Innehållsförteckning för Issue 8 2023 från Photoshop User

Photoshop has a great interface, with a dark slate grey work area, slightly lighter menu and palette bars and sharp white text. It looks great and really makes photos stand out from the background. Let’s see what it has to offer. USEFUL TIP You can set up your own workspaces to reflect the way you work and save them so that you can quickly switch from one to another.…

Atrue Photoshop masterpiece has to start somewhere right? In order to create that masterpiece you have to be able to open and navigate to your various image assets, and then fire them up in Photoshop in order to begin working on them. Photoshop is no different to many other programs in that it allows you to bring up a browser window in order to find the files you require. It also has its own methods for both managing and locating your images in the form of Adobe Bridge, which lets you search for images as well as keyword them making future searches much easier. This is all useful stuff, so get ready to try it out. 01 Since we’ve covered how to create a new document, it seems worthwhile just…

01 Let us say, for the sake of argument, that we are preparing an image that requires a coloured background. The subject of the image has been removed from its original background and you need to place a colour behind it to complete the document. 02 If you go to the bottom of the Layer Palette and click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon, you can choose from a number of layer adjustments. In this case, choose Solid Color. When you do, the Color Picker (Solid Color) will open. 03 The default colour for Solid Colour is usually black, unless you have a colour chosen which is the active foreground colour. The new ‘Colour Fill 1’ layer will be placed above your cut out subject. Click and…

01 We have here two example images. The first is of a forest scene comprised of warm colours, which give it an overall orange colour cast. The second image is of a young girl’s portrait taken in a studio. The tones in this image are much cooler with more of a blue cast by comparison. 02 The image of the girl has been cut out and placed on a layer above the forest scene. Now you can appreciate the difference in the two images and how much the warm image of the forest stands out against the cool tones of the girl. We need to alter her colours to match her environment. 03 With the girl’s layer active, click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer button and choose…

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…

One of the most basic features of Photoshop is the ability to modify only part of an image, leaving the rest unchanged. The way that we do this is by using Selections, and there are several tools and menu operations that we can use to help us achieve this. After the Move Tool, the next three icons on the Tool Palette are all selection tools, giving you a wide range of methods for isolating an area of your image. Some are fully manual, while others use varying degrees of automation. The most basic selection tools are the Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee Tools. These both allow you to manually select a simple shape of any size, or of a fixed size or aspect ratio. You can select several areas, either separately…

Photoshop’s use of layers is one of the most important aspects of what makes it is so versatile and enables the user to unleash their full creativity. Once you include the ability to add masks to those layers, you have yet another very powerful tool that lets you blend or hide parts of one image on a layer and control how they interact with another. Masks are not only very useful in hiding or revealing parts of an image, they can also be used, in conjunction with an adjustment layer, to provide the same function of hiding or revealing parts of the effect you’ve chosen. We are getting ahead of ourselves however. Let’s take a look at how you can use a simple mask to produce a very cool effect.…

1 The first step after installing Lightroom Classic for the first time is to import your photos into the program’s catalogue. Lightroom uses this catalogue to organise your photo collection and to help you find them by applying keywords and other search criteria. By keeping a separate database it means that the files on your hard drive are not affected. 2 When you open Lightroom for the first time, you’ll see a blank screen with the words ‘No photo source selected’ in the middle. To get started with importing your photos, take a look in the bottom left corner. You should see a button labelled Import. Click on this and you’ll be taken to a new screen to begin the import process. 3 On the next screen, you’ll see a…

Now that Photoshop and a host of other Adobe products have moved to the subscription model, you have an application that can be continually updated, over time, without needing to buy a new version. This is in contrast to older versions of Photoshop where you bought a box containing a disk, installed it and called it done. If a new version was released, you had to purchase it or upgrade to the new version. That has been superseded; your computer now maintains an online link with Adobe so each program you have downloaded and installed can be incrementally updated. Photoshop is a good example, since you can have an update appear that adds new features and fixes bugs in the current version. To make sure you are keeping your versions…

The main interface of Photoshop has no fewer than twelve menus and a Help option, each with many options and with many additional nested sub-menus. It’s vital to become familiar with the contents of the most important ones, because once you know where to look for everything you’ll be able to work more quickly, efficiently and confidently. Let’s take a look at some of the key menu listings. File The most important options here are New… to create a new document, Open… to open an existing document, Save to save your current project in its default file format an location and Save As… which gives you the option to save in a diffe ent format or location and to change the file name. Also in the File menu a e…

In the good old days of Photoshop CS, you had a product that you opened up and simply started using with nothing else getting in the way. These days that is no longer the case. The Adobe Creative Cloud series of apps now offer user interactive front-end environments that are more than just a list of recently opened files. Now you can browse and sort those files and display them in thumbnail or list form. That’s not all, you also have access to Adobe’s online web tutorials covering every topic you can think of. From basic videos on getting started with layers and cutting out images, to more advanced topics, you have a library of knowledge at your beck and call. Even creating a new document has a huge wealth…

The concept of Layers was first introduced with Photoshop 3.0 in 1994 and has become the very core of Photoshop image editing, as well as being imitated by every other image editing program on the market. Layers are exactly what they sound like; the elements of the image are stacked up and displayed in descending order. Since layers can include transparency, lower layers can be visible through higher layers. Effects, adjustments and operations can be applied to individual layers, or to all the layers at once. You can move layers around relative to one another, change the order of layers in the stack, turn layers on or off and delete layers without affecting the others. Some people seem to have a hard time getting their head around the concept of…

01 A colourful portrait image provides a perfect example for this case in point. There are a number of strong reds, blues, yellows and greens, with which we can work. As mentioned already, this is a useful non-destructive method, so your base image remains unaffected. 02 Go to the bottom of your layer palette and click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon. A dropdown menu will appear with a list of adjustment choices, click on Black & White. An adjustment layer, called Black & White 1, will be added to the layer stack above your main image. 03 As you would expect, the image will be converted to black and white, but, bear in mind this is a non-destructive adjustment. Keep the ‘Black & White 1’ layer…

01 With your base image active, go to the bottom of the layers palette and click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer button. From the dropdown menu that appears, you can start choosing various adjustments to alter the tone and colour of the original image. 02 This example used four adjustment layers to get the final look that we liked. Now, if you wanted to transfer that same look to a separate image, it would normally mean having to replicate all the adjustment layers you’ve used for the original image and apply them to the new one. 03 However, we can actually combine all four adjustments and turn it into a single effect that can be applied to any other image without the need for multiple adjustment layers.…

Lr or Ps? It’s not always an easy choice but there are vast differences between Lightroom and Photoshop that can help make your mind up. These differences depend on the situation and what you intend to do with the finished product. Let’s break down a few strengths of each. Lightroom Classic Strengths Lightroom can manipulate and edit Raw files directly from your camera, without the need to install or use another plugin. Workflow and image management is one of Lightroom’s main draws. You can easily import, organise, edit and manage each of your images without too much in-depth knowledge of advanced design techniques. There are less features than with Photoshop, which lessens its learning curve and thanks to a well-planned user interface, it’s relatively easy to adapt to if you’re…

These so-called Quick Actions are very similar in feel to the automated effects available in Photoshop Elements. They are quick in the sense that you simply click once on each effect’s Apply button and the effect is added automatically. At the time of writing, there are twenty Quick Actions available with the promise of more to follow. These new actions are accessed via the Help > Photoshop Help menu option. This opens the Discover panel. There are other options to look at but we will look at a few Quick Actions. Quick Actions - Remove Background Let’s start with the Remove Background action. Click on it and you will be presented with a small effect preview, a quick explanation of what the effect will do and which layer, if any,…

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…

1 You can find the Quick Develop tab in the right-hand sidebar of the Library module. To get the best use out of it, it’s a good idea to make sure you have the Histogram tab open at the same time, to help get the exposure right, and use the Loupe view in zoomed-out mode so you can see the whole picture much more clearly. 2 At the top of the Quick Develop panel you’ll see a dropdown menu offering a wide range of preset developing settings. These are great for experimenting with different looks and styles and include a range of monochrome filter and toning effects, various colour processing styles, sharpening, contrast enhancement and more. There are also video effects available. 3 The next feature is the white balance…

October 2021 saw the release of the latest version of Photoshop 2022 which at the time of writing is in release version 23.1.0. It has many new improvements over those tools first offered in the 2020 update. Certain additional new tools and updated features are still in beta but available for us to have a play with. So play we will. A number of the new beta filters have to be downloaded and there are also a number of tools that are as yet unavailable but Adobe ask you for input and submit reasons why a filter like this is useful to you. At first glance, some of the tools new to this version look a little gimmicky but others are actually quite powerful. With a little refinement, there are…

Photoshop is nothing if not customisable. You can shape and adjust the user interface to suit your own needs and make it a very personalised, and customised, workspace. Not only can you choose what appears in the main toolbar, you can also arrange and group the various windows and features entirely to your preference. That accounts for the items you interact with on the screen, however there are also a number of options you can tweak to adjust various ‘under the hood’ settings, as it were, too. Photoshop has a listing of all its Preferences both general and specific, so we thought we’d share the salient points with you here. 01 Under Photoshop CC > Preferences > General (Cmd + K) you will see the list of preferences available. The…

You might think that opening or creating a new Photoshop document is a very simple task to achieve. In the days of older versions of Photoshop that was certainly true with its original start up sequence. You either opened a photo, or you made a new document and started work. These days, with the advent of Photoshop CC, it’s a slightly more involved affair and goes way beyond anything that has been seen in Photoshop before. The newest version of the program has a Home screen and a more interactive front end, offering a lot more choice from the very moment you open the program. Let’s start at the very beginning, dive in and have a quick look at what the Home Screen has on offer for the new user,…

01 We have a science fiction image of a sleek android in a futuristic setting. Although it has been well lit and rendered at high resolution, it could do with a few extra highlights to create some stronger visual cues and enhance the metallic look of the armour. 02 Create a new layer above your base image and name it ‘specular’. Choose a fairly soft white brush and place a brush mark where you would like a brighter specular highlight to appear. Choose a few to begin with. It is just a white daub at the moment, but we can enhance that. 03 If you double-click the ‘specular’ layer, you can open up the Layer Style panel. Under the main General Blending option, choose Linear Light as the blend mode.…

01 We have an image of an aircraft at an airshow display. We can use the Clone Stamp Tool to create more versions of the aircraft and place them in the shot, but more than that, we can have a measure of control about how the cloned copy is placed when you stamp it onto a layer. 02 It is always a great idea to place any cloned samples onto a new layer. Create a new layer called ‘clone’ and select the Clone Stamp Tool from the toolbar. In the Menu options panel, make sure that Sample is set to Current & Below. This will clone from the Background layer onto the new layer, without issue. 03 Set a size for your Clone Stamp Tool. Our example is a brush…

01 Normally, to add lens flare you would go up to the File menu and choose Filter > Render > Lens flare. This opens up the Lens Flare panel, from where you can choose the Brightness and Lens Type for your flare effect. The preview window allows you to drag the centre of the flare around. 02 Alternatively, create a new layer above your base image. In our example, we have named it ‘flare’. Go to Edit > Fill and fill the layer with 100% Black. Obviously, this will obscure your main image on the layer below. Now set the Blend Mode for the ‘flare’ layer to Screen and your main image will be visible again. 03 To call up the information panel go to: Window > Info. You will…

The HSL panel in Lightroom is perhaps more powerful that you might at first think. It can enable you to take greater creative control over your images and allow you to selectively adjust the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance of the unique colours in an image. Our example is a simple application of this. The sky is very bright and the blue sea is quite murky. By adjusting the Luminance and Saturation of just the blues and aquas in the image, you can bring more depth and colour back into them.…

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…

The ability to select discrete areas of an image and change them in isolation is fundamental to Photoshop editing and to help with this there are many different ways of making that selection. The most frequently used are the Marquee tools, which allow you to select regular shapes such as rectangles, ellipses and lines. For irregular shapes there are several Lasso tools, which let you draw the area to be selected. For quicker selections there are the Magic Wand and Quick Selection tools. Common Options If you look across the top left of your menu bar, you will see there are common tool options for all of the selection tools. After the Home button and the Tool preset picker are the selection options. The row of four buttons are: New…

If we are talking about key skills that make Photoshop the most popular photo editing program around, then we have to talk about the ability to cut out parts of one image and then use it as part of anther image entirely. Cut outs are another staple of image enhancement and manipulation that are essential skills to have. It is lucky for us that Photoshop has a number of tools at its fingertips that can help make the process less of a chore. We are going to take two images and then cut out part of one and use it on the other. Yes, it’s a very simple tutorial, but it’s also very useful. This is a skill you will need to use a lot if you wish to create…

Shots like this, that combine foreground with skyscape, 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 clouds, and reduced the shadows to bring out texture in the boat and houses. We then applied a coloured graduated filter from top to middle, reducing exposure by one stop and increasing colour saturation. The result is a bright and colourful shot worthy of any picture postcard. Turn the page for some very useful and simple top tips to improve your Lightroom photo processing workflow. 1 Quick Develop Additions The Quick Develop panel is found in the Library module. Your Library module allows you to view the Metadata of your images, add comments, and set up the…