Innehållsförteckning för May 1, 2015 från Practical Photoshop

WATCH THE VIDEO http://tiny.cc/p8eaxx GENIUS TIP! SELECTIVE COLOUR ADJUSTMENTS The Vibrance adjustment layer enables you to selectively boost the saturation of weaker colours without over-saturating stronger ones, but this can still lead to unprintable colours that will show up as grey gamut warnings. You can target specific colours in a picture and boost their saturation with even more control by using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer instead. Change the adjustment layer’s Master drop-down menu to a specific colour (such as blue). You can then increase the saturation of the Blues slider until just before the gamut warning patches start to appear in the blue parts of the image. PROJECT INFO You’ll learn How to set up a Photoshop colour profile that will help you produce colours for print or web You’ll…

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 lefthand 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…

01 BETTER PERFORMANCE Much has been improved under the hood, with better performance and GPU acceleration giving the Lightroom experience a silkily responsive feel all round (as long as your graphics processor is compatible). It’s a vast improvement on the sometimes clunky performance of Lightroom 5. In particular, slider controls react more quickly, and previews update instantly. Once you’ve started using Lightroom 6, it’s noticeable how slow LIghtroom 5 is by comparison. 02 AUTO WHITE AND BLACK POINTS If you hold down Shift and double click the words Whites or Blacks in the Develop Module’s Basic panel, Lightroom will automatically find the white and black points in your image and shift the tones to use the entire tonal range from white to black. It’s a small improvement, but one that…

As anyone who’s ever tried to pair a pink scarf with an orange top will know, some colours simply don’t work together. Finding colours that complement one another gives images balance and appeal. But how do we know which colours work? We’ll show you here by explaining how to look for and photograph a set of colourful images to be displayed together as a triptych or four-square. We’ll also explain how to combine the images in Photoshop for a great piece of wall art. So why not give it a go? TIP 01 COMPLEMENTARY COLOURS The so-called colour wheel is a really useful reference for finding colours that work together. Complimentary colours sit opposite each other on the colour wheel. So, for example, try a red apple next to a…

HUE/SATURATION AND VIBRANCE 01 On the face of it, Hue/Saturation and Vibrance are two of the easiest colour tools to master, but they have hidden depths. Each can be applied as an adjustment layer. You can use Hue/Saturation to either change the shade and intensity of all the colours in an image, or choose different colour ranges from the menu at the top. Click the hand icon, then drag left or right over colours to alter Saturation, or alternatively, hold Cmd/Ctrl and drag to change Hue instead. Once done, if you want to apply the changes to certain areas, hit Cmd/Ctrl+I to invert the layer’s mask, then paint white to reveal the effect wherever you like. Vibrance is another great colour-enhancing tool that targets the less-saturated colours in an image,…

WATCH THE VIDEO http://tiny.cc/ojgbxx If you’ve ever wanted to add 3D objects to a 2D photo, then this month’s big project will show you how. In keeping with the election fever currently sweeping the UK, we’ll take you through the process of making a politicalthemed chess board. We’ve coloured and ordered the pieces along party lines, but you can use the same techniques to create and manipulate all kinds of 3D objects directly within Photoshop without any need for dedicated 3D software. The key here is to make a good cross-section of each piece with the Pen tool (there are readymade paths within the starting image), then extrude and bend the shape to make a circular object. Once done, you can colour, light and position lots of similar pieces. It’s…