Innehållsförteckning för Issue 6 2023 från Photoshop User

Powerful AI technology has been brought to bear in the latest release of Adobe’s Lightroom suite of products. Masking a subject or just making a selection of the sky is easier now than it’s ever been. As you progress with the new versions, you will need to bear in mind that the AI that analyses your images is only as good as the image itself. Photos with very low contrast and an over-abundance of detail will hinder the AI’s ability to accurately pick out the area for masking that you need.…

This new feature is another interesting method by which you can select and mask areas of your photo. As the name would suggest, it makes its selection based on colour values that are chosen by you. As seen in our example, if you wanted to mask the foreground sphinx and pyramid, you could decide to use Select Sky, invert the mask and alter it that way. If you choose Color Range, you are given the option to select a range of colours using the color picker tool. You can pick a single colour, drag out a sample area box, or click and press Shift to add additional data points to your selection. Because the orange tones all fall broadly within the same range, selecting the sand colours only, is fairly…

1 Exposure Controls the brightness of your photo with a slider. Move left to make the image darker and mimic underexposure; move right to make the image look overexposed. 2 Contrast Determines the contrast between light and dark colours. Move left to flatten the contrast; move right to make the contrast more extreme and dramatic. 3 Highlights Controls the brightness of the lighter parts of your photo. Move left to darken highlights and recover details; move right to brighten them and reduce details. 4 Shadows Controls the brightness of the darker parts of your photo. Move left to deepen shadows; move right to brighten them and recover more details. 5 Whites Use Whites to set the white point of the image. Move slider to the right to make more colours…

Ever since digital cameras first became popular in the early 1990s, photographers have sought ways to adjust and improve digital images and replicate the darkroom tricks and techniques that film photographers have used for decades to get the most out of their pictures. There are dozens of digital image editing programs available and almost everyone who’s ever taken a digital photo, whether they use a top-end digital SLR or just the camera on their mobile phone, has used some sort of editing software to adjust and enhance the image. Most smartphones come with some sort of image editing app as a standard feature. Adobe Photoshop For more than two decades the industry standard for image editing software has been Adobe Photoshop and ever since it was first introduced in 1990…

A full explanation of JPEG compression would take up much more space than we have available in this guide and you really don’t need to know most of it. For our purposes, the major difference between JPEG and Raw mode is the amount of information used to describe each pixel in the image. In JPEG mode each pixel is described by 24 bits, that is 24 ones and zeros, 8 for each colour channel of red, green and blue. This 8-bit encoding allows 256 gradations of brightness per colour channel, meaning that it can display 256 x 256 x 256, or 16,777,216 different shades of colour. That might sound like a lot but if you look at a JPEG image of a clear blue sky you may still see lines…

In the last section, you imported your images into Lightroom and the Library module is where you’ll see the result of that process. The Library module is where you can view and scroll through your image catalogue, select images for sharing or development, add and search for keywords and build collections. It’s comparable to Adobe Bridge, the file browsing and viewing app that installs alongside Photoshop, but the Library module has a lot more functionality. Compare View To compare a chosen image with another side-by-side, select one image and then another and then click on the button for Compare view or use the hotkey C. Both images will be displayed at the same size and zoom level, with the first you selected being labelled Select and the other as Candidate.…

Like the Library module, the Develop module window is divided into three main areas, the left sidebar, the main viewing area and the right sidebar. The filmstrip view is also available at the bottom of the screen. The filmstrip and both sidebars can be permanently in view or set to auto-hide by clicking on the arrow symbols on the edge of the screen. The left sidebar holds the Navigator thumbnail, a list of available Presets, the Snapshot and History views and the Collections. The right-hand sidebar holds all the actual editing and enhancement tools, as well as the Histogram. 1 Navigator This shows you a view of the whole image, useful if you zoom in when using the spot correction tool and need to navigate around the frame. 2 Presets This…

This masking option allows you to create a gradient on your image that runs from 100% of its adjustment visible, down to 0% of its effect. The effect runs in a straight line. It can be vertical, horizontal, or at any angle you choose. A Linear Gradient is most often used to simulate a graduated filter used on a digital camera to help darken an overly bright sky in comparison to the ground. Our example does such a thing with the gradient being dragged down from the top of the image. The colour overlay shows you the extent of the grad you've created. It can be tweaked any time. Then, you can make your adjustments as you see fit. Altering colour and exposure are common adjustments to skies in photos.…

Broadly similar to methods used in the Color Range option, Luminance Range makes its decisions on what areas to mask based on the brightness of the tones selected in the image rather than its colour. Choosing an area of bright sky in a landscape photo creates a mask that falls within the tonal values selected. All other tones are protected by the mask. However, you can use the Luminance Range panel to alter how many brighter or darker tones are included in the mask. Think of this a bit like the Levels adjustment in Photoshop. You're simply telling the mask to include the darker tones and lighter tones most directly similar to the ones already selected. When you are happy with the tonal range selected, you can make your adjustments…

Photographers as a general rule do not tend to like images that are way over-processed and have every preset and colour effect thrown at them. The truth is, if you want to go crazy with your processing, Lightroom has the power to do that but it also has the subtlety when you need it. The kinds of adjustments shown here, which we cover in more detail over the following pages, are a good example of less being more; allowing your images to look their best.…

Transformation Guidance The eight geometry controls allow you to physically alter the shape of your photos. The geometry can be manually controlled by moving each of the sliders between values of -100% and +100% for some extreme transformations. There are also options that let you specify which parts of your photo are level, on either the vertical or horizontal plane, by placing control points and letting the software work out the transformations required to bring those parts of the image back to straight and level.…

1 Lr This is the Identity Plate for Lightroom, displaying the user’s logged in account name, with further options available to be expanded that connect to Adobe’s cloud services. The Identity Plate can be further personalised, using either set templates or customising your own for branding your own photos. These can be text-based, or even a graphical Identity Plate to add that little extra personal touch to your Workspace view and image edits. 2 Presets: Catalog The Catalog Preset is a database that stores a record for each of your photos. This record contains key pieces of information regarding each of the photos you import into Lightroom, such as a reference to where the photo is stored on your system, instructions for how to process the photo and metadata relating…

After the Grid view, the other one that you’ll find yourself using most often is the Loupe view. A Loupe is a small handheld magnifier used by photographers to closely examine a negative or print, to check sharpness and spot minor flaws. Lightroom’s Loupe view performs a similar function. It magnifies the selected image and if you click on the image in the view window it will zoom in to full 1:1 magnification, allowing you to easily spot any imperfections. You can click-and-drag on the image to move it around and the thumbnail at the top of the left sidebar shows you the part of the image you are looking at. If you’re using a second monitor, it can display a Loupe view of any image that you select in…

Removing Red Eye…

In photography, metadata is a piece of information that is generated by your camera and is appended to your image file. The data this information contains tells you everything you need to know about that image. It tells you when it was shot, what camera took the image and what lens was used. Important technical aspects such as ISO sensitivity, shutter speed, aperture and lens focal length are included. It goes far beyond that too. It can contain keywords, copyright information and even GPS co-ordinates if your device is suitably equipped. Until recently, when you processed your images and saved them as other formats such as Jpeg or Tiff, you had just a few choices as to what aspects of the full range of original metadata could be saved to…

Instead of a gradient that runs in a straight line, the Radial Gradient emanates outward from a central point in a circular or oval shape. The adjustments visible can be strongest at its centre and fade to zero at its outside edge, or be inverted so all of the effect outside the outer edge of the radius is seen at 100% and fades to zero at its centre. In the case of our example, we dragged a Radial Gradient from the centre of the girl’s face outwards past her hair. at its centre, the effect was zero, but at the outer edge, the drop in Exposure of -3.33 was at 100% visibility. All the other masking types can be brought to bear on the mask in the form of additions,…

1 Add Photos If you want to import new photographs into your Lightroom catalogue or if you are starting from scratch, clicking this button will begin the process. 2 Learn & Discover Clicking this button will reveal panels dedicated to helping you learn more about Lightroom and discovering work by other artists around the world. 3 All Photos This is simply a complete listing of every photo you currently have in your library. 4 Recently Added This filters your photos by the date you added them to your collection. 5 Recent Edits This is a history of all the edits you've made to your current photo. 6 By Date This breaks down your photo collection by the year they were taken. 7 People Lightroom will scan your images and can…

If you’ve bought this book, we can safely assume that you know something about digital photography, so you’re probably already aware that the vast majority of digital images are stored in a file format known as JPEG. Nearly all digital cameras and mobile phones record their images as JPEG files. You can spot a JPEG file because it will usually have the filename extension. jpg or. jpeg. The JPEG format has been around since 1992, when the standard was first specified by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (after which it takes its name), a standing committee of imaging and software industry experts. There have been various attempts to update or replace the JPEG format over the years but it is now so entrenched in the digital world that it will…

Shots like this, that combine dark foreground with bright sky, are prime candidates for a graduated filter. In this case, we’ve increased the overall exposure slightly, pulled back the highlights to bring detail into the sky, and reduced the shadows to bring out texture in the rocks and grass. We then applied Texture and Clarity to bring out all the little details in the scene and increased colour saturation. The result is a striking and colourful shot worthy of any picture postcard.…

Portrait shots can look great in black and white and this simple fashion shot especially benefits from an application of the Sepia processing preset. You can find it in the left sidebar of the Develop module, under Lightroom B&W Presets. We’ve added a slight boost to the contrast, as well as the BW Punch preset and -40 points of post-crop vignetting to slightly darken the edges and corners. The result is a nice atmospheric portrait.…

HDR (High Dynamic Range) merging is a relatively new technique that has become very popular, to the point that it is often over-used. It works by merging several nearly identical photos, taken at different exposure settings, into one image with expanded dynamic range. Many cameras, including some mobile phone cameras, can produce HDR images in-camera, but you will get better results merging specially shot images in Lightroom. You can find HDR merging in the Photo menu, under Photo Merge > HDR.…