Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i Practical Photoshop

Ever wondered what the offspring of a hippo and a hamster might look like? Or a poodle and a gorilla? or a goldfish and a giraffe? With a few simple Photoshop skills you can unleash your inner Dr Moreau and find out. Over the next few pages we’ll explore a range of compositing skills that you can use not just to make macabre animal creations, but all kinds of amazing composites. To kick things off we’ll begin with our zebra/cockerel creation here. We’ve supplied the starting images, but why not try using some of your own animal photos? However, keep in mind that the success of an effect like this - or any composite - begins with the choice of images. There needs to be at least some consistency in…

Layer Masks are central to all kinds of compositing tasks. They have a simple yet incredibly powerful function: they let you hide parts of a layer. Because layers stack up on top of one another, this ability to hide parts of an upper layer allows you to reveal parts on the underlying layer, which is essentially what compositing is all about. The great thing about layer masks is that nothing is ever lost or erased, it’s just hidden. Here are a few essential Layer Mask tips, tricks and facts… 01 BLACK HIDES, WHITE REVEALS Black areas on the mask are hidden, and white areas are revealed. You can see this in the mask thumbnail here. There are several ways to add black or white to a mask. The most simple…

Photoshop’s Radial Blur is one of several filters that let you blur the detail in your photos. What’s clever about this particular filter is the direction in which it blurs. As the name suggests, it lets you blur in a radial way – either in concentric circles or bursting outwards from a centre point. The latter option can be used to mimic the look of clouds in motion, as if they have moved across the sky during a long exposure. Of course, nothing beats capturing a real long exposure in-camera. But sometimes it may not be possible to do this. Perhaps you’ve been caught short without a tripod or ND filter, or maybe you’d like to try the effect out on one of your old landscape photos. Either way, you…

When you make a selection, its edge is initially very abrupt and jagged, but after running it through the Select And Mask command (Select > Select And Mask), it will almost always turn out much better. The key features of the command are the Radius controls. Using both the Radius slider and the Refine Radius brush, you can increase the area of refinement along the edge, which means the command will look further afield to find the pixels that should be included or excluded from the selection. It’s essential when you make precise selections of fur or hair, for example.…

1 BLUR METHOD The filter offers two different types of blur. Spin works in a circular motion around the center point, while zoom pushes the blur outwards from the center point, like a zoom burst. Spin is useful for adding blur to wheels, for example, so that vehicles appear to be moving fast. Zoom is not only useful for blurring clouds like this, but also for creating all manner of vortex-like effects – try using it on the background in an action portrait for a dynamic blurred backdrop. 2 SELECTIVE BLUR The Radial Blur filter is most useful when you apply it selectively to parts of your photo, like the sky here. First make a duplicate layer (Ctrl/Cmd+J), then select the area. The Quick Selection tool is ideal for selecting…

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…

COPYING AND PASTING After opening any two photos into Photoshop, there are a number of ways you can combine them together. Perhaps the quickest method is with the Move tool. You can simply drag over an image (or its layer in the Layers panel) up to the tab of the other image, wait for them to switch over (while still holding the mouse button down), and drag down into the new image to copy it over. The new image will sit on its own layer in the Layers panel, ready to be positioned and blended in. If you press and hold Shift after you begin dragging an image across, it’ll be pasted ‘in place’, which means it’ll appear in exactly the same position as its origin. POSITIONING LAYERS The Transform…

Of all the tools available in Photoshop’s Camera Raw plug-in – or indeed in the entirety of Photoshop – the Graduated Filter is one of the most useful, especially when it comes to tweaking your landscapes. The tool allows you to make a linear adjustment over part of your photo, producing a transitional blend of tones. Anywhere beyond the first point that is typically defined will be entirely affected by the tonal settings that you input, with a gradual fall-off. This is determined by the length of the line you drag. This enables you to carefully create possible enhancements to key areas of your photos. It’s effective for balancing a scene in which one part might be darker or brighter than another. With landscapes, this can occur when you include…

One of the best things about Photoshop is how it gives you the opportunity to transport people or objects from one place to another. You can replace a background or specific part of a photo to come up with new scenes that could never exist in the real world. In this simple project, we’ll show you how it’s done. The fundamental feature for this technique is layers. This cornerstone of Photoshop allows us to bring in different parts of photos, then combine them with complete control. Here we simply copy the New York city scene onto our original portrait, then use layer blending skills to fit it to the empty window. To combine our two photos we can make use of a fantastic command in Photoshop called Blend If. This…