Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2019 i Practical Photoshop

The raw workflow begins with a choice: the decision to switch from JPEG to raw quality on your camera. This is a big step. It’s a commitment to your photography; a pledge to spend more time perfecting your photos in post; and an undertaking to increase your file storage. But the decision brings big benefits. Your camera’s raw format has a higher dynamic range, which means it has a greater headroom for editing and makes it easier to recover under- or overexposed details. It also means you can choose a white balance after the fact, with no loss in quality. With these benefits comes a slightly elongated workflow. You can’t simply open the raw image into Photoshop immediately or send it off into the wider world. First, you need to…

Just like an archive of negative film, you’ll need to come up with a robust storage solution for your raws – with backups in at least two places. This brings us to one of the drawbacks of shooting raw, and perhaps the only reason you might ever choose to shoot JPEG. All the extra data contained in a raw file comes at a price, and that price is extra storage. They are typically three or four times larger than equivalent JPEGs, so naturally they’ll take up more space on your drive (and your memory card). So if you’re making the switch to raw for the first time, it might also be time to think about your storage workflow. When you first download your raws from your memory card, be sure…

If, like most people, you don’t really want to have to spend hours in front of your computer, sorting and editing your photos, there are lots of ways to speed up your raw workflow. Chiefly, you can save our favorite effects and treatments to use on other images. Let’s say you make a nice, punchy black-and-white landscape – perhaps by stripping out the color, then dialling down the blues to make the sky more dramatic, then finally applying sharpening. It may have taken you 10 minutes or so to do, playing with sliders while you perfected the look. Well, the good news is you’ll never have to spend 10 minutes making the same effect again, as long as you save a preset. Available in both Camera Raw and Lightroom (and…

The Levels command has long been one of the most useful tonal tools in Photoshop. Not only can you use it to lighten or darken an image, you can also correct color casts, increase contrast, fix exposure, and introduce color shifts. It’s worth noting that if you shoot in raw, it’s best to make as many tonal edits as you can in Camera Raw before opening the image into Photoshop. But if you need to alter tones once your image is open, Levels offers a fine degree of control. There are two ways you can apply Levels to your photo: either directly to your pixel layer (Image > Adjustments > Levels, or Cmd/Ctrl+L), or as an Adjustment Layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels). The latter gives you more…

So you’ve switched to shooting raw – what’s next? Those with an Adobe Photography Plan subscription have two main choices. You can either import the raw file into Lightroom, or you can begin editing it with Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin. Both options offer almost identical raw editing tools, with the Camera Raw panels closely matching those found in the Lightroom Develop Module. Lightroom also brings lots of organizational features and presentation tools, while Camera Raw links closely with Photoshop and its huge array of image-editing tools. If you’re interested in creating a fully organized, keyworded and structured image library, Lightroom is definitely the way to go – but it complicates the process slightly because you must import the file. If you simply want to get at a raw file quickly,…

So if raw files are impenetrable, how do you edit them? In essence, you don’t. Rather, you view them, then make changes to that view. When you edit a raw photo in Lightroom or Camera Raw, you are not altering the pixels: you are simply changing its appearance within the application. It’s like adding filters on top of the photo. This is called parametric editing. It means that, unlike many of the pixel-altering tools in Photoshop, you’re instead applying a set of parameters to the image. Your raw image as it appears in Lightroom or Camera Raw is essentially a preview of the image. Any changes that you’ve made are only committed if you choose to export or save the file in another format, like a JPEG or a TIFF.…

The fact that changes to an image are stored alongside the raw file rather than ‘on top’ of it gives you ultimate flexibility to alter any setting at any time, create different treatments for your image, or simply remove all edits and start anew. It’s also why there’s no need to ever ‘save’ your raw edits, because each time you make a change to the image you’re simply updating the sidecar data. What’s more, that sidecar data can be synced from one file to another to give it a similar look. The sidecar data makes it easy to batch-edit a whole set of photos with a couple of clicks, because you can sync all the relevant edits from one raw photo to the rest of the batch.…

In the wider world, your raw file is essentially useless. You won’t be able to send it to a printer or post it to social media. So if you deem the image worthy, the last stage is to save a duplicate in a usable file format like a JPEG or TIFF. This will ‘burn in’ the raw edits you’ve made. Of course, if you’re not ready to commit, you can simply click Done in Camera Raw or leave Lightroom, and all your raw edits will be stored. If you do decide to progress the image beyond Camera Raw or Lightroom, you’ll need to either save or export the image. In Camera Raw, you have two choices. You can either click Open, which send the image into Photoshop where you can…

1 MIDPOINT EYEDROPPER This eyedropper lets you sample points in your image, and remaps the colors around that point. You can use it to correct color casts in your photos by clicking on a point that should be neutral, like a white wall, a grey rock, or the boy’s shorts here. Similarly, the related Black and White eyedroppers let you sample points to make them full black or full white. 2 COLOR CHANNELS This dropdown lets you target different color channels – with RGB images, you can select Red, Green or Blue. Experiment with the different channels to shift colors, either to fix casts or to add creative color shifts. The Red channel lets you add a red/green shift; Green channel is green/magenta; and Blue is blue/yellow. Try shifting the…

Profiles are the perfect place to begin editing your raw photos, and a good example of parametric editing in action. They allow you to instantly apply different looks and treatments. Adobe has created a range of raw profiles that cater specifically for different types of raw photos, like landscapes and portraits. For example, the Portrait profile enhances skin tones, while the Landscape profile draws out texture and color. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/2QE8tw1…

Photoshop has many types of layers and adjustment layers available, but there are six that you’ll find you need to use again and again. Learning how they should be used may seem a little daunting for beginners, but once you’ve got to grips with them, you’ll find they play a part in the creative process of almost every image you make. 01 LEVELS This should be the first layer you add to an image, because it fundamentally alters the tonal range of the entire image. Create a Levels Adjustment Layer, drag the Black Point slider inwards until it touches the left-hand edge of the histogram, and drag the White Point slider inwards to the right-hand edge. This remaps the tones of the image to make more of the available tonal…