Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2021 i Practical Photoshop

“Welcome to issue 128 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99” This is an exciting time of year for Photoshop users. It’s when Adobe usually releases its annual update – and this time, there’s a host of improvements. We take a look at the headline features. Elsewhere, learn how to increase your resolution, shoot portraits in the sun, and make local adjustments. www.digitalcameraworld.com Editor James Paterson Art Editor Rosie Webber Production Editor Richard Hill Content Director Chris George Senior Art Editor Warren Brown DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES To download this issue's files, type the following link into your web browser on your PC or Mac: https://bit.ly/pho_128 FIND US HERE… http://bit.ly/practweet http://bit.ly/pracface Also available on: http://bit.ly/pp_pocketmags http://bit.ly/pp_app_store http://bit.ly/zinio_pp…

This improvement will please designers who use Illustrator and Photoshop. It’s been tricky to bring layered Illustrator files into Photoshop, as they tend to come in as a single object or a Smart Object. Now you simply select all the objects in the design, then copy, go to Photoshop and paste. A Paste menu appears, which allows you to choose Layers, Smart Object, Pixels, Path or Shape Layer. Choose Layers and all your original layers are kept intact, so you can edit vectors in either program without having to switch back and forth.…

If you wanted to colorize an old photo, you always used to open the monochrome image, make a new layer and set it to the Color Blending Mode, then painstakingly paint in your colors. Introduced as an AI-powered Neural Filter last year, Colorize makes the job far easier; it has now been moved out of its beta version, and is vastly improved in the Photoshop 2022 release. Colorize works much better with portraits, choosing accurate skin tones even of different ethnicities. It may not give you perfect results, but it offers a great starting point for further edits. If the colors in any area look wrong, simply click on the area and use the sliders to shift the colors.…

The launch of Creative Cloud Web could eventually spell the end of desktop editing applications. For now, bringing Photoshop and other applications to the web chiefly allows for connected collaboration. When you’re working on projects with others, they can not only provide feedback and review of documents, but also open the image on Photoshop for Web and make their own tweaks and edits. Here’s how it works. The Share menu in the top-right corner of the Photoshop workspace lets you create a link to your image file, which takes others to a web page with a Feedback Panel. Here collaborators can comment on the work, or draw on the image to mark up different areas. Once done, these comments will automatically sync to Photoshop in the new Comments Panel so…

One of the golden rules for portrait photography is that you shouldn’t shoot people in direct sunlight. Without clouds to diffuse it, sunlight is very hard-edged. You’re likely to get strong shadows over the face, squinting subjects, and greasy hot spots on the skin. As such, many photographers would put the camera away, wait for cloud cover, or come back later. However, the sun can be a wonderful source if you know how to work the angles and manipulate the light. The main challenge with direct sunlight is the strong contrast it creates in your subject. The difference between the brightest and darkest parts of the subject is so great that shadows can look impenetrably dark. You need to find a way to reduce the contrast, by lifting the shadows…

01 RETOUCH THE SKIN Hard-sunlight portraits tend to require a degree of retouching, because the hard light more clearly shows pimples and rough patches of skin. To fix this, open your shot in Photoshop and make a new layer, then grab the Spot Healing Brush and set it to Sample All Layers. Now paint to remove any small imperfections you find. 02 REDUCE HOT SPOTS Direct sunlight can create oily-looking hot spots on skin. Make a new layer. Grab the Brush Tool, hold Alt and sample a nearby skin color. Press 3 for 30% brush opacity, then paint over the hot spot. Try reducing the layer opacity, setting the Blending Mode to Darken and adding a little noise via Filter > Noise > Add Noise. 03 TRY A MONO CONVERSION…

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 interesting new Neural Filter employs AI to detect and isolate parts of a landscape scene, allowing you to automatically mix in new images, details and objects. You can choose from one of Adobe’s preset images or bring in your own with the Custom button. Season sliders let you shift the colors in the scene towards an autumnal feel, or a wintry look, for example. Buttons along the top of the interface let you isolate the subject automatically, so you can keep them separate and unaffected by the Landscape Mixer filter.…

This new Neural Filter is helpful for balancing out tones between different layers, so it’s especially useful for composites. The problem we often face with composites is that if the colors and tones don’t match between our separate images, the whole thing looks wrong. Harmonization automatically shifts one layer to match another – a big time-saver.…

Super Resolution is a feature in Photoshop’s Camera Raw and Lightroom that doubles the size of your photo. Resolution-boosting tools have been available in Photoshop for a long time, but this one is different. While older tools such as Image Size would increase resolution using standard bicubic upsizing, Super Resolution instead employs machine learning to boost the pixel count. It calls upon a database of millions of pairs of high - and low-resolution sample images, compares the detail in your photo to the similar detail it recognizes in these sample photos, then deduces the optimum way to enhance the detail and upsize the photo. It’s a powerful way to boost resolution or fill in lost detail in your photos. Whether you want to enhance a high-res raw file or rescue…

1 FLASHES WITH SUNLIGHT Some might think of flash as a tool to use for extra light in dim conditions, but bright sunlight is one of the best times to bring out a flash. The flash gives you lots of creative options, as you can use it to create dynamic cross-lighting like this, or gently fill in shadows for a more natural look. 2 CROSS-LIGHTING The key to shooting portraits in the sun is to reduce the contrast over subjects. The flash lets you do this by filling in shadows. Our subject here has her back to the sun, so it creates bold highlights along the edge of her figure. Positioned opposite, the flash lifts the shadows on the face and body. 3 EXPOSE FOR SUNLIGHT The ‘sunny f/16’ rule…

Selections have been improved dramatically in recent years, thanks to the advancement of AI. Released last year, the Object Selection Tool quickly became one of our favorite methods. The way it works – or rather worked – was simple: you dragged a selection box over part of the photo, and the tool did the rest by analyzing the content and isolating the object with a selection. In Photoshop 2022, the tool has been overhauled to great effect. Now as you hover over objects in the scene, an auto-masking overlay appears over the object: just click on it to make a precise selection of the area. To select more than one object, hold Shift and click on another. To remove an area, hold Alt and drag a box to subtract it.…

The Depth Blur Neural Filter has been vastly improved in Photoshop 2022. It allows you to alter the depth of field in a scene to get a realistic shallow focus effect. You can now choose the Focal Distance, which effectively lets you set our focus point, and it also lets you control the strength of the blur. The clever thing about changing the focal point in this way is that it doesn’t just blur out the background of the scene, but also blurs the foreground in front of the focus point, so you get realistic fall-off either side of your subject.…

Whether you’re a seasoned retoucher or a Photoshop newbie, one of the biggest challenges of image-editing is in settling on the right strength for a tonal change. Often this can be a bit of a juggling act: after making one edit you may want to go back and fine-tune the one before, so that they work together in harmony. This is why the editing tools in Camera Raw and Lightroom are so useful. Every edit is non - destructive, so you have the freedom to go back and alter a setting or tweak a tonal change whenever you choose. Not only does this give you a safety net to backtrack your edits, it also allows for the creative freedom to try out different treatments and effects. This sort of control…

01 EMBRACE THE SUNLIGHT Why not embrace the hard light look? Ask your subject to turn their face to the sun and lift the chin, so that their eye sockets are not in shade. Look to achieve butterfly lighting under the nose, where the shadow cast by the nose forms a butterfly shape: it’s considered to be flattering to the subject’s features. 02 USE FILL FLASH You can use a flash to gently fill the shadows on a sunny day. To get the best results, the flash should be close to the same angle as the camera. A hotshoe-mounted flashgun can also work well. Try using the flash in ETTL mode and set spot metering on your camera, and then you to set the image exposure off of the subject’s…