Innehållsförteckning för Issue 5 2023 från Photoshop User

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 create your 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…

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 picture of a sunlit island as the image to begin with. What we want to do first is crop it down so we just have the main part of the boat with the sea, sky and trees of the island beyond. The Curves graph is a histogram showing the relative strengths of different…

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…

There may have been occasions when you have looked at one of your favourite photographs and wondered, ‘what would it look like if it were drawn in pencil instead of being a photo?’ Photoshop and all its photo editing counterparts offer various artistic filters that can turn your image into a watercolour or an oil painting. Some of them can be quite effective. However, the pencil sketch filter offered by Photoshop does not really capture the essence of a hand-drawn image. However, there is an approach in Photoshop that may take you a step closer to being able to create a more realistic pencil sketch effect. It requires your favourite image, a few Photoshop layers and a little patience. You don’t need to be Leonardo Da Vinci to create a…

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 doubt spend 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…

1 Even with a good quality digital SLR it’s possible to produce a shot with limited contrast. Reasons include incorrect metering, poor lighting or simply a low-contrast scene. In our example shot here it’s a combination of all three. The shot is under-exposed, the lighting is flat and it’s simply not a contrasted scene. Let’s see how we can help. 2 One look at the histogram reveals the nature of the problem. The image lacks both highlights and shadows and the histogram curve is bunched up towards the darker end of the scale, indicating under exposure. The first step is to correct that under-exposure, so we need to open up the Basic tab on the right-hand sidebar. 3 To increase the exposure, simply take the Exposure slider in the Basic…

Adobe Photoshop Elements has many one-click solutions to make your photos look their best but over time you may find the need to dig deeper into the more advanced options that are on offer with the Photo Editor. Many options are presented in the taskbar at the bottom and the panel bar on the right. If you need them however, the File Menu is where you can find all the vital tools. Adobe Photoshop Elements From this menu you can see the About screen and manage any Plug-ins as well as update your Preferences and quit Photoshop Elements. You can also view any legal notices or hide the workspace. File One of the key menus you access at the start and end of a session. You can create new documents,…

There’s no doubt that when it comes to getting better at something, the best way to learn is to do. Getting hands-on is always worth doing. With applications like Photoshop, Elements and Lightroom, the same is certainly true. Dive in and see what is intuitive and what may need a little more research and possible time spent flicking through a user manual. It’s all good experience. There may be times when you encounter a situation that a manual doesn’t answer. Or, you may just have some general questions about these applications that may help you decide whether you are going to invest in any of them at all. You ask a question, you get an answer, you go from there. Simple. We would always advocate the asking of questions, but…

01 The most commonplace images, be they photos of your family, snaps taken during a woodland walk, or assets procured on the web, can all be combined to let Photoshop do what it does best. When it comes to adding elements together into new compositions, Photoshop’s layer-based system makes the process easy.…

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 or more 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…

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 and the 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…

1 All digital cameras suffer from noise but some control it better than others. Modern top-end digital SLRs can comfortably shoot at 6400 ISO without too much trouble but older or cheaper cameras can suffer image ruining noise problems as low as 1600 ISO. This example was shot on a five year old Panasonic compact at 3200 ISO and is very noisy. 2 Working on reducing noise requires a close-up view of the image, to be able to judge fine detail, so we need to zoom in. At the top of the left sidebar, on the right-hand end of the title bar of the Navigator panel, you’ll see a button for a dropdown menu. Click on it and select 2:1 or even 3:1 for a zoomed-in view. 3 In the…

Your Guide There are currently a large number of guided edits available in Adobe Photoshop Elements. They can be accessed from the Guided workspace page and are distributed under various categories. Each one has a small before and after slider that gives you a quick overview of what each effect is designed to achieve. Easy-to-follow guides Just as the name suggests, the Guided mode is designed to help you produce a number of creative and artistic effects by taking you through the process in numbered steps. It is a semi-automatic edit where you click various available options and Elements does the rest for you. Brightness and Contrast 1 This lets you adjust the brightness of your photo and control how much contrast is present. You can view the after image…

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 that point. There’s always something…

Create your own piece of art with an eye-popping tutorial that takes an image and turns it into a super-saturated fluorescent duotone. Applying this treatment to contemporary photographs is a popular trend at the moment and the key word here is intense. Bright and gaudy images are what we are looking for; don’t worry about going over the top, that’s a good thing. Put on your shades and summon the ghosts of Andy Warhol, Eduardo Paolozzi and Roy Lichtenstein, as we go seriously retro. 01 Let’s kick off with an appropriate image that we can turn into a retro portrait, something sensual will do the job nicely. For the base of our pop art masterpiece, we have a portrait of a fashion model, from a studio-based shoot, to use as…

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, will display 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…

1 For our basic image, we’ll use this woodland scene. It’s a decent shot with good composition and a nice bright sunny glow to the light; but the colours look a little muted, it lacks punch and it doesn’t really capture the full potential of what should be a striking scene. There are several things we can do to adjust the colours in this photo. 2 Simply boosting the saturation by +65 does make the colours pop but the Saturation slider is a very indiscriminate control when used on its own. The colours are certainly richer but it makes the already bright greens of the grass look too bright and unnatural. It also does nothing to help boost the contrast. 3 The Vibrance control is more subtle. Instead of boosting…

1 Successful monochrome photography is all about lighting, contrast and texture, so the best monochrome conversions will be images that emphasise these qualities. Artistic portrait studies, modern urban architecture and rugged rural landscapes are all good candidates. For our example, we’ll be using this shot of a coastal sunrise. 2 For quick results, Lightroom comes with a number of built-in presets for converting colour photos to monochrome. You can find them in the left-hand sidebar, not too surprisingly in the Presets tab. There are presets for B&W Filters, B&W Toned processing and also for simple B&W conversion. Let’s take a closer look at these first. 3 Open the Presets tab and then click on Lightroom B&W Presets to see the list of available built-in options. They include high and low…

1 In the Guided workspace, you will find the Replace Background edit under the Special Edits category. Put the photo you want to work on in the Photo Bin. 2 Choose from the available tools to select your subject. The Quick Selection tool should work well on our subject. Drag inside the edge of subject to select them. 3 Use the tool options to subtract areas that stray outside what is required. Then you can use the Refine tool to improve the quality of the selection. 4 Now you can import a photo that will be the new background. It will be placed behind your main subject. Both subject and background can be moved if required. 5 Now you can make further refinements to the outline of your subject if…