Innehållsförteckning för April 2021 från Practical Photoshop

1 PROFILE BROWSER The Profile Browser offers a range of excellent starting points for editing your raw photos, including themes such as Adobe Landscape and Adobe Portrait. The Camera Matching set mirrors the picture style options on your camera. 2 BASIC PANEL The Basic Panel is the place to begin making enhancements to tone and color. Start at the top and work your way down the sliders. Many work in combination with the Alt key to give you a handy grayscale view. 3 TOOLBAR The toolbar on the right edge lets you access the Crop Tool, local adjustment tools, presets and more. When you click on a tool, the panel view changes to show the specific tool settings. The top icon will bring you back to the regular panel view.…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3cHW1Uh Camera Raw is hands down the best place to crop your photos. Sure, you can do so in Photoshop later on – but if you make the edit in Camera Raw, it remains non-destructive, so you can always go back and change the crop later if you like. The cropped areas will never be lost. Cropping is very straightforward – simply grab the tool and drag the crop box – but there are a few tricks you can use too… 01 CONTROL THE PROPORTIONS Press X to switch between a vertical or horizontal orientation, or right-click with the Crop Tool for various useful aspect ratios, like 3:2 or 1:1 square. Click the lock icon in the tool settings or press Alt+A to lock or unlock the…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3bUjp1A 01 OPEN A SET OF PHOTOS You can open an entire set of images into Camera Raw, then edit them all at once. Either hold Cmd/Ctrl and click to highlight several thumbnails in Bridge; or Shift-click between the first and last file in the set to select them all, then rightclick them and select Open In Camera Raw. 02 EDIT AND SYNC Once the set is open in Camera Raw, you can sync in different ways. Either highlight them all in the Filmstrip (Cmd/Ctrl+A) and begin editing to alter the entire set at once;. or edit one photo to your satisfaction, then select the rest, go to the top-left menu and choose Sync Settings. 03 SYNC IN BRIDGE After editing a single photo in Camera Raw,…

Light-painting is a wonderful way to make the ordinary look extraordinary, and you don’t necessarily need to travel far to create photos that look out of this world. In this project, we’ll show you how to get set up to shoot eye-catching lightpainted photos in your own garden after dark. You don’t need any special kit for this: you probably have everything you need in your house. If it’s miserable weather or you don’t have a suitable garden, you could easily set this up indoors in a dark room with a pot plant, or any other interestinglooking objects you like. The technique for lightpainting is simple: we fix our camera to a tripod and set up a long exposure, then open the shutter and move a torch around the scene.…

01 FLASHING FUNCTION If your torch has a flashing function, this can give you a different lightpainting effect. The flashes will show up as a series of dashes and dots as you move the torch around the scene. You could take this further if you have two torches by creating separate, differently colored dashes in different areas. 02 SMOOTH MOTION The key to flowing light-painted swirls is to use a smooth motion, so keep the torch moving throughout the exposure and make flowing movements with your arms. Some light-painters like to tie a torch to a piece of string or a long stick, then wave it around for circular patterns, which can yield some spectacular results. 03 SILHOUETTES OR DETAILS Remember that as well as creating the colored patterns of…

WHAT IS CAMERA RAW? Raw files require processing before they can be edited in Photoshop. Camera Raw is Photoshop’s raw processor. It allows you to set white balance, crop photos, enhance colors, make tonal changes and powerful local adjustments. As such, it’s invaluable for many essential editing tasks. By contrast, the main Photoshop editor gives you more depth in terms of working with layers, creating special effects, compositing and more. But for photographers who mainly prefer to make simple enhancements, the tools in Camera Raw can be all you need. These tools and settings are almost identical to those in the Lightroom Develop Module, so it’s easy to switch between the two. FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO PREFER TO MAKE SIMPLE ENHANCEMENTS, CAMERA RAW CAN BE ALL YOU NEED WHY CAN’T I…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/30R9NhQ 01 CHOOSE A PROFILE The Profile Browser is often the best place to begin editing your raw. The Profiles in the Adobe Raw set have been optimized for different subjects - here the Landscape profile improves the colors and detail in our scene. 02 SET BLACK AND WHITE POINTS By setting black and white points, we can control the tonal range. As a rule of thumb, we should bring them to a point just before clipped pixels appear. Alt-drag the sliders to see clipping. 03 WHITE BALANCE TOOL Use this to set white balance by clicking on a point that should be neutral – like a gray rock, or the white cliffs here. Drag to draw a box and sample a wider area. 04 APPLY CAPTURE…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/2P0syg2 This new feature employs machine learning to double the resolution of your photos. It works brilliantly on low-res images, so it’s great for improving old photos or low-quality rights-free images. Open an image in Camera Raw, then rightclick the image or the filmstrip thumbnail (or select several at once) and choose Enhance. If it’s a raw file, the feature will apply Raw Details enhancement as well as Super Resolution. It’ll also give you an estimated completion time. Once complete, you’ll find a new Adobe DNG file alongside your original image file, with the suffix ‘-Enhanced.dng’.…

After perfecting the look of the image, the next stage is to output the file in another format. You can right-click the image and choose Save Image to access different format options, resolution settings, sharpening controls and more… 1 OUTPUTTING AS A JPEG JPEGs aren’t great for heavy editing, but they’re fine for outputting finished images. 8-bit JPEGs can hold 16.7 million colors, while the eye can perceive around 7-10 million (and even modern screens are mostly 8-bit). Saving as a JPEG at this point will give you a small file size, which is perfect for posting online. 2 OUTPUTTING AS A TIFF TIFF is a 16-bit lossless format, so your image won’t degrade from repeated opening and closing, which can happen with JPEGs over time. TIFF is often a…

1 TRIPOD Our exposure here will run to several seconds, perhaps even minutes. So we need to keep the camera still by using a tripod. If you don’t have a tripod to hand, then you can simply place your camera on any solid garden object, like a sturdy chair or a suitable brick wall. 2 CAMERA SETTINGS When our camera is set to Bulb mode, we need to set the aperture and ISO manually. We can set a narrow aperture of f/22, which restricts the flow of light into the camera. A low ISO of 100 also allows for a long exposure and ensures a noise-free image. 3 REMOTE TRIGGER We need to trigger the camera and keep the shutter open. A cable or wireless release is fine, but it’ll…

It’s hard to get the exposure spot-on when you’re light-painting, and you might find a few areas look too dark or blown out. It’s best to shoot in raw, as raw files have greater dynamic range than JPEGs, which means you have greater headroom for recovering highlights or shadows. To do so, it’s worth getting to grips with the Adjustment Brush in Camera Raw or Lightroom. We simply paint over an area with the Adjustment Brush, then tweak the tonal sliders to change it. Here it allows us to lift the darker areas and balance them with the rest of the image. You might find that the colors look slightly muted in raw files to begin with, so boost Saturation and Vibrance to make them stronger.…

01 ZOOMING You can press Cmd/Ctrl and the plus or minus keys to zoom in or out, or press Z then drag right or left. Pressing Cmd/Ctrl+0 (the number) or double-clicking the Zoom Tool icon will fit your image on-screen. When zoomed in, hold down Space and drag to move around the image. 02 ALT-DRAG SLIDERS Several sliders give you a different view if you hold Alt. The Masking slider in the Detail Panel lets you mask out areas from sharpening, while the Whites and Blacks sliders let you see clipped pixels. The Exposure slider gives a grayscale view that can help judge image brightness. 03 RESET SLIDERS Double-click any slider in Camera Raw to reset it to its default value. You can also hold Alt and click Reset to…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/30S4EGj The Skin Smoothing Filter is part of Adobe’s Neural Filters command: a range of new filters that employ artificial intelligence to analyze image content and determine which areas to affect. Skin Smoothing can automatically recognise people and faces in your photos, isolate the skin and let you apply a softening effect. Pimples, spots, wrinkles, eye bags and rough skin can all be de-emphasized within a few clicks. Even a model with great skin like this can benefit from some subtle smoothing. Skin Smoothing gives better results than many other techniques: you can smooth out tones while retaining texture in the pores, which is essential for keeping the portrait looking natural. Neural Filters are part of a bold new direction for Photoshop, as Adobe embraces the power…

01 PLAN YOUR COMPOSITION In any garden there are likely to be plenty of good spots you can choose for this technique. Have a look around during the day, and take a few test shots to work out some nice compositions. Look for strong shapes, like a single flower, or seek out interesting trees, branches or other garden objects. 02 HOMEMADE LIGHT WANDS You can buy all kinds of different lights and gizmos for light painting, but a simple torch and a few colored plastic cups will do the trick perfectly well. Here we stacked some plastic cups on top of one another, then used gaffer tape to attach them to the front of a powerful LED torch. 03 FOCUS AND LOCK Many cameras’ autofocus systems can struggle in the…

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…