Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i Practical Photoshop

“Welcome to issue 130 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99?” If you can get to grips with layer Blending Modes, you can make all kinds of incredible images with very little effort. Amongst a host of Photoshop tools of varying difficulty, it’s something of an easy win, so it’s well worth learning a few fundamentals. We explore several key techniques this issue. www.digitalcameraworld.com…

While there are 27 Blending Modes on offer, there are five or six that you’re likely to end up using far more than the others. Along with Overlay and Soft Light (useful for blending textures) these are Lighten and Darken, Screen and Multiply. Lighten only allows pixels that are brighter than those below to show through, while Darken does the opposite. Screen and Multiply are similar, but they combine either the brightness or darkness values in the layers. Many Blending Modes have counterparts in this way. Screen and Multiply are opposites in the way they fill in the lighter or darker areas of the portrait with the blended abstract image shown here.…

01 To quickly boost a flat-looking portrait, simply add a Black & White Adjustment Layer, then change the Blending Mode to Overlay or Soft Light. Lower the layer opacity until it looks right. Of course, you can also use the sliders in the B&W settings to fine-tune the effect. 02 Alternatively, you can add any Adjustment Layer you like – such as Levels here – then leave the settings untouched, and change the Blending Mode to Screen to quickly brighten the image. Once done, adjust the layer opacity to suit. If you want a darkening effect, use Multiply instead of Screen. 03 A Curves Adjustment Layer is one of the best tools for adding contrast. An S-shaped curve line like this deepens shadows and lifts highlights, so is a brilliant…

01 HAND-COLOR OLD PHOTOS To give vintage photos a hand-painted look, simply paint colors on a new layer set to the Color Blending Mode. 02 CHECK ALIGNMENT If you want to check that two image layers are in perfect alignment, temporarily set the Blending Mode to Difference, then nudge with the arrow keys until it goes black. 03 SHARPEN WITH HIGH PASS For a great sharpening effect, copy a layer, go to Filter > Other > High Pass, choose a strength, then set the Blending Mode to Overlay. 04 COMPOSITE FIREWORKS If you want to blend stars or fireworks to a dark night sky, use the Lighten Blending Mode; if necessary, mask the effect to affect only the sky with Select > Sky. 05 CANCEL OUT TEXT BACKGROUNDS If you…

Waterfalls are one of the most enticing of landscape subjects. From a photographer’s perspective, there’s so much potential. First and foremost, there’s the movement of the cascading water, which you can transform into silky-smooth blur with a long exposure. Then there are surrounding details like rocks, rivers and foliage, which can all add wonderful foreground interest. Many photographers would reach straight away for an ND filter, set up a long exposure and capture the motion in the water as beautiful blur. While this is usually the best course of action, there are less obvious tricks and skills you can use in combination with long exposures to elevate your waterfall photos. Some of these tricks are purely camera skills, while others require a mix of camera and post-production techniques. One such…

01 SHOOT FOR A STACK Sometimes we may want to include details that are very close to the lens, like the branch here. This can make it tricky to get the whole scene sharp. Take two or more shots while varying the focus point, making sure the exposure settings stay consistent throughout the set. 02 STACK THE SHARPNESS Focus-stacking is straightforward in Photoshop. Go to File > Scripts > Load Into Stack to load your set of focus-stacked images, then Cmd/Ctrl-click to highlight the layers and go to Edit > Auto Align. Choose Auto, then go to Edit > Auto-Blend to combine the sharp parts.…

Blending Modes let you blend pixels on the selected layer with those below. Each mode employs an algorithm based on the brightness or color values of individual pixels. With 27 modes, it’s not always clear which Blending Mode will give you the best results, so experimentation is key. Hover over any mode in the dropdown to preview each effect, or press Shift-Plus or Shift-Minus to cycle through them. To get started, simply copy (Cmd/Ctrl+C) an image and paste (Cmd/Ctrl+V) onto another image, then go to the Layers Panel, click the Blending Mode dropdown at the top and choose from the list. To achieve a double exposure, for example, set the Blending Modes to Screen.…

As well as the layer Blending Modes, you can blend layers in Blending Options. Double-click a layer to open the dialog box. The Blend If sliders are useful for gradually fading out highlights or shadows in an effect (hold Alt and drag half the slider to feather the effect). You can also get creative by mixing color channels. Copy one image on top of another, then double-click the top layer to open Blending Options, and toggle the R, G or B boxes on or off. Do the same with the layer below. Here the top layer has the G and B channels turned on, while the bottom layer has R turned on. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3IRA4RO…

Unlike the other modes, Color Burn, Linear Burn, Color Dodge, Linear Dodge (Add), Vivid Light, Linear Light, Hard Mix, and Difference all give a different effect at 50% Fill to 50% Opacity. This can be put to great use for enhancing landscapes. Make a new layer and change the Blending Mode to Hard Mix. Grab the Brush Tool and Alt-click to sample a color from the image, then paint over similarly colored details to increase the vibrancy and selectively boost the color. It’ll look awful at first, but when you drop the layer Fill value down to around 10-20%, it’ll start to look fantastic.…

There are lots of tools in Photoshop and Lightroom for adjusting the look of your black-and-white photos. Most of them are easy to get the hang of; more often the challenge lies in committing to a certain monochrome look, especially when there are so many sliders and settings to choose from. Should you go for this bold contrasty look? Or will a subtle matte effect be more suited to your photo? How about adding a vignette? Opening up the shadows? Dropping the blues? And so on. It’s the age-old editing conundrum: stick or twist? Thankfully, there are features that can help you overcome image-editing analysis paralysis. One such tool is Profiles. They’re ideal for monochrome lovers, as they give you one-click treatments in seconds, offering just the right amount of…

1 USE A TRIPOD A tripod is an essential piece of kit for the serious waterfall photographer. Not only does it let you shoot long exposures and blur the water while keeping everything else sharp, it also allows you to focus-stack your shots and composite several frames together – useful if there are tourists blocking the view. 2 EXPOSURE SETTINGS Our exposure settings for waterfalls are usually very simple. We use ISO 100 for the best image quality, and an aperture of around f/11 to f/16, for plenty of depth of field. Either shoot in Aperture Priority for this and let the camera work out the shutter speed, or shoot in Manual mode and dial in your own. 3 ATTACH AN ND FILTER During daylight we will struggle to get…

01 SHOOT SEVERAL FRAMES Beautiful spots like waterfalls can often be overrun with tourists. If it’s not possible to visit at a quieter time, try shooting several frames as people move around the scene. Later, you can combine the clean parts using layer masking in Photoshop, in the same way as the shutter blending technique earlier. 02 GO LONG Alternatively, fit a 10-stop ND filter to your lens and set up your camera for a 30-second exposure; or you can use a Bulb exposure instead and shoot for even longer. People moving around the scene will disappear over the course of the long exposure; if they’re sat still, then they’ll be recorded as ghostly shapes. 03 CLONE THEM OUT Sometimes it’s impossible to get a clean shot at the time…

The Lighten Mode only allows pixels that are brighter to show through. It’s brilliant for special effects, but also for more practical photography. For instance, the Lighten Mode is hugely useful when lighting a static object over several frames. We can use a tripod to keep the camera still, then use a flash or any light source to lift different parts of the scene over several photos. Combining the frames afterwards is a breeze. We simply copy the images on top of one another (use File > Scripts > Load Into Stack to quickly stack an set of images) then set the Blending Modes of all the layers to Lighten, and use masks to hide any areas you don’t want to include in the mix. It’s a brilliant technique to…

Local adjustments have long been one of the best features in Adobe’s Camera Raw and Lightroom programs. But now things have moved up a gear with Select Sky and Select Subject, two hugely helpful new masking tools that sit alongside the existing Adjustment Brush and Radial and Graduated Filters. These new tools let you automatically target areas with a single click, so you can add drama to a blown-out sky, lift the tones in your subject and make powerful local enhancements. The improvements don’t end there. The brand-new Masking Panel changes the way local adjustments are organized and edited. The old system would give each new edit a simple pin, but now there’s a dedicated panel that makes a group from each mask. Crucially, this allows you to add or…

01 SHOOT VARYING SPEEDS Try shooting the falls at several different shutter speeds. Start off with around 4 sec with ISO 100, then half your shutter speed and double the ISO. Repeat a few times. We don’t need to worry about increasing noise with higher ISOs, as we’re mainly interested in the blurry areas. 02 CHOOSE THE BEST BLUR A 1/2 sec shutter speed gives us nice blur in the falls here, but the slower-moving water in the river below looks too detailed and choppy. By contrast, a 4 sec exposure blurs the river water nicely. We can combine the best blur from each frame using compositing skills in Photoshop. 03 COMBINE IN PHOTOSHOP Open the images you want to use, then go to the faster frame, and copy and…

It’s often the case with landscape photography that if we expose for the foreground, then the sky will be overexposed. The difference between sky and land can be more extreme in waterfall scenes, as waterfalls are often surrounded by dense woodland or shaded by rocky cliffs, which cuts out ambient light. This makes it a challenge to balance out the two in a single frame. The solution is to take a series of bracketed frames (using a tripod), then combine the sky and land in Photoshop. You could employ HDR for this, but often you’ll get better results with manual exposure blending. To do this, copy, paste and mask in the same way as the blending technique described previously, blending the better sky with the lighter foreground in the layer…

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…