.com www.digitalcameraworld.com HIGHLIGHTS: WHAT’S INSIDE… LOSE YOURSELF IN PHOTOSHOP ■ Creative tips and tricks for amazing artwork CREATE NEW WORLDS ■ Learn how to make a cinematic snowy montage CONTROL OVER CLARITY ■ Use this raw tool to enhance details and make images pop COLOR-CAST SHADOWS ■ Shoot and edit bold portraits with this neat…

With this technique, you can create flowing shapes and unexpected designs in seconds. To begin, make a new layer, then either add a simple shape, paint something or make a quick cutout, like we did with the feather here. Next, press Cmd/Ctrl+T to transform it. Now make a few tiny adjustments – rotate the layer very slightly, try resizing it a smidge, and nudge the position slightly. Press Return to apply, then press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T to ‘step and repeat’. This copies the layer and applies the same transformation again and again. Once you’re happy with your shape, group the layers and copy elsewhere like this to build up the effect.…

There are lots of tools that can help your images pop out of the screen or from a print, but few have as instant an effect as Clarity. Available in Camera Raw and Lightroom, Clarity works by increasing the contrast in midtones, the range of tones that sit either side of the middle grey point in an image. By increasing midtone contrast, the brighter parts of the midtone range become brighter, and the darker parts go even darker. All you need do is open an image and experiment with Clarity to get a feel for the amazing effect it has on details. In the photo above, for instance, a bold increase in Clarity boosts the contrast around the dog’s hairs, making each wet strand stand out more clearly. It also…

1 WHITE BACKGROUND A white background is best for this effect, as it will show the colors of the various shadows clearly. We used a roll of white vinyl here. If you don’t have a dedicated backdrop to hand, like this, you could always use a plain white wall instead, or pin up a white sheet. 2 STUDIO FLASHES We need three lights working in combination to create our colored shadows. We’ve used three studio heads on light stands here. If you don’t have studio lighting, you could equally use three flashguns or continuous lights; any type of lighting will do. 3 FLASH TRIGGER You’ll need to be able to fire your flashes off-camera, so either attach a sync cable, use a wireless trigger and receiver, or use an on-camera…

Photoshop has many types of layers and adjustment layers available, but there are six that you’ll find you need to use again and again. Learning how they should be used may seem a little daunting for beginners, but once you’ve got to grips with them, you’ll find they play a part in the creative process of almost every image you make. 01 LEVELS This should be the first layer you add to an image, because it fundamentally alters the tonal range of the entire image. Create a Levels Adjustment Layer, drag the Black point slider inwards until it touches the left-hand edge of the histogram, and drag the White point slider inwards to the right-hand edge. This remaps the tones of the image to make more of the available tonal…

This painting may look complicated, but we knocked it out in about five minutes! The secret is Symmetry Painting. This wonderful feature of the Photoshop Brush Tool lets you paint in several places at once to create patterns and symmetrical shapes. Used alongside brush features like scattering effects and smoothing, it doesn’t take long to create art like this. It’s such a relaxing and mindful technique that you may lose track of time… 01 CREATE THE BASE Open a blank image or use a photo as a base for your painting. We flipped and blurred an image here to give us an interesting mix of colors and tones for our backdrop. Once done, grab the Brush Tool from the toolbar and choose a color in the Color Picker. Make a…

With many of us yearning for shared experiences at the moment, this could be a cathartic way to get with the crowd. It’s also a simple introduction to compositing, and it takes mere minutes… 01 REMOVE THE BACKGROUND Open the crowd image (we used a free image from pixabay.com- search for 2564431) and your portrait. Go to the Layers Panel and click the lock on the layer to unlock it, then go to the Properties Panel (Window > Properties) and click the Remove Background quick-action button. 02 BLEND AND BLUR Grab the Move Tool and drag the cut-out portrait into the crowd image. Press Cmd/Ctrl+T to transform and resize the layer to fit. We’ve blurred the crowd slightly to make our main subject stand out. Highlight the layer and go…

One of the best things about digital imaging is the ability it gives you to visualize places and scenes that could otherwise only exist in dreams. With a few simple Photoshop skills, anybody can craft a fantasy scene that wouldn’t look out of place on a movie screen. You might have a selection of photos in your own library that would be ideal for a fantastical composite like this, but if you want to look further afield you’ll find tons of resources online. We’ve used several free images from www.pixabay.com, which is a useful resource of rights-free photos. The great thing about a project like this is, even though these photographs have probably been displayed thousands of times in various different ways, we can still use them to create something…

01 ATTACH THE GELS You can find decent inexpensive gels online to attach to your three lights. If you’re using studio flash, keep the modeling lights off if you can, as the heat can melt the gels. The order of the red, green and blue lights will have an impact on the order of the shadows, so experiment with different light sequences. 02 BALANCE THE LIGHTS Turn the lights on one at a time and play with the output, taking test shots until each records a deep color, like the red above. Then turn all the lights on; combined, they will create white light but may have a red, green or blue cast. If so, lower the output of the relevant light until the light looks balanced. 03 CREATE HARD…

The image-editing process begins as soon as you’ve transferred your photos from your memory card to your computer. The first stage is to begin sifting through your pictures to discover which are the keepers. The image organizer that comes with Photoshop is ideal for this task. Adobe Bridge has controls for keywording, rating and filtering your images, and there are handy tools for batch renaming files, creating panoramic stitches, making contact sheets and more. Launch Adobe Bridge and navigate to a folder containing new images. Use the cursor keys to quickly flick through the images and click below a thumbnail to add a star rating, or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+1-5. You can then filter your photos by the star rating to group the ones you want to work on.…

If you go to File > New in Photoshop, you’ll find an array of fun downloadable templates to play with. There are workmanlike images of phone screens and laptops that you can drop images into, or more creative documents like the Interlocking Geometric Images template we’ve used here. With a template like this, you need to go to the Layers Panel and find the layer that says ‘your image here’ or something similar. This will usually be a Smart Object Layer – double click the layer image thumbnail to open the Smart Object in a new window, then copy and paste in your own image. Finally, save and close the Smart Object file to update the main image. You can replace it later if you like.…

This fun feature lets you see a live preview of patterns as you create them. Simply go to View > Pattern Preview. You’ll see a blue box appear around your document - this is your pattern-making area (although you can work outside of it). Beyond the rectangle, anything you add to it will be repeated ad infinitum. Simply zoom out to see your pattern preview duplicated endlessly. Once you’re happy, go to Edit > Define Pattern to save the pattern for future use. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3boaHXZ…

The colored shadow look is an old-school technique you’re just as likely to see in a science museum as in a photo, but is becoming increasingly popular as photographers explore optical in-camera effects. As well as being a vibrant way to shoot a portrait, it’s a fascinating demo of color theory. To split our shadows into different colors, we need three separate light sources, colored red, green and blue. When working in combination – as we see in the light hitting the subject here – the three colors form normal white light. This is down to the concept of additive color mixing, where red, green and blue light combine to form white. But when our three lights are spaced apart, something very interesting happens. Each light creates its own shadow,…

01 FIX COLOR CASTS It can be tricky to balance out the red, green and blue flashes to combine to white, so you may find during editing that your images display a color cast. You can remove color casts with the White Balance Tool in Camera Raw or Lightroom. Click on a point that you want to be neutral, like our backdrop here. 02 ENHANCE COLORS Some of the colors may look weaker than others. Go to the Color Mixer Panel in Camera Raw or Lightroom and click the Saturation tab, then grab the Target Tool. Next, click and drag to the right over colors in the image to target and enhance color ranges. Experiment with the Luminance of colors too. 03 SEPARATE THE SUBJECT If you find it hard…