Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2021 i Practical Photoshop

Welcome to issue 124 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99? Retro photo effects are all the rage, but if you want a more refined old-school look than phone filters give you, Photoshop offers a host of tools for the job. Elsewhere this issue, selectively boost your landscapes and get creative with flower photos by focus-stacking or shooting with ultraviolet light. www.digitalcameraworld.com Editor James Paterson Art Editor Rosie Webber Production Editor Richard Hill Content Director Chris George Senior Art Editor Warren Brown DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES To download this issue's files, type the following link into your web browser on your PC or Mac: http://bit.ly/pho_124 FIND US HERE… http://bit.ly/practweet http://bit.ly/pracface Also available on: http://bit.ly/pp_pocketmags http://bit.ly/pp_app_store http://bit.ly/zinio_pp…

In general, we want our photos to display a complete range of tones from black to white, but when it comes to retro effects, we can give the impression of a faded old photo by cutting out the two ends of the tonal range. This is easy to do with Curves (use either the Tone Curve in Camera Raw or Lightroom, or the Curves command in Photoshop). Drag the bottom-left point of the diagonal curve line upwards slightly: this lifts our black point, so it effectively sets the darkest tone in our image. Similarly, drag the top-right point down slightly to fade out the white point. To take it further, try similar edits on the red, green and blue curve lines. For example, drag the lower red point upwards to…

If you want a simple, no-fuss way to add vintage effects to your photos, it’s worth investing in a dedicated plugin. Analog Efex Pro comes as part of the excellent Nik Collection (which also includes the fabulous Silver Efex Pro for black-and-white treatments). The plugin lets you create a range of vintage and classic camera effects. There are lots of fun presets to choose from, and a vast array of options for customizing your retro look by adding different light leaks, film borders and more. Once installed, the plugin can be accessed and opened via the Photoshop Filter menu; and after applying and saving your effect, you can send it back to Photoshop for fine-tuning. It’s a powerful package that lets you create all manner of retro effects with ease.…

Focus-stacking is a great way to increase the depth of field in your close-ups, landscapes or any other type of scene where you want to achieve front-toback sharpness. Sometimes this simply isn’t possible in one exposure – especially when you want to include details that are very close to the lens – but by shooting a set of photos with varying focus points, we can combine the sharpest parts into a single image later on. To shoot for a focus stack, simply use a tripod and focus on the closest point. Take a shot, then manually shift the focus slightly and take another, continuing to shoot until you’ve recorded front-to-back sharpness. Of course, plenty of modern cameras have focus-stacking modes that can shift the focus for you automatically. To composite…

01 GET A UV FLASHLIGHT The Convoy S2+ UV LED flashlight used here has a concentrated UV beam, so keep it away from anyone’s eyes, even they have safety glasses on. This 365nm torch is mostly used by minerallovers seeking out rocks and gems or testing minerals at shows. But it’s also ideal for capturing fluorescence in flower photography. 02 ATTACH A ZWB2 FILTER This little circle of glass behaves as a longwave bandpass filter, cutting out some of the light spectrum outside the UV range. By doing so, we prevent visible light from overpowering the weak UV reflectance in flowers. You can tape it to the front of the torch, or unscrew the head and fit it inside. 03 SET AN EXPOSURE The correct exposure will depend on the…

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

One of the easiest ways to give your photos the look of a weathered old print is to blend in a texture on top of it. There are 26 layer Blending Modes to choose from. Depending on your choice of image and texture, any one of these 26 might do, but the most dependable tend to be Lighten, Screen, Darken, Multiply, Overlay and Soft Light. We’ve used the Screen Blending Mode here to add a scratched texture to our portrait. We’ve supplied 30 free textures amongst this issue’s project files for you to try out on your photos. Of course, you can combine more than one texture, using different Blending Modes and layer opacity settings to build up the effect over several layers. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/2TVkAam…

Photoshop and Lightroom both offer a range of built-in one-click effects that let you add a retro color tint in seconds. One of the best tools for the job is the Profiles Browser in Camera Raw or Lightroom. This features a Vintage set of Profiles that skew colors in a pleasingly old-fashioned way. You can also find a range of retro toning presets in the Presets Panel in Camera Raw or Lightroom, which gives you old-school effects like ‘Aged Photo’. Elsewhere, you can find a selection of film stock effects within the Color Lookup Adjustment in Photoshop, and a crossprocessed treatment within the Curves presets.…

Ultraviolet light can have a dramatic effect on flowers by revealing glowing colors and details unseen by the naked eye. Outside the visible spectrum of light, UV causes phosphors in certain substances and surfaces to store up energy, which is then released as light. A phosphor is something that emits visible light when activated by UV radiation – like your white T-shirt and teeth under UV ‘blacklights’ at a disco. However, those sort of disco lights won’t cut it here. The problem is they produce a lot of visible light (this is the blueypurple light you often see). They work great on things like T-shirts and glowing makeup because these surfaces have strong UV reflectance. But with flowers, the UV reflectance is weaker. Instead, we need a more concentrated UV…

01 SET WHITE BALANCE Your flower photos are likely to have a strong blue color cast. It’s best to shoot in raw for greater headroom while correcting colors. Grab the White Balance Eyedropper Tool in the Camera Raw or Lightroom Basic Panel, and click on a point that should be neutral (like the black backdrop here) to correct color casts. 02 USE COLOR MIXER Even after adjusting the white balance, your images may have a strong blue tint. You can tone this down with Camera Raw or Lightroom’s Color Mixer Panel. Go to the Saturation tab, then grab the Target Tool. Click on the overly strong colors and drag to the left to reduce them, or drag to the right over weaker colors. 03 EXPOSURE CONTROL It’s tricky to get…

As well as using Blending Modes to combine textures with your images, you can also create all kinds of interesting effects by experimenting with the Blend If controls. These let you blend by luminosity or color. Double-click a layer to access the Blend If controls, then use the This Layer and Underlying Layer sliders to start blending. You can fade out the brighter parts of one layer to reveal the brighter areas on the layer below by dragging the white point This Layer slider inwards. You can also split the sliders in half by Alt-dragging one side of the triangular control point. This allows you to create a softer transition. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3xjOjrX…

Old lenses would often be very soft around the edges of the frame, which meant that the corners of the photo would be blurred. We can replicate this with simple blur filters in Photoshop. The two best filters for this effect are both found in Photoshop’s Blur Gallery. Here you’ll find the Iris Blur and Tilt-Shift filters. Iris Blur lets you create circular fall-off, so the center of the image stays sharp while the corners go soft. Tilt-Shift works in a linear way, blurring the top and bottom of the frame. Of course, you could use both. To apply the effect, rightclick your layer and choose Convert To Smart Object (this keeps the blur editable), then go to Filter > Blur Gallery > Iris Blur. Use the circular control to…

1 SAFETY GLASSES Exposure to UV light can be damaging to the eyes, so we need some eye protection. Safety glasses are usually made of polycarbonate, which blocks ultraviolet light. Failing that, you could use a pair of decent sunglasses or spectacles that have UV protection. 2 FLOWERS AND LEAVES Different plants will fluoresce in different ways, and you may find some don’t work at all, while others will give you a magnificent show. You might see specks of light or dusty glowing patterns. Experiment with a variety of plants and flowers and see what results you can achieve. 3 PLAIN BACKDROP A dark plain backdrop will contrast with the glowing colors. We used the black side of a 5-in-1 pop-up reflector here. You could try different colors and surfaces…