Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i Practical Photoshop

Unless you’re looking to make advanced edits or carry out extensive retouching, there’s often no need to bring images into Photoshop at all. Camera Raw (or Lightroom’s near-identical Develop module) offers everything you need to create beautifully bold black-and-white photos. Here we’ll look at how to utilise Camera Raw’s black-and-white controls, before finishing off our image with Camera Raw’s excellent Transform tool, which is ideal for straightening out wonky lines and converging verticals in any of your architectural photos… 01 CONVERT TO MONOCHROME Open an image in Camera Raw. (If it’s a JPEG, right-click it in Bridge and select Open In Camera Raw.) Grab the Targeted Adjustment tool, right-click over the image and choose Grayscale Mix. Drag up or down to lighten or darken tones – here we’ve darkened the…

Doesn’t it look wonderful when landscape scenes are broken up by patches of mist? It’s especially true in scenes like this, where the mist helps a foreground element to stand out against distant details, like the mountains here. This is easily achieved in Camera Raw with the Dehaze command. Normally we’d use Dehaze to cut through haziness for sharper, more detailed landscapes – but here instead we’ll use it to add fog… 01 PAINT ON HAZE To begin, grab the Adjustment Brush from the Toolbar, then go to the settings on the right and click the plus next to Dehaze to dial in a positive value. Set a high Feather in the brush settings, then Shift-click from one side of the image to the other to paint in a band…

Black-and-white emphasizes shapes in images, especially if there’s strong contrast between them. As such, you can blend different kinds of brush shapes with black-and-white portraits for eye-catching results – and because everything is in monochrome, it gels easily. We’ve used a set of brushes from the Creative Cloud App. If you have an older version of Photoshop, there are plenty of websites where you can download similar ‘ink scribble’ brushes. If you use your own image for this project, it helps if it’s against a lighter backdrop. 01 CROP AND CONVERT Open cover_before into Photoshop. First, grab the Crop tool and crop the image with room at the top and bottom. Next, go to the Layers panel, click the Create Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom and choose Black and…

WHAT IS WHITE BALANCE? Light comes in all kinds of different colors. Our eyes can adapt to these variations so that a white object will always look white, but cameras need a little help, which is why you either need to set the white balance correctly in-camera or alter it later on. If you shoot in raw, you can do so with no loss in quality, as if you’d set it at the time. 1 THE WHITE BALANCE TOOL Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin (or the near-identical Lightroom Develop module) is the ideal place to fix white balance. Grab the White Balance tool from the toolbar and click over a neutral point in the image: all the other colors will be remapped around this point. 2 IDENTIFYING A NEUTRAL POINT How…

Because black-and-white is a great simplifier of images, it makes it easier to create collages. You can place images side by side with more freedom: there’s less danger of the result getting too busy. There are several options for simple photo collages in Photoshop. You’ll find useful templates under File > New within the Photo tab. Simply download a template, then drop your own images into the placeholders. Another simple option for Lightroom users is the Print module, which offers templates via the Template Browser. For greater control, you can make your own collage manually in Photoshop. With some clever use of clipping masks this doesn’t have to take long – and you have the freedom to shift and move either the template window or the image within it at…

Stretch an exposure to several seconds or more and the movement of clouds is captured as a beautiful silky blur. It’s one of the landscape photographer’s most potent visual devices, but it requires a tripod and a strong neutral-density filter. If you don’t have this gear, or if you’d like to see how the effect would work with a photo you’ve already taken, you can recreate the look in Photoshop. The long-exposure look goes well with a moody black-and-white treatment. Begin by converting your image to monochrome. There are many ways to remove color in Photoshop, but one of the most powerful is found within the Camera Raw plugin. Here you can use the HSL/ Grayscale Panel and Targeted Adjustment Tool to strip out the color while controlling eight color…

It’s best to fix color casts in a raw converter like Camera Raw or Lightroom before bringing the image into Photoshop – but if that’s not possible, here’s a Photoshop trick that will help you fix the cast. Create a new layer [1] then go to Edit > Fill; choose Contents: 50% Grey to make a grey layer [2]. Change the Blend mode [3] of the layer to Difference. Now you need to identify the darkest areas. Click the Adjustment Layer icon [4] and choose Threshold [5], then drag the slider to the left [6] so that only a few tiny black points are visible. Grab the Color Sampler tool [7] and click over the black area, then hide both the top layers. Add a Curves Adjustment Layer [8], then…

There are lots of ways to convert an image to black and white in Photoshop. There are methods that involve Desaturate, Grayscale, Hue/ Saturation, Channel Mixer, Lab Color, Gradient Maps, and more. But out of all of them, the most reliably quick and effective is in Camera Raw. The HSL Grayscale controls are eight sliders that let you alter the brightness of different color ranges while converting to mono. Used in combination with Camera Raw’s Targeted Adjustment Brush, you have a fine degree of control over the look of your black-and-white. 01 REMOVE THE COLOR Open an image in Camera Raw (right-click it in Bridge and pick Open In Camera Raw). In the HSL / Grayscale Panel, check Grayscale Mix. Now either adjust the sliders to change color brightness, or…

If an image is badly underexposed (and we’re talking barely visible), you might be able to rescue it by converting to mono. With black and white, you can get away with stronger shifts in brightness, as the lack of color information makes extreme exposure fixes less noticeable than usual. To begin, open the image in Camera Raw. Start by increasing Exposure, Brightness and Blacks to pull detail out of the image. (It helps if it’s been shot in raw format: raws have a wider dynamic range, so they contain more detail in the shadows.) Next, convert to mono: go to the HSL panel and check Grayscale Mix. Unfortunately, lightening very dark pixels inevitably leads to an increase in noise, so head to the Details panel next, and use the Noise…

01 USE THE WHITE BALANCE TOOL Navigate to a folder of similarly lit images in Bridge. Right-click on one image and select Open In Camera Raw from the resulting pop-up menu, then grab the White Balance tool from the toolbar. Click over a neutral gray point (or drag a box to sample a wider area). Click Done to close the image and go back to Bridge. 02 COPY AND PASTE THE FIX Right-click over the edited photo and choose Develop Settings > Copy Settings from the pop-up menu. Next, Shift-click between the first and last photo in the set to select them all, then right-click over them and go to Develop Settings > Paste Settings. In the Paste Settings box, click Check None then check White Balance and click OK.…

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…