Adobe Photoshop CS6 - PDF Drive. The adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free download
Looking for:
The adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free download |
The adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free download - Customers who bought this item also bought
The adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free download
The adobe photoshop cs6 book for digital photographers pdf free download
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon. Top reviews Most recent Top reviews. Top reviews from the United States. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Verified Purchase. This book is not for people new to Photoshop and newbies will likely get lost and frustrated if this is their first jaunt into figuring out the many amazing facets of PS, and I would hardly call this an essential reference the crappy index ruins that. Having said that, if you have experience in PS, it offers some great tips and is definitely worth the read.
I've bought the last two versions of this book, because nothing compares with its in-depth treatment of Photoshop for photographers. But I was dismayed when I read Martin's section about "what's different in this book.
Because the material has "barely changed" over the past six editions, and he figures his readers have already bought one or more of his books! I do not have unlimited shelf space. And now I very much mind having a crippled version of your book instead of the complete reference I thought I was getting.
And, no, it's not good enough to provide it as a PDF. That's not to mention the very questionable strategy of removing info that's essential to new readers. Believe it or not, Martin, not all Photoshop users have been using the program for years and years. Go to the Web sites of prominent photographers and you'll see that many of them STILL don't know enough to embed a color profile in their online photos, or are embedding the wrong one! They are in desperate need of the info you didn't think was important enough to include!
His book on CS6 is just as good. He approaches PS from a photographer's point of view - a good thing as there are many features in this monster program that have little to no relevance to us. He covers theory and practice.
My only suggestion is that I would have liked a more thorough treatment of layer blending than is found in the book. I guess I'll just have to experiment more with that feature. There are many tips that he passes along from his vast experience as a fashion photographer, as well as hands-on examples, that make life easier for the work we do. The book is logically organized by program tasks and is easy to read.
There are the inevitable quirky differences between the author's British English and our American implementation, but they are never confusing. Study this book and you will know how to make Photoshop sing. There are chapters left out of this version that were in previous editions, but they are downloadable from his website for free. There are also downloadable image files from the examples in the book if you're inclined to practice his techniques. There is no DVD of tutorials either, but the videos are available online for free as well.
All in all, a very thorough treatment of one of the most complex applications around. One person found this helpful.
I have been using Photoshop as an amateur ever since version 1. I have never taken any classes. Over the years as my photography has taken off and reached new levels, my skills with PS have increased.
This book just took me to a new plane. I also have Lightroom, but am not a fan, I guess I am just getting to old to learn new tricks.
I believe PS can do everything Lightroom can, just via different actions. This book solidified it for me. The book has clear instruction and examples that relate to real world photography, and not anything crazy. I am not building new worlds or making pro level magazine covers. This book simply took the skills I have already and expanded them. I am not sure if this book would help as much if you have never touched PS before, if it was me I would go with a more basic approach and then progress to this book.
I am very happy with this purchase, it also will relate to older version as well a s newer version for the main aspects. See all reviews. Top reviews from other countries. Martin Evening's guide to Photoshop CS6 is a huge tome at more than pages. It's packed full of detail and is a superb reference resource, although perhaps a little unwieldy as a practical training guide. If you are the type of person who wants to know why things work rather than just how to do them, then this is the best option for you.
It's perhaps less helpful to the first time user, as the pages of detail on differences between old versions of Photoshop and CS6 indicate. It's best suited to those who are upgrading from older versions and who already are au fait with many of the ins and outs of Adobe Photoshop. The Dummies book is best for those completely new to Adobe Photoshop and indeed to image processing software.
Unlike the other two, it is more general and so includes more on the creative art or design elements of the software. It's well organized, logical and clear. While none of the three books come with a CD of photos, the Dummies is the only one not to provide web-based images that you can work on along with the book. In fact, it's less of an instruction book and more of a general resource, although it is laid out such that you can work through it if you want to with your own images. The trademark List of 10s contained in Dummies works well here - and is less of a stretch than it can sometimes be in the series.
For the new user it's very, very good indeed. I loved that it was more powerful, but I hated that it was a totally separate program, and now I had to leave Photoshop to get to my images. Step Two: background, Mini Bridge comes alive, displaying your images in a horizontal filmstrip layout as seen here. On the left side of the panel is the Navigation pod, which is where you navigate to the photos you want to appear in Mini Bridge.
Here, I chose my Pictures folder, and below the pop-up menu, it lists the folders I have inside that folder. If you click on the little right-facing arrow to the right of each folder in the Path Bar, a pop-up menu appears with a list of the subfolders inside that folder. By the way and this may seem insanely obvious, but… , to open any of these images in Photoshop, just double-click on one.
Clickand-drag the top of the panel upward and, as you do, the thumbnails grow to fill in the space as seen here. Step One: By default, Mini Bridge is set up in a wide filmstrip layout, and is docked to the bottom of your screen, like the one you see here. However, you can undock it and have it work like any other floating panel in Photoshop.
Step Two: corner of the Mini Bridge panel shown circled here in red. Again, if you want your thumbnails bigger, you have to drag the left side of Mini Bridge out to the left, and as it gets wider, the thumbnails grow to fill in the space.
Instead, you can get an instant full-screen preview by clicking on a thumbnail, and then pressing the Spacebar on your keyboard. That image goes full screen as shown here , so you can get a good look at it. To see the next image in the filmstrip, just press the Right Arrow key on your keyboard and, of course, to go to a previous image, use the Left Arrow key. By making your images much larger onscreen, it makes it much easier to find your best shots, and Review mode really makes whittling things down to just the best shots from your shoot so much easier.
Step Two: When you choose Review Mode, it enters a full-screen view with your images in a cool carousel-like rotation as seen here. This mode is great for two big reasons: The first being it makes a really nice onscreen slide show presentation. You can use the Left and Right Arrow keys on your keyboard to move through the photos or the arrow buttons in the lower-left corner of the screen as a photo comes to the front, it becomes larger and brighter.
If you want to open the image in front in Photoshop, press the letter O. To open the front photo in Adobe Camera Raw, press R. To leave Review mode, press the Esc key. If you forget any of these shortcuts, just press H. Start by Command-clicking PC: Ctrl-clicking on just those photos in the filmstrip to select them, and enter Review mode. In Review mode, you can zoom in tight on a particular area using the built-in Loupe. Just move your cursor over the part of the photo you want a closer look at, and click to bring up the Loupe for that photo as shown here, in the image in the top right.
To move it, click-and-hold inside the Loupe and drag it where you want it. To make it go away, just click once inside it. That way, you can view them as slide shows, post them on the web, send them to a client for proofing, or prepare them for printing. If you want to change how they are sorted, click on the Sort icon it looks like up and down arrows near the left end of the Toolbar, and a pop-up menu of options will appear as seen here. Now, use the Left and Right Arrow keys on your keyboard to move through the fullscreen images.
For all the rest of the photos, you do absolutely nothing. So, why not use the entire star rating system? What about your 3-star ones? We keep them, too. Click-and-hold on the Filter Items by Rating icon at the right end of the Toolbar it looks like a funnel and choose Show Rejected Items Only as shown here to see just the Rejects. Click it, and it brings up a dialog where you can name and save your images to a collection. You can use the same shortcut to remove the Reject label.
Step Eight: When you click that Save button, a collection of just these photos is saved. Now these best-of-that-shoot photos will always be just one click away. Or, 3 you can use a standard Bridge search which searches just the filename and any embedded keywords to narrow things down in just your current folder.
To leave the search results and return to your previous folder of images, just click the Back button the left arrow at the top-left corner of the Mini Bridge panel. Now, Mini Bridge and Big Bridge will both display the same folder of images. You can also do other things from this pop-up menu, like add a color label to your image, or add a star rating, or rotate the file.
Dragging-and-Dropping Right from Mini Bridge If you already have a document open in Photoshop, you can drag-and-drop an image directly from Mini Bridge right into that document and it appears as a smart object not too shabby! Just drag-and-drop your image from Mini Bridge right into the center area where your document would normally be, and it opens your photo in a new image window.
You gotta try this! The numbers 1—5 also add star ratings, and 6—9 add color labels. Lastly, just press the H key to get a list of the slide show shortcuts. One thing to know: this only works with one image at a time. Click the Reveal in Bridge icon at the top left of the panel to jump to Big Bridge, then in the Folders panel at the top left of the window , find the folder you want to make a favorite.
Once you find it, Right-click on it and choose Add to Favorites from the pop-up menu, then click the Return to Adobe Photoshop icon the boomerang icon in the top left of the window to jump back to Photoshop. This highlights the name field and you can just type in the new name you want. See, that was a vague reference to the named after the movie starring Donald Pleasence.
You need to click-and-hold on that Format pop-up menu, and from that menu choose Camera Raw, as shown here. However, if you just want to save the changes you made in Camera Raw without opening the photo in Photoshop, then click the Done button instead as shown here , and your changes will be saved.
Just so you know. Affected by the Blacks slider 1. Affected by the Blacks slider 2. Affected by the Fill Light slider 2. Affected by the Shadows slider 3. Affected by the Exposure slider 3. Affected by the Exposure slider 4. Affected by the Recovery slider 4. One problem was that the Exposure slider covered too much of that range—from the midtones all the way through the highlights see 3 in the histogram on the left here.
If you do clip the highlights perhaps in-camera , you now use the Highlights slider first to fix the clipping, and tweak the Exposure slider, if necessary.
Step Two: However, the processing technology being used on your photo at this point is actually out-of-date. In this image, once I updated to the process version, I was able to increase the Clarity more without creating halos , and I bumped up the Exposure a bit, too. Step Two: The default profile will be Adobe Standard.
At the very least, I would change it to Camera Standard, which I think usually gives you a better starting place as seen here. Again, this is designed to replicate the color looks you could have chosen in the camera, so if you want to have Camera Raw give you a similar look as a starting point, give this a try.
Also, since Camera Raw allows you to open more than one image at a time in fact, you can open hundreds at a time , you could open a few hundred images, then click the Select All button that will ap- Before: Using the default Adobe Standard profile After: Using the Camera Vivid profile pear at the top-left corner of the window, change the camera profile for the firstselected image, and then all the other images will have that same profile automatically applied. Now, you can just click the Done button.
Unless you took the shot in an office, and then it probably had a green tint. If you just took a shot of somebody in the shade, the photo probably had a blue tint. Luckily, we can fix them pretty easily. At the top of the Basic panel on the right side of the Camera Raw window , are the White Balance controls. Here I tried each preset and Flash seemed to look best— it removed the bluish tint and made the background gray again. Step Three: The second method is to use the Temperature and Tint sliders found right below the White Balance preset menu.
The bars behind the sliders are color coded so you can see which way to drag to get which kind of color tint. What I like to do is use the built-in presets to get close as a starting point , and then if my color is just a little too blue or too yellow, I drag in the opposite direction. So, in this example, the Flash preset was close, but made it a little too yellow, so I dragged the Temperature slider a little bit toward blue and the Tint slider a tiny bit toward magenta. By the way, I generally just adjust the Temperature slider, and rarely have to touch the Tint slider.
Also, to reset the white balance to where it was when you opened the image, just choose As Shot from the White Balance pop-up menu as seen here. Step Five: The third method is my personal favorite, and the method I use the most often, and that is setting the white balance using the White Balance tool I. This is perhaps the most accurate because it takes a white balance reading from the photo itself. So, take the tool and click it once on the background near her hair as shown here and it sets the white balance for you.
It was a little dark, so I bumped up the Exposure a little, too. White balance is a creative decision, and the most important thing is that your photo looks good to you. You are the bottom line. Accurate is not another word for good. By the way, you can just Rightclick on your image to access the White Balance pop-up menu as shown here.
Once your lighting is set, just have your subject hold it while you take one shot. Then, open that image in Camera Raw, and click the White Balance tool on the Before: The As Shot white balance has a bluish tint After: With one click of the White Balance tool, everything comes together card in your image to instantly set your white balance.
Now, apply that same white balance to all the other shots taken under that same light more on how to do that coming up in the next chapter. However, in CS6, it works best if you start by getting the Exposure midtones set first, and then if things look kind of washed out, adding some Contrast the contrast slider in CS6 is way, way better than the one in CS5 and earlier, which I generally avoided.
Taken in harsh, unflattering light, it needs some serious Camera Raw help. Step Two: Start by adjusting the Exposure slider. This photo is way overexposed, so drag it to the left to darken the midtones and the overall exposure. Here, I dragged it over to —1.
These two steps—adjusting the Exposure and then the Contrast slider if necessary —should be your starting points every time. This top-down approach helps, because the other sliders build off this exposure foundation, and it will keep you from having to constantly keep tweaking slider after slider. See that triangle? First, go up and click directly on that white triangle and the areas that are clipping will appear in red look on her arm.
Continued The Essentials of Camera Raw Chapter 2 The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers Step Five: If that red highlight shows over an area you feel has important detail her arm and other areas here certainly seem important to me , go to the Highlights slider and drag it to the left until the red areas disappear here, I dragged the Highlights slider to the left to — Now, in CS6, the Shadows slider works with the Exposure slider to give you better results than the old Fill Light slider alone could give.
Start by bumping up the Exposure, and then the Contrast the Shadows slider will work much better when you tweak these first. That overprocessed Fill Light look from previous versions of Camera Raw is gone. Instead, we have a much more natural-looking edit. Now we can jump back to our original image. Most of the time, if I use the Whites slider which controls the brightest highlights , I find myself dragging it to the right to make sure the whites are nice and bright white and not light gray , but in this instance, I was using the Whites slider to pull the whites back a bit to help hide the fact that it was shot in harsh, direct daylight , so I dragged it to the left to darken the whites to around — I also increased the deepest shadows by dragging the Blacks slider to the left just a little bit here, I dragged over to — I still use this slider if, near the end of the editing process, I think the color needs more oomph, as this helps the colors look saturated and less washed out.
Again, I recommend doing all of this in a top-to-bottom order, but just understand that not every image will need an adjustment to the Highlights and Shadows—only mess with those if you have a problem in those areas. Letting Camera Raw Auto-Correct Your Photos Step One: Once you have an image open in Camera Raw, you can have Camera Raw take a stab at setting the overall exposure using the controls in the Basic panel for you by clicking on the Auto button shown circled in red here. Now, Camera Raw will evaluate each image and try to correct it.
The Clarity slider which is well-named basically increases the midtone contrast in a way that gives your photo more punch and impact, without actually sharpening the image. I add lots of Clarity anytime I want to enhance the texture in an image, and it works great on everything from landscapes to cityscapes, from travel photos to portraits of men—anything where emphasizing texture would look good.
Any image I edit where I want to emphasize the texture landscapes, cityscapes, sports photos, etc. However, you can also use the Clarity control in reverse—to soften skin.
Step Two: If you want more contrast, choose Strong Contrast from the Curve pop-up menu as shown here , and you can see how much more contrast this photo now has, compared with Step One. The difference is the Strong Contrast settings create a steeper curve, and the steeper the curve, the more contrast it creates.
There are two different types of curves available here: the Point curve, and the Parametric curve. To add adjustment points, just click along the curve. To do that, click on the Presets icon the second icon from the right near the top of the Panel area to bring up the Presets panel.
This brings up the New Preset dialog shown here. If you just want to save this curve setting, from the Subset pop-up menu near the top, choose Point Curve, and it turns off the checkboxes for all the other settings available as presets, and leaves only the Point Curve checkbox turned on as shown here. Step Six: The Highlights slider controls the highlights area of the curve the top of the curve , and dragging it to the right arcs the curve upward, making the highlights brighter.
Right below that is the Lights slider, which covers the next lower range of tones the area between the midtones and the highlights. Dragging this slider to the right makes this part of the curve steeper, and increases the upper midtones. The Darks and Shadows sliders do pretty much the same thing for the lower midtones and deep shadow areas. Here, to create some really punchy contrast, I dragged both the Highlights and Lights sliders to the right, and the Darks and Shadows sliders to the left.
So, if you move the far-right region divider to the right, it expands the area controlled by the Lights slider. Now the Highlights slider has less impact, flattening the upper part of the curve, so the contrast is decreased. Just move the tool over the part of the image you want to adjust, then drag upward to lighten that area, or downward to darken it this just moves the part of the curve that represents that part of the image.
A lot of photographers love the TAT, so make sure you give it a try, because it makes getting that one area you want brighter or darker easier. In the example shown here, I clicked and dragged upward to brighten up that shadowy area on the left, and the curve adjusted to make that happen automatically.
You can get Camera Raw to tell you exactly which part to adjust. Move your cursor over the background area you want to affect, pressand-hold the Command PC: Ctrl key, and your cursor temporarily changes into the Eyedropper tool. Click once on your image and it adds a point to the curve that corresponds to the area you want to adjust. Now, leave the center point where it is, drag the top point straight upward, and drag the bottom point straight down to create the curve you see here at the far left.
The area to be cropped away appears dimmed, and the clear area inside the border is how your final cropped photo will appear.
If you want to see the cropped version before you leave Camera Raw, just switch to another tool in the toolbar. Note: If you draw a set size cropping border and want to switch orientation, click on the bottom-right corner and drag down and to the left to switch from wide to tall, or up and to the right to switch from tall to wide.
By default, you click-and-drag it out around the area you want to keep, and like in Photoshop, you have access to a list of preset cropping ratios. To get them, click-and-hold on the Crop tool and a pop-up menu will appear as shown here.
The Normal setting gives you the standard drag-itwhere-you-want-it cropping. However, if you choose one of the cropping presets, then your cropping is constrained to a specific ratio.
To bring back the cropping border, just click on the Crop tool. If you want your photo cropped to an exact size like 8x10", 13x19", etc. You can choose to crop by inches, pixels, or centimeters. Click OK, click-and-drag out the cropping border, and the area inside it will be exactly 8x10".
If you click the Open Image button, the image is cropped to your specs and opened in Photoshop. If, instead, you click the Done button, Camera Raw closes and your photo is untouched, but it keeps your cropping border in place for the future. TIP: Seeing Image Size The size of your photo and other information is displayed below the Preview area of Camera Raw in blue underlined text that looks like a web link. When you drag out a cropping border, the size info for the photo automatically updates to display the dimensions of the currently selected crop area.
However, if you click the Save Image button and you choose Photoshop from the Format pop-up menu as shown , a new option will appear called Preserve Cropped Pixels. If you turn on that checkbox before you click Save, when you open this cropped photo in Photoshop, it will appear to be cropped, but the photo will be on a separate layer not flattened on the Background layer.
So the cropped area is still there—it just extends off the visible image area. When you open multiple photos, they appear in a vertical filmstrip along the left side of Camera Raw as shown here. A tiny Crop icon will also appear in the bottom-left corner of each thumbnail, letting you know that these photos have been cropped in Camera Raw.
Now, click-and-drag it along the horizon line in your photo as shown here. When you release the mouse button, a cropping border appears and that border is automatically rotated to the exact amount needed to straighten the photo as shown in Step Eight. If you click Open Image instead, the straightened photo opens in Photoshop. TIP: Canceling Your Straightening If you want to cancel your straightening, just press the Esc key on your keyboard, and the straightening border will go away.
So, just pressand-hold the Shift key when you doubleclick on the RAW file in Mini Bridge, and the image will open in Photoshop, with the last set of edits already applied, skipping the Camera Raw window altogether. If those sound like your favorites, you can save yourself some time by jumping directly to the one you want using a simple keyboard shortcut.
To run through the different shortcuts, just try different letters on your keyboard. Instead, to get back to the original way your image looked when you first opened it in Camera Raw, go to the Camera Raw flyout menu and choose Camera Raw Defaults. Deleting Multiple Images While Editing in Camera Raw If you have more than one image open in Camera Raw, you can mark any of them you want to be deleted by selecting them in the filmstrip on the left side of Camera Raw , then pressing the Delete key on your keyboard.
To remove the mark for deletion, just select them and press the Delete key again. Just press Command-1, -2, -3 PC: Ctrl-1, -2, -3 , and so on, to add star ratings up to five stars. You can also just click directly on the five little dots that appear below the thumbnails in the filmstrip on the left.
A little hint of the hot spot comes back, so it looks more like a highlight than a shine it actually works really well. You can do something similar in Camera Raw when using the Spot Removal tool set to Heal by removing the hot spot or freckle, or wrinkle and then using the Opacity slider in the Spot Removal options panel. However, I went with the movie Raw backscreened headshots. That would be incredibly trying to fool you into watching a movie thinking it was shallow of me.
However, of Camera Raw, there is no real justice in that this finely what I found most puzzling was this: in the movie poster, crafted classic of modern cinematography wound up Pamela Anderson totally dominates the poster with a large, going straight to DVD. But when we open the photo, the subject is basically in silhouette. In this example, the camera properly exposed for the sky in the background, so the rock formation in the foreground is a silhouette.
Plus, by double-processing editing the same RAW photo twice , we can choose one set of edits for the sky and another for the rocks, to create just what we want.
Now, press-and-hold the Shift key, and the Open button changes to Open Object as seen here. Click it. Now we need a second version of this image, because the sky looks way too light in this version. We need to be able to edit these two layers separately from each other. Basically, we need to break the link between the two layers. To do that, go to the Layers panel, Right- click on the layer, and from the pop-up menu that appears, choose New Smart Object via Copy.
This gives you a duplicate layer, but breaks the link to the original layer. So, drag the Exposure slider way over to the left I went to —0. Once the sky looks good, click OK. Continued Camera Raw—Beyond the Basics Chapter 3 The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers Step Five: You now have two versions of your photo, each on a different layer—the brighter one exposed for the rocks in the foreground on the bottom layer, and the darker sky version on the layer directly on top of it—and they are per fectly aligned, one on top of the other.
Now what we need to do is combine these two different layers with different exposures into one single image that combines the best of both.
So, get it from the Toolbox and paint over the rocks and foreground, and it selects them for you in just a few seconds as shown here. Step Six: Go to the Layers panel and click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the panel shown circled here in red. This converts your selection into a layer mask, which hides the light sky and reveals the new darker sky layer in its place as seen here. Well, except for those blue mountain areas on either side of the base of the rocks, which look kind of funky.
If you make a mistake, switch your Foreground color to white and paint over your mistake to erase the spillover. Go under the Select menu and choose Refine Mask. This brings up the Refine Mask dialog you see here. In the Edge Detection section, turn on the Smart Radius checkbox and drag the Radius slider to the right until the white edge is almost gone I dragged to 8. Then, under Adjust Edge, drag the Shift Edge slider to the left as shown here until the white edge disappears as you see here, where I dragged to —25 , then click OK.
See, that was fairly easy. Go to the Layers panel and, from the flyout menu at the top right, choose Flatten Image to flatten the image down to one layer. The image looks a little dark overall, so press Command-L PC: Ctrl-L to bring up the Levels dialog, and bring back some of the overall highlights by dragging the white Input Levels highlights slider right below the far-right side of the histogram to the left to brighten things up.
Step Lastly, I would do something to make the image a little more vibrant and applying an effect to the combined image helps unify the look. Go under the Image menu, under Mode, and choose Lab Color.
Now, go under the Image menu again and choose Apply Image. This adds color and contrast. In Mini Bridge, start by selecting the images you want to edit click on one, press-and-hold the Command [PC: Ctrl] key, then click on all the others. Choose Basic from the popup menu at the top, and it unchecks all the other stuff, and leaves just the Basic panel checkboxes turned on.
Although it does work, it takes too many clicks, and decisions, and checkboxes, which is why I prefer the second method. At the top of this panel is the Sharpening section, where by a quick glance you can see that sharpening has already been applied to your photo. Step Two: If you want to turn off this automatic, by default sharpening so capture sharpening is only applied if you go and manually add it yourself , first set the Sharpening Amount slider to 0 zero , then go to the Camera Raw flyout menu and choose Save New Camera Raw Defaults as shown here.
Now, RAW images taken with that camera will not be automatically sharpened. Now the sharpening only affects the preview you see here in Camera Raw, but when you choose to open the file in Photoshop, the sharpening is not applied.
Compare the image shown here, with the one in Step Four where the Sharpening Amount was set to 0 , and you can see how much sharper the image now appears, where I dragged it to Step Six: The next slider down is the Radius slider, which determines how far out the sharpening is applied from the edges being sharpened in your photo.
I only use a Radius of more than 1 when: 1 the image is visibly blurry, 2 it has lots of detail like this photo, where I pushed the Radius to 1. If you decide to increase the Radius amount above 1 unlike the Unsharp Mask filter, you can only go as high as 3 here , just be careful, because if you go too much above 1, your photo can start to look fake, oversharpened, or even noisy, so be careful out there in the next step, I set it back to 1.
The default Masking setting of 0 zero applies sharpening to the entire image. As you drag to the right, the non-edge areas are masked protected from being sharpened.
This is particularly helpful in understanding the Masking slider, so press-and-hold the Option key and drag the Masking slider to the right. When Masking is set to 0, the screen turns solid white because sharpening is being evenly applied to everything.
As you drag to the right, in the preview shown here , the parts that are no longer being sharpened turn black those areas are masked. Any areas you see in white are the only parts of the photo receiving sharpening perfect for sharpening women, because it avoids sharpening their skin, but sharpens the things you want sharp, like the eyes, hair, eyebrows, lips, edges of her face, and so on.
It does this by reading the embedded camera data so it knows which camera and lens you used , and it applies a profile to fix the problem. Open the image with a lens problem in Camera Raw. So I always fix lens problems here, rather than using the Photoshop filter. Also, I usually have to back down the amount of correction just a bit with fisheye lenses by dragging the Distortion slider a little bit to the left as seen here.
Take a look at the photo here. Step Four: I shoot Nikon cameras, so I pretty much knew this was taken with a Nikon, so from the Make field I chose Nikon, and as soon as I did, it did the rest—it found a lens match and fixed the photo. Here, I actually used the This is a pretty common problem for photos taken with a wide-angle lens on a full-frame camera this was taken with a 28—mm lens, at 28mm.
I kind of like the mystery of the fog, but it is just kind of a mess overall. We can fix this in just a few clicks. It looks at the camera data embedded into your photo and, if it finds a match in its database, it applies the fix automatically, as it did here by flattening out the foundation of the building, removing the bloated look from the front of the palace, and removing the edge vignetting from all the corners.
Step Eight: If you need more than a little tweak to the profile which we definitely do—look at how the building and tower are leaning back, back in Step Seven , then you need to click on the Manual tab and basically do it yourself. Note: The changes you make in the Manual tab are added on top of what you already did in the Profile tab.
In this case, we need to fix the vertical geometric distortion, so drag the Vertical slider to the left, and as you do, keep an eye on the tower on the left. Your goal is to make it straight, so simply drag to the left until it is in this case, I dragged over to —43, as shown here. To fix the squattiness not a word, I know and cover that dark gray gap at the bottom, get the Rectangular Marquee tool M , and clickand-drag it around the image, going across the bottom edge, right above the dark gray gap.
Grab the bottom-center transform handle and drag the image straight down— stretching it to fill the dark gray gap at the bottom as shown here. Two birds. One stone. Step Now, when it comes to those two gray triangles in the corners, you have two choices here: 1 The most common choice is simply to crop away those gray empty areas, so get the Crop tool C , drag it out over as much of the photo as you can without extending into the gaps, and then press Return.
Get the Magic Wand tool press Shift-W until you have it , and click it once in a gray area to select it, then Shift-click in the other one. Go under the Select menu, under Modify and choose Expand, and enter 4 pixels ContentAware Fill seems to work better if you expand out your selection by 4 pixels. I learned that from Adobe themselves. Hey, look at that— it worked. Press Command-D to deselect the triangular areas.
Then, press Command-T to bring up Free Transform as seen here. By the way, while Free Transform is in place, you can go to the Layers panel and lower the Opacity of this top layer so you can see the original tower below it. That way, you can match up the height correctly. Now, press the Return PC: Enter key to lock in your transformation. You betcha! I love it!!!! Step The final step would be to sharpen this puppy to death!
I mean, add a significant amount of sharpening. Go under the Filter menu, under Sharpen, and choose Unsharp Mask. This is some major sharpening, but when you have a photo with something this detailed, it can take a lot of sharpening meaning, it loves to be sharpened.
Now, click OK to finish your lens correction problem and then some! A before and after is shown on the next page. Sometimes the fringe is red, sometimes green, sometimes purple, blue, etc.
Luckily, Camera Raw has a built-in fix that does a pretty good job. To remove this, start by clicking on the Lens Corrections icon the sixth icon from the left at the top of the Panel area, then click on the Color tab in the center to make the Chromatic Aberration controls visible. In this case, it removed most of it, but left a little bit especially on the left.
Click right between the two knobs and drag the slider way over to the right, and the residual color is now gone sometimes you might have to drag to the left—it just depends on the image. So, try dragging it in both directions first to quickly see which direction is the right one. To remove this vignetting from the corners, start by clicking on the Lens Corrections icon the sixth icon from the left at the top of the Panel area. See page 66 for more on this. If the image still needs correcting, try the Vignetting slider under Correction Amount.
In the Lens Vignetting section, click on the Amount slider and drag it to the right until the vignetting in the corners disappears. Once you move the Amount slider, the Midpoint slider beneath it becomes available. It determines how wide the vignetting repair extends into your photo, so drag it to the left to expand the lightening farther toward the center of your photo. Drag the Midpoint slider quite a bit to the left, which increases the size of the vignetting and creates a soft, pleasing effect that is very popular in portraiture, or anywhere you want to draw attention to your subject.
Two for the price of one! So, start by applying a regular edge vignette as shown here. It kind of looked just like adding muddy dark gray to the edges. I would stay away from this one altogether. Step Eight: Below the Midpoint slider is the Roundness slider that gives you control over the roundness of the vignetting lower the Feather amount to 0, so you can get a better idea of what the Roundness slider does. The farther to the right you drag, the rounder the shape gets, and when you drag to the left, it actually becomes more like a large, rounded-corner rectangle.
The Feather slider determines how soft that oval you created with the Roundness slider becomes. If, one day, one or more manufacturers abandon their proprietary format for something new like Kodak did with their Photo CD format , will we still be able to open our RAW photos? Step Two: When the Save Options dialog appears, at the bottom of the dialog, from the Format pop-up menu, choose Digital Negative shown here. Once you choose Digital Negative, a new set of options appears at the bottom of the dialog seen in Step Three.
If you do want to do it, turn on that checkbox, then choose from its pop-up menu which option is most important to you: saving the same physical dimensions pixel size or file size megapixels. If you turn on the Update Embedded JPEG Previews checkbox and choose your preferred preview size from the pop-up menu , then any changes you make to the DNG will be applied to the preview, as well.
Now, click on the Saturation tab as shown here to bring up the Saturation sliders which control the intensity of the colors. You can just drag the Blues slider to the right, and it will get bluer the color will get more intense , but most of the time, the color your eye sees blue, in this case is made up of more than just that color. So, click on the green sample circle and drag it to a nearby area and it redoes the retouch as shown here.
Now, remove the rest of the blemishes with just a single click each, adjusting the position of their green sample circles, if necessary. Now, drag the Exposure slider a little to the right, decrease the size of your brush, then paint over the whites of her eyes as shown here.
Once that looks good, click the New radio button again and zero out the sliders, so we can work on adding contrast and brightness to her irises. However, with the way Adobe implemented this feature, you can use it for much more than just neutral density gradient effects although that probably will still be its number one use.
When you click on it, its options panel appears shown here with a set of effects you can apply that are similar to the ones you can apply using the Adjustment Brush. Start by dragging the Exposure slider to the left, or just click on the — minus sign button two times to get to —1.
Generally, you want to stop dragging the gradient before it reaches the horizon line, or it will start to darken your properly exposed foreground.
You can see the darkening effect it has on the sky and the photo already looks more balanced. Note: Just let go of the Shift key to drag the gradient in any direction. You can also have more than one gradient click on the New radio button at the top of the panel and to delete a gradient, just click on it and press the Delete PC: Backspace key. Start by pressing the Delete PC: Backspace key to get rid of this adjustment pin and start over from scratch with the original color image.
Get the Adjustment Brush and click the — minus sign button beside Exposure to zero everything out. Then drag the Exposure slider almost all the way over to the left. Step Six: Turn off the Auto Mask checkbox and, using a large brush, paint over the entire image as shown here to greatly darken it. That way, it builds up more gradually as you click the brush.
If I try to warm up the white balance, she is going to turn really yellow. Luckily, now we can adjust the white balance in just one area. I also decreased the Highlights a bit to finish it up. This technique lets you paint noise reduction just where you need it, so the rest of the image stays sharp.
It definitely looks better now well, to me anyway , but if you look at the inset, you now see lots of noise that was once hidden in those shadows. This noise reduction only affects that wall area where you painted, and the rest of the image keeps its original sharpness. Next, fully paint over just the two circular headlamps.
Really handy when working on hard edges, like the edge of a building where it meets the sky. The trick is to click on the Color swatch in the middle of the Adjustment Brush options panel to reopen the Color Picker, then drag the Saturation slider down to 0. Want to bring them all back? Then you can jump back to how the image looked when you took that snapshot by clicking on it in the Snapshots panel. Click that little bucket on any one of the swatches, and it changes the swatch to your currently selected color.
Anyway, I also a great title for a movie about evil corn is almost ideal found a band named Cash Crop, which would make a great for this chapter, except for the fact that this chapter also title, too, but when I looked at their album, every song was includes resizing. So, I thought, what the heck, and searched marked with the Explicit warning.
The Designers, and motion picture soundtrack for the movie Sorority Row , and it literally is an long background music track with two I immediately knew what kind of the music they did. Naughty, European-sounding women whispering the names of menu naughty music.
Anyway, while I was listening, and wincing commands from Adobe products. I am not making I realized that someone at the iTunes Store must have the this up I listened to the free second preview. I imagine, at this point, that person has commands set to music. Now, just grab one of the corner or side handles and start dragging inward to start cropping as seen here and it crops in toward the center of the image the area to be cropped away will appear dimmed.
If you want to keep the image proportions the same in your crop I usually do , just press-and-hold the Shift key while you drag any of the cropping handles. Also, you can reposition your image within the border by clickingand-dragging on it.
When you do this, the cursor will change into a double-headed arrow. Just click, hold, and drag up or down and the cropping border will rotate in the direction you choose. Want to take it up a notch? The other options here only kick in if you do have that dimmed cropped away area visible called the Crop Shield , and you can make it lighter or darker by changing the Opacity amount, or you can turn it off altogether by turning off the Enable Crop Shield checkbox.
Of course, now you can tweak the handles just like before. One quick thing to check first: if you want a white background for your canvas area and my guess is, most times you will , then before you even click on the Crop tool, press the letter D on your keyboard to set your Background color to white.
Then, once you click on the Crop tool, make sure Unconstrained is selected in the popup menu at the left end of the Options Bar, otherwise the cropping border will be constrained to the aspect ratio of your image in this case, we want the bottom section to be deeper than the sides and top.
Now, grab a cropping handle and drag the border outward to add canvas area. Step Here, I dragged the right side out and then dragged the bottom-center handle down quite a bit to add a fine art poster mat look around my image. How cool is that? You get to decide if the part of your image that gets cropped away from view is: a gone forever, or b just hidden from view and, if necessary, can be brought back.
With it turned on, when you crop, the stuff outside the border is cropped away and you get a smaller file size. Step Once you have the cropping border right where you want it, press the Return PC: Enter key to crop your image. The final cropped image is shown here, where we cropped off some of the crowd on the right side, and the lens peeking into the frame from above my shooting position down on one knee , and some of the excess grass on the tee box.
More times than I care to admit. Type in the custom size you want in this case, 20x16" at a resolution of ppi, which is pretty ideal for most color inkjet printing. Now press the Return PC: Enter key and it crops your image to that size. When the New dialog appears, enter 20 inches by 16 inches, and enter for Resolution, then click OK to create a new blank document in the exact size and resolution you need as seen here.
All you have to do is crop the other image, and it will share the exact same specs as your ideal-size photo. Step Four: Now, get the Move tool V , click on the image you want cropped to that size, and drag it onto that new blank document.
The one you like best. In fact, once you set them up, they will save you time and money. Then, when we want to crop to 5x7", all we have to do is grab the 5x7" Crop tool preset. In the Width field, enter 2 in, then press the Tab key to jump to the Height field, enter 2. This brings up the New Tool Preset dialog, in which you can name your new preset.
Name it, click OK, and the new tool is added to the Tool Presets panel. If you need to change the name of a preset, just double-click directly on its name in the panel, and then type in a new name. In the resulting dialog, choose Tools from the Preset Type pop-up menu, and scroll down until you see the Crop tools you created. Now just click-and-drag them to wherever you want them to appear in the list, and then click Done.
A tool preset picker will appear. Click on a preset, and your cropping border will be fixed to the exact dimensions you chose for that tool. When the New dialog appears, click on the Preset pop-up menu to reveal the list of preset types, and choose Photo.
Then click on the Size pop-up menu to see the preset sizes, which include 2x3", 4x6", 5x7", and 8x10" in both portrait and landscape orientation.
The only problem with these is that their resolution is set to ppi by default. First, choose Photo from the Preset popup menu, then choose Landscape, 5x7 from the Size pop-up menu.
Choose your desired Color Mode below Resolution and Color Profile under Advanced , and then enter a Resolution I entered ppi, which is enough for me to have my image printed on a high-end printing press. Once your settings are in place, click on the Save Preset button. In the Preset Name field, enter your new resolution at the end of the size. You only have to go through this once. Photoshop will remember your custom settings, and they will appear in this Preset pop-up menu from now on. A warning dialog will appear asking you to confirm the delete.
The trick is to decrease the physical size of your digital camera image and increase its resolution without losing any of its quality. As you can see from the rulers, the photo is about 59" wide by 39" high. Under the Document Size section, the Resolution setting is 72 ppi. That way, when we type in a Resolution setting that we need, Photoshop automatically adjusts the Width and Height of the image down in the exact same proportion.
Pretty cool! In fact, I never print with a resolution higher than ppi. As you can see, the Width of my image is now almost 24" and the Height is now almost 16". Note: Do not turn off Resample Image for images that you scan on a scanner— they start as high-res images in the first place.
Turning Resample Image off like this is only for low-res photos taken with a digital camera. That way, when the Image Processor opens, it already has those photos pegged for processing. Then, in the second section, decide whether you want the new copies to be saved in the same folder or copied into a different folder.
Just turn on the Run Action checkbox, then from the pop-up menus, choose which action you want to run. If you want to automatically embed your copyright info into these copies, type your info in the Copyright Info field. Click on that menu and choose Percent as shown here.
So, which one is the right one for you? Thankfully, now there is just that. Click-anddrag the Straighten tool horizontally along this straight edge in your photo, starting from the left and extending to the right as shown here. Now, just press the Return PC: Enter key to lock in your straightening, and it straightens and crops the image down to just what you see inside the cropping border the final straightened image is shown here below.
Luckily, maintaining image quality is much easier when sizing down than when scaling up in fact, photos often look dramatically better—and sharper—when scaled down, especially if you follow these guidelines.
Making Your Photos Smaller Downsizing Downsizing photos where the resolution is already ppi: Although earlier we discussed how to change image size if your digital camera gives you ppi images with large physical dimensions like 24x42" deep , what do you do if your camera gives you ppi images at smaller physical dimensions like a 10x6" at ppi? The image will be scaled down to size, and the resolution will remain at ppi.
When the size looks good, press Return PC: Enter. If the image looks softer after resizing it, apply the Unsharp Mask filter see Chapter 10 for settings to bring that sharpness back. You have two documents open, and they look approximately the same size as seen here, at top , but when you drag the sunflower photo onto the blank document, the sunflower photo appears really small as seen below.
The sunflower photo is a low-resolution, ppi pixels per inch image, but the blank document is a high-resolution, ppi image. Try gang scanning fitting as many photos on your flatbed scanner as you can and scanning them as one big single image , and then you can have Photoshop automatically straighten each individual image and place it into its own separate document. No dialog will appear. Instead, Photoshop will look for straight edges in your photos, straighten the photos, and copy each into its own separate document.
Press-and-hold the Shift key, then grab a corner point and drag inward to scale the image down, so it fits within the 8x10" area as shown here on top , and press Return PC: Enter. This is where Content-Aware Scale comes in. Grab the top handle, drag straight upward, and notice that it stretches the sky upward, but pretty much leaves the jet intact. Note: The button that looks like a person in the Options Bar tells Content-Aware Scale that there are people in the photo, so it tries to avoid stretching anything with a skin tone.
Step Three: There are two more controls you need to know about: First, if you try ContentAware Scale and it stretches your subject more than you want, get the Lasso tool L and draw a selection around your subject as shown here , then go under the Select menu and choose Save Selection. When the Save Selection dialog appears, just click OK. Then bring up Content-Aware Scale again, but this time, go up in the Options Bar and choose your selection from the Protect pop-up menu as shown here to tell Photoshop where your subject is.
Now you can drag up or down to fill the empty space with the least possible stretching. The nice thing is the Amount control is live, so as long as your handles are still in place, you can lower the Amount and see live onscreen how it affects your resizing.
In the Layer Style dialog, enter your own settings like changing the glow from yeech yellow to white, or black, or anything but yeech yellow , then click on the Make Default button near the bottom of the dialog. To return to the factory default yeech settings, click the Reset to Default button. In CS4, they changed the shortcuts, which totally bummed out a lot of longtime users, but you have the option of bringing those glory days of channel shortcuts back to the pre-CS4 era.
Click on it and it brings up the Blend If sliders in the Layer Style dialog. When you crop a photo in Camera Raw, you can see the final cropped image without having to open the image in Photoshop. That has changed and JPEG is now a choice, but what it does is makes a copy of the file, which it converts to 8-bit, and saves that instead. This the Pen tool all that much, so he used the letter P for Picker. To hide it again, press V again.
Assign a Keyboard Shortcut to the Color Picker leaves your bit image still open onscreen and unsaved, so keep that in mind. Click on whichever one you want, and type in the shortcut you want. I have to tell you up front: most of the good shortcuts are already taken in fact, almost all combinations of shortcuts are already taken , but my buddy Dave Cross came up with a good idea. The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers Photoshop Killer Tips Working with Tabbed Documents When working with multiple documents while using the Tabs features, to see any tabbed image, just click on its tab at the top of the image window or press CtrlTab to cycle through them one by one.
You can find them by clicking on the pop-up menu at the right end of the Options Bar. To create your own custom workspace layout, just click-and-drag the panels where you want them. To nest a panel so they appear one in front of another , drag one panel over the other. When you see a blue outline appear, release the mouse button and it nests. More panels can be found under the Window menu. Instead, you have to go into that pop-up menu and choose Reset [your workspace name].
When the Match Color dialog appears, just turn on the Neutralize checkbox in the Image Options ssection. Change Ruler Increments If you want to quickly change the unit of measure in your ruler say, from pixels to inches or from centimeters to millimeters , just Right-click anywhere inside the Rulers and choose your new unit of measurement from the pop-up menu that appears.
Switch the Stroke position or location to Inside. Remember the song: Umlaut. The page is white. Kidding, Kim. Just a joke. So, the best advice I can give you is to get out of this panel just as fast as you can.
That basically means making the whites whiter and the blacks blacker, which has been made easier to do in Photoshop CS6 now that the Basic panel has both Whites and Blacks sliders not to mention a Contrast slider that now actually does a good job. So, start in the Basic panel. Now, drag the Blacks slider to the left until it really starts to look nice and contrasty as shown here, where I dragged to — Now, drag the Shadows slider to the left and then paint over the towers as shown here.
Pretty striking difference, eh? Otherwise, I would do it in Camera Raw, because you have more control. However, we can add another click or two and take this conversion up a big notch. All you need to do is change the layer blend mode of this adjustment layer from Normal to Soft Light at the top of the Layers panel, as shown here and look how much more contrasty, and just generally yummy, this photo looks now. Step Four: In the Layers panel, click on the Gradient Map adjustment layer the middle layer to make it active.
Once it appears, click once directly in the center, right below the gradient ramp as shown circled here to add a color stop it looks like a little house right below your gradient. As you slide up and down that left side, let go of the mouse button and look at your photo. Of course, this is all optional [you could have stopped back at Step Three], but now we have some extra editing power if we want it.
For example, to darken the photo, you drag to the right, toward the white end of the gradient, and to lighten the photo, you drag left toward the dark end. Freaky, I know. At this point, dragging either the Highlights or Shadows Hue slider does absolutely nothing because, by default, the Saturation sliders are set to 0.
Note: I made some adjustments in the Basic panel shown here , before I turned on the checkbox. There is one more control—a Balance slider, which lets you control whether your split tone favors your highlight or shadow color. Tritones use three inks, and do I really have to mention how many duotones use?
Quadtoning effects seem to look best with but are not limited to two kinds of photos: 1 landscapes, and 2 people. Now, before you can make a quadtone, you need to convert this image to Grayscale mode by going under the Image menu, under Mode, and choosing Grayscale. It will ask you if you want to flatten your layers, so click the Flatten button. It will also ask you if you want to discard the color info. Click Discard. So, go under the Image menu, under Mode, and choose Duotone.
How about a nice duotone? It uses black and it adds a reddish brown to the mix. Just remember—anytime you come up with a look you like, you can save it as a preset. Now, just turn on the checkboxes for the adjustments you want copied to your preset as I did here , give your preset a name, and then click the OK button.
Keep in mind, though, because the exposure is different for every photo, if you save a preset where you had to tweak the exposure a lot, that same exposure will be applied anytime you apply this preset.
Switch to the other document, then go under the Edit menu, under Paste Special, and choose Paste in Place. Now it will appear in the exact same position in the other document provided, of course, the other document is the same size and resolution.
This also works with selected areas—not just layers. This was destiny, my friends. Step Four: Now we set up the camera to shoot bracketed, which tells the camera to shoot the regular exposure, and then extra photos that are exposed both brighter and darker.
The minimum number of exposures you can use for HDR is three, but I generally take five bracketed photos for my HDR images although some folks take as many as nine. So, with five, I wind up with one shot with my normal exposure, then two darker shots one 1 stop underexposed and one 2 stops underexposed , followed by two brighter ones one 1 stop overexposed and one 2 stops overexposed.
Then use the main command dial to choose how many exposures to bracket the control panel on the top of the camera shows the bracketing settings; choose 5F, so you get five bracketed shots. Use the sub-command dial in front of the shutter button to set the bracketing amount to 1 stop as seen here. Okay, on to the setup for Canon cameras. Now, use the Main Dial to choose 2 stops brighter, then press the Set button again this automatically sets the bracketing to also shoot 2 stops darker.
Now set your camera to High-Speed Continuous Shooting mode, and then press-and-hold the shutter button and your camera will automatically shoot all five bracketed photos once all five are taken, you can release the shutter button. They contain enough depth to make the HDR actually, the darker image is more important than the lighter one , and by only using three photos, the processing is much faster. Hang on—here we go! My buddy RC Concepcion had a couple of his presets included here, as well.
If part of your HDR image looks pretty dark like the courtyard in the center does back in Step Three , then you can open up those shadows a bit by dragging the Shadow slider way over to the right as seen here. Now, you can see the trees in the courtyard pretty well.
When the High Pass filter dialog appears shown here , I generally enter 4 pixels and click OK for a nice snappy sharpening. Note: When the filter dialog appears, it will turn your duplicate layer solid gray with just an outline of the edges in your image.
It helps to take away some of the harshness of an HDR image and gives the image a little bit of a surreal feel to it in a good way, not in an over-the-top, crazy surreal HDR way that drives people nuts. Enter 50 pixels to blur the heck out of it, and click OK as shown here. This is what blends the glow effect in nicely and gives you the final effect you see at the bottom right. These actually come into play if you turn on the Auto Ghosting feature—more on that later in the chapter.
Any way, ignore those for now, and just know that, instead, a lot of your editing work will be spent finding a good balance between the two Edge Glow sliders. The Radius slider controls the size of the edge glow, and the Strength slider controls the contrast of that glow. In my Scott5 preset, I set the Radius at and the Strength at 0. For this image, which is going more in the hyperreal direction, set the Gamma to the right at 0.
Step Six: The Exposure slider controls the overall exposure, much in the same way the Exposure slider does in Camera Raw dragging to the left darkens the overall image; dragging to the right brightens it. In this case, go ahead and drag the Exposure to 0. Now, keep in mind that these are two sliders that will change some from image to image. Most of the time, I wind up lowering the Highlight amount either a little or a lot depending on the image , and raising the Shadow amount to keep the shadows from getting too dark.
But, again, it just depends on the image. Basically, these make the colors more punchy, so if your image needs more color, try dragging the Vibrance slider to the right.
Be careful about adding too much Vibrance or Saturation at this point, because in the next step, when we add contrast, that usually makes the colors automatically more vibrant. You see that diagonal line going across the curve grid? Well, we bend that line into a subtle S-curve and that adds contrast.
The steeper we make this S-curve, the more contrast it adds. So, start by clicking once in the center of the line and it adds an adjustment point there see bottom left. Now, add another point halfway between that center point and the top right, then clickand-drag it upward a bit as seen in the bottom center. Remember, if you need more contrast, click-and-drag the top point up higher and the bottom point down lower, which makes the curve steeper. By the way, in the previous step, when we increased the contrast, it made the highlights a little too bright, so I went back to the Highlight slider and pulled them back to —80, since the stone floor was starting to blow out in some areas.
Note: At this point, you could save this as an HDR Pro preset click on the icon to the right of the Preset pop-up menu and choose Save Preset to add it to the list.
Step Now, click the OK button at the bottom right to have Photoshop process the image. How do you get your image back into Camera Raw? When the dialog appears, click on the image you just saved, and from the Format PC: Open As pop-up menu at the bottom, choose Camera Raw as shown here to have the image open in Camera Raw for processing, and then click Open.
Okay, the image looks brighter, but it also looks kinda flat, so this is where you want to bump up the Contrast. That brings in a lot more detail, too. And, to keep the image from looking washed out, we need to lower the Blacks. Anytime I see an image looking washed out, the first thing I think of is I need to lower the Blacks, so drag that slider to the left to — To do this, click on the Effects icon the fourth one from the right at the top of the Panel area, and go under Post Crop Vignetting.
A before and after is shown below. It actually looks like it has an effect applied. In fact, if you look at the side of this building, you can see an edge glow around it. Nothing screams HDR like an edge glow. Step Two: Surprisingly, the one that looks the most photorealistic to me is the preset called Default. So, choose Default from the Preset pop-up menu, and take a look at the image. The edge glow is gone, and look at, for example, the grass, trees, and left side of the building.
You also might want to add a little bit of contrast using an S-curve, as shown here see page in this chapter for more on this. Below is a before and after, comparing the normal-exposure image and the HDR image.
Again, notice how the HDR image reveals so much more in the details, and in the texture of the building, without it getting clogged up and turning to black in areas. Now go under the Filter menu, under Other, and choose High Pass as shown here.
Now, drag the slider to the right until you can just start to see the color peek through the solid gray as shown here — the farther you drag, the more intense the effect will be here, as an example, I dragged to 7 pixels, and you can see lots of edge detail starting to appear.
Get the Brush tool B , and make sure your Foreground color is set to white. Start by opening the image in Camera Raw. Step Two: Drag the Highlights slider all the way to the left. Then, drag the Shadows slider all the way to the right, which tends to make the image look washed out. Click on the Adjustment Brush K in the toolbar up top, and then click three times on the little — minus sign button to the left of Clarity. This resets all the other sliders to 0, and then sets the Clarity to a negative amount —75 , which creates a softening effect.
However, you at least should know where HDR Toning is and give it a try to see what you think. In the Tone and Detail section, set your Gamma to 0. Crank up the Vibrance and Saturation a bit to add in some color. Lastly, add an S-Curve see page earlier in this chapter for more on this to add more contrast to your image. In this handheld photo of the Forbidden City, there are people moving in the scene, but in most cases, fixing that is just one click away.
Here are some settings you can use for this image: Radius: , Strength: 0. Lastly, turn on the Edge Smoothness checkbox to enhance the detail and smooth out the edges. Merge to HDR Pro tries to deal with the ghosting by looking for things that are in common in all your exposures to lock onto and it does a pretty amazing job of it.
If you want to try one of the other images, and see if using it does a better job than the one Photoshop chose, just click on it down in the filmstrip. Here, I clicked on the first image, but it actually looks worse. When you do this, you can see some of the funky stuff I was talking about up in the intro—a fakey-looking sky, glows around the mountains and the two colorful glass creations on top of the two columns in the foreground.
Also, the photo looks a little bright to me, anyway , so lower the Exposure to —0. Step Six: Click the Open Image button to open your regular-exposure image in Photoshop, and now you should have two images open: 1 the HDR image with its problems , and 2 the normalexposure image with its problems. Note: If you hand-held your HDR bracketed shots, and Photoshop had to do some layer alignment as it applied the HDR effect, holding the Shift key may not be enough to line these two perfectly up.
At the top of the Layers panel, change your layer blend mode from Normal to Difference. This highlights any alignment differences between the two layers.
You do this, with the Move tool still active, by hitting the Right Arrow key on your keyboard once and the Down Arrow key once. Next, click on your top layer, so that only it is active, press-and-hold the Option PC: Alt key, and click on the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to hide the HDR image layer behind a black mask.
Get the Brush tool B , choose a soft-edged brush from the Brush Picker in the Options Bar and, since your mask is black, you need to paint in the opposite color, so make sure your Foreground color is set to white.
Now, begin painting over the parts of the image that you want to have a more HDR look. All that detail is coming out now, but look at our sky and the mountains—they look realistic. I painted over the sidewalk, as well, to bring out half the HDR in it.
But, I avoided that shadow of the railing, because once I painted over it, it got a funky-looking edge, so I just pressed Command-Z PC: Ctrl-Z to undo my painting, and then repainted the sidewalk while avoiding that shadow. I painted over the other walkway on the left, too, but when I painted over the red glass ornaments, it looked weird, so I used Undo, and painted those columns again, but not the red glass.
Then, finally, get the Spot Healing Brush J and click once on each of those sensor dust spots in the sky to remove them, giving you the image seen here. Also, look at the glass ornaments on top of the columns—too dark in the top shot, then they have those awful glows in the middle one, but this one has the right mix. Shown here is the regular exposure—one of the five bracketed photos taken for an HDR image. I actually briefly covered these two effects earlier in this chapter when I applied them to our projects as finishing moves.
To get to this feature, in Camera Raw, click on the Effects icon the fourth icon from the right at the top of the Panel area. The Midpoint slider determines how far that darkening extends in toward the center of your photo so I dragged it just a little to the left to make the dark edge bigger. To get to this, go under the Filter menu in Photoshop and choose Lens Correction.
When the dialog appears shown here , click on the Custom tab near the top right. In the Vignette section, drag the Amount slider to the left to darken the edges, and then drag the Midtone slider to the left a bit, too. These same controls are also found in Camera Raw and do the same thing if you go to the Lens Corrections panel and click on the Manual tab. It still looks really blurry, but what gives this the right look is when you change the blend mode of this blurry layer from Normal to Soft Light.
Now, you get that soft glow across the image that takes the edge off the harsh HDR look. A dialog will appear and, if you click the Yes button, it disables any third-party plug-ins. Now, not only is it off by default, but you can edit the size and color of the grid itself. Just go to the Layers panel, Command-click PC: Ctrl-click on the layers you want duplicated to select them, then use that same shortcut to duplicate all the selected layers this is new in CS6.
I usually use five images as I explained at the beginning of this chapter , but an interesting tidbit I learned from one of the Photoshop product managers is that, for the best results, you need more darker photos than lighter ones. Correction dialog, a Size field and a color swatch become available to the right of the checkbox. Press it again to bring them all back. Renaming Multiple Layers Fast Want to rename a bunch of layers?
The Tab key takes you to the next layer down; to jump back to a previous layer, press Shift-Tab. You can find Kuler built right into Photoshop in its own panel. Just go under the Window menu, under Extensions, and choose Kuler, and browse some of the most popular color combos right within Photoshop.
If you see a set of colors you like, double-click on it to see them as larger swatches in a panel. To make any of those color swatches your Foreground color, just double-click on it. Instead, move your cursor outside the Layer Style dialog—over into your image area—and just click-and-drag the shadow itself right where you want it.
❿
Comments
Post a Comment