Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i Practical Photoshop

This year Adobe decided to change the Save As command so that if you’re working on a layered image, you can now only save in a format that supports layers, like a PSD or TIFF. This might sound like a small tweak, but it’s incredibly annoying for those of us who have grown used to pressing Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+S to bring up Save As to quickly save a JPEG or any other format we like. To be fair to Adobe, it’s an issue that came about because of changes to macOS, which left the old Save As command redundant. Now we instead need to use the Save A Copy command, which bafflingly has a different shortcut: Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+S. So we have two options: either learn this new shortcut or, if decades of muscle…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3tWBAel Making multiple exposures in Photoshop is really easy: all you have to do is copy one layer on top of another, then change the Blending Mode to Screen. But if you want an extra degree of control, try using Blend If. This lets you blend pixels based on luminosity. So we can, for example, tweak things so that the white backdrop on the portrait layer shows through, while making the industrial shapes on the layer above appear stronger. Simply double-click a layer to bring up Blend If, then experiment with the This Layer and Underlying Layer sliders (Alt-drag to split sliders in half to make blends look smoother). With Blend If, you can fine-tune multiple exposures for all kinds of amazing blending effects.…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3EwS1D4 Photoshop’s Shadows/Highlights command has long been one of the most useful tonal tools on offer in the software. Initially, the tool offers two simple sliders: one lets you lift the shadows, while the other darkens the highlights. However, hidden away are a wealth of other options that give you a fine degree of control over shadows and highlights in your scene. Shadows/Highlights can be used on all kinds of photos, but it really comes into its own with landscapes. Like our Icelandic seascape here, a typical landscape photo will often be dominated by very bright and very dark tones, as skies tend to be lighter than the land below. This makes it tricky to achieve a balanced exposure, as the contrast between the two is too…

01 PLACE THE GELS When it comes to placing a color gel over your light source, be sure not to leave any gaps around the edges. If you’re using a studio flash, it’s best to leave the modelling light off, as it can melt the gel. Often it’s easier to simply remove the modelling bulb, as this makes it simpler to place the gel over the flash bulb. 02 SET UP COLOR COMBINATIONS If you want to combine two or more gels, choose colors that are complementary. If you look at a standard color wheel, the colors opposite one another will work in harmony, so go for a red/green combo, or blue/orange. Think about how the color can work with your subject’s clothes, too. 03 SET THE FLASH POWER Gels…

Liquify is normally thought of as a tool for reshaping parts of objects or people, but you might be surprised to hear that this tool is also brilliant at fixing hairs. This is a trick every portrait retoucher should know! The problem with retouching stray hairs is that it takes forever. Tools like the Spot Healing Brush, which are excellent for most retouching tasks, often give messy results with hairs. But rather than removing stray hairs, you can instead use Liquify to smooth them down into a pleasing shape, and the results can often be much more natural than trying to remove the hairs. The trick works best in portraits shot against clean, simple backgrounds. Simply go to Filter > Liquify, then grab the Freeze Tool from the toolbar on…

The Black and White Adjustment Layer is usually used to – you’ve guessed it – convert an image to black and white. But it can also be an invaluable tool for controlling colors. Simply add the layer (click the Create Adjustment Layer icon in the Layers Panel and choose Black & White) then change the Blending Mode to Luminosity. Now instead of removing the color, it allows us to change the brightness of the different color ranges (much like the Luminosity sliders in Camera Raw and Lightroom’s HSL Panel). Similarly, when we use Curves to boost contrast with an S-curve, a byproduct is often a shift in color saturation. Often this is a good thing, but sometimes it can leave photos looking overcooked – especially portraits, where the skin has…

Clipped pixels are usually something to be avoided in photos: if areas are clipped to pure black or pure white, then all detail will be lost. But there are times when you might want pure black or pure white, like when you’re working on product shots with white backdrops. Of course, you could just paint with white or black, but this can be time-consuming, especially if you have to carefully paint around an object. Instead, try painting with the Brush Tool set to the Overlay Blending Mode in the brush options. Now if you paint white, the tool will blow out any tones that are near to white, while leaving other tones less affected. Similarly, paint with black and the tool leans on the darker tones more than others. The…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3krEuF0 Content-Aware Fill lets you fill in large areas of a photo to remove unwanted objects. Here it lets us extend our backdrop and cover up the messy edges of the frame. But the command doesn’t get it right every time. It uses surrounding pixels for reference, so it can sample from the wrong area (here it duplicates textures from the model’s dress). To trick the command into sampling the right areas, duplicate the layer and hide the layer below, then grab the Eraser Tool and remove the subject. Use the Lasso Tool to select the problem areas, then run the Fill command (Edit > Fill) set Contents: Content Aware and click OK.…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3ADaivW Color gels offer a wonderful way to enhance your lighting and add impact to portraits. By placing a gel in front of a flash or LED you can tint the light to any shade you like. Whether you want a bold colorful backdrop or an atmospheric color tint over your subject, gels are very handy. What’s more, they’re inexpensive and can be used over budget flashguns, so a simple lighting setup – with a couple of gelled flashguns – won’t cost a lot. And you really don’t need a studio to create beautiful color gel portraits: any large space will do the job. Here, we’ll look at a range of techniques for creative gel photography, from bold vibrant looks to moody low-key effects. We’ll explore complementary…

01 VIBRANT BACKDROPS One of the simplest ways to use color gels is for a vibrant backdrop. Set up a flash directly behind your subject, then choose a color gel to place over the flash and direct it towards the backdrop. Work out an exposure that results in a bold color background, then add a frontal light to lift your subject. 02 BOUNCE COLORS When you bounce a hard light source like a gelled flash off a white piece of card or white reflector, the harsh light from the flash becomes more diffuse, resulting in gentler tints. Here, a blue flash is bounced off a card to the left, and an orange is bounced to the right, resulting in a gentle but vibrant color combination. 03 BOLD AND EDGY A…

The Move Tool isn’t just useful for moving layers: it’s also brilliant at finding them for you. If you have lots of layers, it can be tricky to target the one you need. But grab the Move Tool and check Sample All Layers in the options at the top, and now you can simply click over parts of the image to select the corresponding layer. Of course, there are times when layers overlap one another, which makes this slightly more difficult. Thankfully, the Move Tool has another trick up its sleeve. Simply right-click over any point in the image for a list of all the layers that occupy that spot, then choose the layer you need from the list. And if there’s a layer you keep selecting by accident, remember…

You can assign keyboard shortcuts to any tool, command or menu you like in Photoshop, so you can tailor tools to your own specific workflow. Here’s an example. When making composites or designs we often need to have several documents open at once, and we may need to quickly copy layers between them. The standard tab view (where each open document is accessed by a tab at the top) sometimes makes it difficult to identify specific documents. But you can set up a custom shortcut to quickly switch between a single-image view, and one that shows all your open documents on-screen. These options are usually available under Window > Arrange, but you can speed things up with a custom shortcut. Go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, choose Shortcuts For: Application…

The History Panel records every step in your workflow and lets you step back through them – to an extent. By default it keeps the last 20 steps, and anything beyond this is lost. But if you want to be able to go back further, you need to change the number of history states in the Photoshop Preferences, under Performance. Similarly, if you like to use the Recent Files dropdown under the File menu to open the documents you’ve been working on lately, then you can also change the number of files in the list. Simply go to Preferences > File Handling.…

The new AI-powered Colorize Neural Filter is spookily good at coloring old black-and-white photos. But it can also be used for the opposite, adding a hand-colored effect to a modern photo so that it looks more like a vintage print. Simply open an image, duplicate the layer with Cmd/Ctrl+J then go to Filter > Neural Filters. Enable Colorize, then tweak the colors to suit your photo. Set the output to Duplicate Layer and click OK. To complement the look, why not try adding a texture?…

1 LIGHT SOURCE You can use color gels on any light source, but flash tends to give the best clarity of color and light. Studio heads like this are ideal, but you could equally use flashguns. With two or more flashes in the setup, use a wireless trigger and set them to optical remote, so that they all fire simultaneously. 2 BACKDROP A plain backdrop – such as a wall, a pop-up reflector, a roll of paper, or even a white sheet – will give you a blank canvas on which to spray your chosen colors onto. A neutral gray roll, like the one that we used, is ideal, as it gives greater color saturation than a simple white backdrop. 3 EDGE LIGHTING Lighting the subject from the side or…

Even the boldest colors from gelled lights can occasionally look a bit flat when you first open the shot, but it’s easy to fix and enhance them in Lightroom. Start by experimenting with the white balance. (Shoot in raw so you can change the white balance after the fact.) Next, adjust Vibrance, which targets and boosts the weaker colors without overegging the strong shades. For more targeted control over color, head to the Color Mixer Panel. Here, you can target Hues, then use the Target Tool to drag left or right over colors in the image to alter them. This lets you change the color of the backdrop, for example. You can also use the Adjustment Brush to paint in more color, or selectively alter the white balance for variation.…