Innehållsförteckning för November 2020 från Practical Photoshop

1 DARK ROOM The room needs to be completely pitch-black at the moment the shutter button is triggered. If there is any ambient light, it’ll cloud our exposure and cause unwanted motion blur. So shoot this in a room that can be blacked out, or at night outdoors. 2 FLASHGUNS We’ve set up two flashguns. When the room is fully dark, the shutter speed becomes irrelevant – it’s the flashes that effectively determine the length of our exposure. This allows us to freeze the motion of the water, as flashguns have an incredibly fast duration. 3 SOUND TRIGGER We’re using a Hähnel Captur Module Pro (£100/$100) to detect the sound of the bursting balloons and fire our flashguns at the precise moment. It transmits wirelessly to receivers attached to each…

01 USE A LOWER POWER On a typical flashgun, the flash duration is around 1/400 sec at full 1/1 power, but the flashgun is capable of speeding up to around 1/20,000 sec at the lowest power settings. This means that setting a low power is better for freezing action, but this means you may need to open the aperture or increase the ISO to compensate – or use several flashguns. 02 DIFFUSE THE LIGHT The flashgun angled towards the subject’s face is fitted with a large umbrella softbox. This softens and diffuses the light, which is often more flattering for faces. A large white reflector placed opposite the flash to the right of camera bounces some of the side light back into the shadows on the subject’s face. 03 GEL…

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…

If you like to make patterns, then this new feature will offer instant gratification. One of the main challenges with patterns has always been in visualizing how it will look once defined. Now Photoshop does the visualizing for you by offering on-the-fly pattern previews. It means that you can zoom out from your base shape and see a preview of it as a continuous repeated pattern. Any changes you make to the shape are instantly updated across the entire screen. It’s a big improvement that elevates pattern-making, making it more accessible and more fun for everyone. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3dI3JOd…

Most of us normally work on our images in the RGB color mode. In this mode, each pixel is given a certain value for red, green and blue. These combine to create millions of colors. As such, RGB mode is the principal mode for most edits. But it does drawbacks… In RGB mode the color and brightness of your image are linked. Adjust the red, green or blue value of any pixel and, as well as changing the color, you’ll also affect brightness. This is where LAB mode comes in. LAB stands for Lightness, A and B channels. These represent an entirely different set of values for each pixel. The Lightness values determine how bright the pixels are, while the A and B values set the color. Put simply, LAB…

01 FILL THE BALLOONS Our water balloons are a mixture of the normal bomb-like round variety and the longer type used to make animal shapes for kids – not strictly speaking meant for water, but perfectly fine. We used warm water in our balloons, just to make it a bit bearable. 02 SET MANUAL EXPOSURE Set the camera to Manual and use a shutter speed long enough to give you time to drop the balloon: two or three seconds should suffice. Our camera here is set to 2 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100. The long shutter speed means the shot needs to be taken in total darkness. 03 CONTROL THE LIGHTING Two flashguns are used to light our scene. The first is placed to the left of the camera and…

01 REMOVE THE PIN Here we need to remove the pin that was used to pop the balloon. This is easily done with the Spot Healing Brush. Use the ] and [ keys to resize the brush tip so that it’s slightly larger than the area you want to remove, then paint over the pin to remove it. If necessary, switch to the Clone Tool to tidy up. 02 CHANGE THE BACKGROUND COLOR If you want to change the color of a background, it’s an easy job with the Hue/Saturation command. Click the Adjustment Layer icon in the Layers Panel and choose Hue/Saturation from the resulting menu, then grab the Hand Tool from the Hue/Saturation dialog box. Hold Cmd/Ctrl and drag over the background color to change it.…

The headline new feature in Photoshop 2021 is this AI-powered tool. You can now automatically replace a sky. Either choose a new sky from the set supplied by Adobe, or select one from your own image library instead. Slick, quick and intelligent, the new tool can isolate skies even when seen through intricate foreground details like trees and bridges. It also automatically tones the foreground to match the sky you choose. Replacing a sky is nothing new, but now it’s quicker and easier than ever. Let’s look at the key features… 1 CHOOSE A NEW SKY Go to Select > Sky Replacement to begin (you can also use Select >Sky to kickstart your own adjustments if you prefer). You’ll see a list of skies to choose from on the right.…

1 BRIDGE BETTER WITH VIDEO The image-browsing program Bridge now integrates with Premiere and Media Encoder as well as Photoshop and Camera Raw. You can now scrub through video previews in Bridge and select several clips to open as a sequence in Premiere. You can also export videos to Media Encoder to re-encode with a right-click. 2 LIGHTROOM CC WATERMARKS As well as adding text watermarks to your images, you can now overlay your own graphics and logos, allowing you to stamp your images to help prevent theft and demonstrate ownership. The feature is found under Custom share options on macOS and Windows, and Export As share options on mobile and web. 3 LIGHTROOM CC/CLASSIC COLOR GRADING Color grading of your photos in Lightroom (and Camera Raw) has taken a…

A water balloon can be a wonderful prop for action portraiture. Inspired by the portraits of Tim Tadder, these exploding balloons look almost like wigs or hats of water when they’re frozen mid-blast. But aside from all the watery fun, this project is also an exercise in lighting. In order to freeze the fast action of the water, we need to go beyond what our shutter speed is capable of, and instead make use of flash duration. Put simply, this is the length of time the burst of flash takes; with the right lights at the right setting, we can make it as fast as 1/10,000 sec or more. As long as there’s no other light influencing our exposure, the flash duration effectively becomes our shutter speed, allowing us to…

01 BOMB FROM ABOVE Dropping water bombs from above is a great way to create a splash, but it can literally be hit-and-miss. We found it helped to have a head torch to check our aim. Of course, sometimes the balloons don’t burst. 02 LAY AND POP As well as dropping water bombs from above, we also tried laying longer balloons (the kind used to make balloon animals) along our subject’s head then popping them with a pin taped to a stick. Once the shot is taken, it’s easy enough to remove the pin in Photoshop with the Spot Healing Brush.…