Innehållsförteckning för October 2022 från Practical Photoshop

Super Zoom is a wonderful tool for upscaling images if you want to give them a boost in resolution. Simply go to Filter > Neural Filters and turn on Super Zoom. Click the Zoom button to upscale the image by 2x, 3x or more. Your chosen Output is important here. If it’s set to New Layer, the command will zoom in to a part of the original image, as if cropping in (you can drag the preview to change the cropped area). But if the Output is set to New Document, the entire image will be upscaled, rather than a portion of it. The latter is perhaps more useful for most purposes, as it lets you increase the resolution of the whole image. You could try the Super Resolution command…

Style Transfer is one of the most intriguing of the Neural Filters – even if the results can often be a muddled mess. The idea here is that we can transfer the style from a painting onto our own images. There’s a selection of famous paintings to choose from inside the filter, and you can load in your own photos or images with the Custom tab. It’s worth playing with the sliders when you use Style Transfer, as you can get markedly different effects with a few basic tweaks.…

Smart Portrait lets you change the angle of a head, alter an expression to make someone look surprised or angry, and age your subjects older or younger. You can also change the lighting in your portraits by subtly shifting the direction of the light from one side of the face to the other. Results can vary from decent to downright scary. Go to Filter > Neural Filters and turn on Smart Portrait to get started. Low settings tend to give more successful results.…

1 GARDEN BAG SOFTBOX Our key light here is a second-hand Godox flashgun, bought for £30 on eBay. We’ve crafted a softbox using an old garden waste bag, with the front covered in a white bin liner bag. There is no TTL mode on this model of flash, only manual power, but that’s all we need. We set it to 1/4 power. 2 OLD UMBRELLA Our fill light here is a second-hand Yongnuo flashgun (costing £40 on eBay), fired into an old umbrella covered in tin foil and bin liners. It’s placed directly above the subject and set to 1/8 power to provide a gentle fill light. As we couldn’t buy a light stand within the budget, we tied the light to the ceiling. 3 GREEN SCREEN Green screens or…

A green screen can be transformed into any color you like with a few simple Photoshop skills. Just make sure that there’s no green in the subject (like the green balls here) or this will change color too. If you like to use Camera Raw or Lightroom, simply head to the Color Mixer Panel, grab the Hue Target Tool, and drag over the background to change the color. In Photoshop, the most effective tool for this job is the Color Range command. Use it to select the green, then change it to any color you like with a Hue/Saturation layer. To completely remove the backdrop (which is useful for stitching several frames), press Cmd/Ctrl+F for the Find Menu, then use the Remove Background Quick Action.…

Harmonization automatically matches the color and feel of one layer to match another. As such it can be hugely useful when you’re creating photo composites, because if you cut out and copy part of one image into another then the colors may not initially match up. But by running the cut-out layer through the Harmonization Filter, you may be able to come up with more realistic results. Here’s how it works… 01 MAKE A CUTOUT Open the image of your subject and go to Select > Subject. Improve the selection if necessary, then click the Add Layer Mask icon to convert the selection to a Layer Mask, thereby hiding everything else. Grab the Move Tool and drag the layer across to the image you’d like to use for the backdrop.…

JPEG artifacts are blocky shapes caused by the compression that JPEGs go through whenever they’re closed and opened. They’re more apparent when the JPEG quality is set to Low, which is why you’ll often see artifacts in low-quality web images. This Neural Filter can help to clear up artifacts. Simply go to Filter > Neural Filters, turn on JPEG Artifacts Removal and experiment with the strength settings.…

Adobe keeps its updates under wraps, so we can only predict what Neural Filters it’ll come up with next. However, there is a Wait List tab in the filter that gives some indication of what to expect. So you might be seeing a Portrait Generator or Noise Reduction Neural Filter soon. The most exciting filter on the Wait List is Latent Visions. This, as the description states, may be able to “generate abstract artistic concepts based on text strings”. It sounds similar to astounding AI-powered image generators like MidJourney and Dall-E, which enable you to generate art based on a line of text. We used MidJourney here with the prompt ‘half goat half tiger’ and this is what we generated. It will be fascinating to see how Adobe will bring…

01 MAKE YOUR OWN FLASHGUN HOLDER To make the softbox, we began by wrapping a small piece of cardboard around the end of the flashgun, leaving an overhang. We taped it in place, then cut down each bend and spread out the sides. Next, we took a larger sheet of cardboard, made a hole for our flashgun tube, and taped it to the sheet. 02 PREPARE THE BAG We used an old garden waste bag as the basis for our DIY softbox. We made a slit in the bottom center to feed our flashgun tube through, then we fitted the sheet of cardboard to the base of the bag. For extra reinforcement, we ran some thick wire around the rim of the bag to keep the structure reasonably solid. 03…

Depth Blur lets you blur backgrounds and foregrounds as if using a shallow focus. Go to Filter > Neural Filter and turn on Depth Blur, then adjust the blur strength to suit your scene. You can change the focus point if necessary by unchecking Focus Subject then clicking on a part of the preview image. The filter can work very well, but it depends whether the command can successfully isolate the subject. For more precision, cut out the subject manually, then add blur to the background and foreground with Photoshop’s array of blur filters. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3QYSX8b…

Color Transfer works by transferring the colors in one photo to another, so if you want to give one image a certain look, open a target image then run the filter. Initially the results can be rather too strong, but you can fine-tune things by adjusting the strength and tweaking the color sliders. It’s best to output the effect as a separate layer, as this gives you the option to lower the layer opacity or experiment with different Blending Modes.…

With inflation and an unprecedented fall in living standards to consider, spending money on photography kit or a trip to a portrait studio just isn’t a priority at the moment for many of us. But you can create outstanding photos without incurring outstanding payments. In this project we set ourselves a challenge: to craft high-end studio portraits on a shoestring budget of £75. This was enough to buy two cheap second-hand flashguns and a green sheet for the backdrop. A chroma key sheet costs as little as £5 on eBay, and we can transform the green into any color during editing. We supplemented this with a few everyday items – an garden waste bag, a busted umbrella, bin liners and kitchen foil – to build our DIY home studio. The…

01 JUST THE FILL A fill light on its own should result in an underexposed subject. We began by leaving our softbox off and only firing the overhead umbrella. With our exposure settings locked in (Manual mode, 1/200 sec, f/5.6, ISO 100), we adjusted the flash power until it resulted in a gentle fill like this. 02 ONLY THE KEY Next, we turned off the fill light and turned on the key light (our DIY garden bag softbox) and angled it towards the subject’s face. We wanted the key light to give us a correctly exposed subject, so we took shots and adjusted the flash power accordingly until it looked right, choosing 1/4 power here. 03 BOTH KEY AND FILL Finally, we turned on both of our flashguns and fired…

PHOTOSHOP CC FROM £9.98/$9.99 PER MONTH WINDOWS, macOS Photoshop is the software of choice for most professional and non-professional photographers. Beyond the standard photo-editing features, it boasts a vast array of more creative tools and filters. Layers are one of the key differences between Photoshop and Lightroom. They enable you to mask out selected parts to build up increasingly sophisticated images. ELEMENTS 15 £79.99/$99.99 WINDOWS, macOS Elements is the consumer variant of Photoshop, and contains many of its key tools and features within a simplified interface. It’s limited, but it does provide access to layers for those who have switched to a Lightroom workflow. LIGHTROOM CC FROM £9.98/$9.99 PER MONTH WINDOWS, macOS Lightroom CC combines professional image-processing tools with asset organizing. It keeps all its images online in the Creative…

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…