Photoshop Tips & Tricks for Photographers

Dimy

Hey there,

Seeing that quite some people are posting photo's on here that desperately need some simple photoshopping I decided to start this thread where people can post quick and handy photoshop tutorials to share their photoshop skills with people who don't know much about it yet (maybe good for a sticky?). I'm using Photoshop CS2 myself, so maybe not all of the tools of things I'm posting here are available for you if you use Photoshop Elements or CS, my apologies to them!

I'll start with a quick photoshop tutorial on a very common problem... it's something every photographer experiences, although some more than others :rolleyes: But it's definitely one of my favourite and mostly used photoshop "fixes": How to Straighten Horizons. This post will be up within the next half an hour or so.

Feel free to add new tutorials to this thread and spread those skills!

Cheers,
Dimy

melekalikimaka

great idea, this forum is really taking off.

Dimy

Well here's my first tutorial, in this tutorial I will show how to fix a common problem, a tilted horizon or background. While I'm at it, I also show how to use the clone tool effectively.

Start Image


Ok here we have the starting photo, as you can clearly see the background is tilted cpunter clockwise by a few degrees.

Step 1: Select the Measure Tool


Step 2: Use the Measure Tool


With the Measure Tool Selected, click and drag a line. In this example I dragged a vertical line accross the wall in the background, for landscape photo's you can of course drag a horizontal line at the horizon in the background. Release the mouse button to finish the measurement line.

Step 3: Rotate


Go to the Image Menu --> Rotate Canvas --> Arbitrary...



Now don't change anything to the presented angle in the screen above, by using the Measure Tool it automatically calculated the amount of rotation degrees needed to straighten up the image... so simply click OK here



Step 4: Crop!

Now that we rotated the image, we need to crop the image. I prefer cropping at 2x3 ratio, but if you want a square crop or different dimensions feel free to do so.

Select the Crop Tool:


Make a crop selection by simply clicking and drag a box, when you're happy with the selection release the mouse button. If needed you can still change the size of the crop selection by moving any of the 4 borders upwards, downwards, left or right by just hovering over the side you want to change, click and hold the mouse button and drag.



Check the info box for the size of your selection and adjust either width or height of the selection until you have the desired ratio... in my case 3x2 or 557x371 pixels:



When you're happy, click on the Crop tool Icon once again to confirm the crop.



This is where the Straighten Photo tutorial ends, but as you can see the image above now has a new problem... the top right hand corner is blank, here's where the Cloning Tool comes in hand!

See my next post for a Cloning Tutorial

Shrimp

General tip: Always have the contrast* of a photo slightly stronger than you expect. Keep that in mind.





*not just the contrast slider, I'm talking about anyhting that effects the relation between light and dark.

Dimy

Cloning is another very useful tool in Photoshop... it can be used in many ways, but here's a useful example of how to use this tool effectively.

Here's the starting image:


This is the image we ended the last tutorial with, as I mentioned this photo still needs some editing as after cropping the rotated image the top right-hand corner became blank. We can fix this easily with the Cloning Tool.

Step 1: Select the Clone Stamp Tool


Step 2: Set desired Origin from which to Duplicate


Press and hold the ALT-key and click the desired Origin Point to duplicate from. Now this requires a little bit of practise and is difficult to explain... but in the image above you see what Origin Point I have selected for my example.

Step 3: Start Cloning


Now you have selected an Origin Point you can use the Clone Stamp Tool like any ordinary Brush, you can also change the size of your brush if you want a smaller or larger brush. I started "brushing" with the clone stamp tool at the point indicated in the image above, simply hold the mouse button and drag your mouse around over the area you want to clone.

Final Result:


And that's it... above you can see the final result. We straightened the tilted background of the original and used the clone tool to fill in the blank area!

I hope you found these tutorials useful... I might post some other tutorials later, also if you happen to know a useful trick yourself please feel free to add a tutorial yourself in this thread!

Dimy

Oh and special thanks goes to my nephew and niece, Youri and Anouk, who kindly posed for the picture

Thirdfox

Thanks for posting up those tutorials! I can finally start using some of the power of my Photoshop 5

Placebo

Cropping is fine, maybe some refinning but i dont agree with the fact of photoshoping photography, maybe if the image is being used for something else but it is very misleading when people pitch up the hue/saturation on flickr[for instance] and make it seem like the cameras amazing, before buying a camera - i personally, always go online to look for its results. But croppings, minor adjustments are fine etc, just my opinion, great tutorial anyway, didnt mean to over take.

while im on this, if anyone wants a flamour type shot, or dreamt effect.
DUPLICATE the layer, apply GAUSSIAN BLUR filter[around 4.0] effect. Change layer mode to overlay and flatten the image/combine the layers. Looks nice at times , if its a pic of youre baby.

Fajitas!

Shrimp wrote:

General tip: Always have the contrast* of a photo slightly stronger than you expect. Keep that in mind.

Correct. Try to bring the contrast up to a level that suits, between 0 and 30 usually looks most natural. You might be better off to adjust the darkness slide before this though.

Other than that, if you're starting off in PS, the "Colour Variations" button can be of great help. Experiment with it.

Dimy

Placebo wrote:

Cropping is fine, maybe some refinning but i dont agree with the fact of photoshoping photography, maybe if the image is being used for something else but it is very misleading when people pitch up the hue/saturation on flickr[for instance] and make it seem like the cameras amazing, before buying a camera - i personally, always go online to look for its results. But croppings, minor adjustments are fine etc, just my opinion, great tutorial anyway, didnt mean to over take.

Before any other people reply to this, please don't! This topic is not about whether YOU agree with using Photoshop or not! If you don't like it, don't use it. This topic is meant for the people who do want to use photoshop and need some help. Anyway, the above tutorials are both very minor tweaks imo, and that's the last I have to say about that topic! Please start a new thread if you want to discuss the use of photoshop.... Thanks.

-Dimitry

CONMIKE12

Brilliant idea,very informative and much appreciated.

joolsveer

Very useful idea. It's great to see you being helpful again. Keep it up Dimy.

Dimy

joolsveer wrote:

Very useful idea. It's great to see you being helpful again. Keep it up Dimy.

Your photo's with tilted horizons were an inspiration jools... I have some other tutorial-ideas so will make a few more additions to this thread.

Also if anyone has a question about how to do something in Photoshop, feel free to post your original image here and describe what you would like to be done about it, I might give it a go and describe it step-by-step if it's possible to do.

CrowdedHouse

Excellent tutorial-many thanks Dimy

Flipflip

Excellent idea dimy, good stuff, your tutorials are good man, keep it up sher.

Thirdfox

Is it possible to sharpen out of focus pictures?

see this picture - not in focus is there anything I can do about it in photoshop?

Borderfox

Nice one Dimy great tutorial

Dimy

Thirdfox wrote:

Is it possible to sharpen out of focus pictures?

see this picture - not in focus is there anything I can do about it in photoshop?

I'm afraid that one is beyond help... you can't do magic with photoshop :rolleyes:

Flipflip

Hey how about an dodging/burning tutorial from someone, its the only part of photoshop that id consider myself pretty bad at.

Thirdfox

Lol thanks Dimy anyway! The picture was soooo close to being in focus

Dimy

Flipflip wrote:

Hey how about an dodging/burning tutorial from someone, its the only part of photoshop that id consider myself pretty bad at.

I must admit that I never used dodging and burning myself so don't know much about it. Maybe someone else can post a tutorial for that here.
Anyway...I was going to post a few more tutorials here this weekend, but Irish Broadband messed that up for me... about 90% of the web, including boards.ie, wasn't accessable for me from friday night until about 40 minutes ago . This afternoon I'll be going to Greystones again with a friend so no time. And when I have the time I'll look into dodging and burning myself so we can learn together ;-)

Shrimp

Simple: Dodging and Burning.. use dodge if you wish to highlight a certain area, use burn if you wish to darken an area.. Then the settings within them are self explanatory.

Zillah

Dodging and burning is so much easier to understand if you've done real life photo printing. I get it, but I don't think Im qualified to do a tutorial, although I am considering a couple others.

EireRoadUser

I'm having a problem with photoshop ,whenever i load up a picture they have a yellow tint on them .
It's like photoshop is set to autoadjust the lighting, but i don't want it ??

What can I do?

alleepally

EireRoadUser wrote:

I'm having a problem with photoshop ,whenever i load up a picture they have a yellow tint on them .
It's like photoshop is set to autoadjust the lighting, but i don't want it ??

What can I do?

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/321608.html

EireRoadUser

Thanks alee for that ,I hadn't a clue what was wrong ,so i didn't know how to find out.
Working fine now ,I could have been messing with it for hours.

Dimy

Here's a new tutorial, this time about how to save images for the web. Although most people should be familiar with this already, we still find many unnessary large files posted on this and other boards. Most of the photo's I post are below 100kb, I obviously keep large high quality photo's for personal use on my hard drive, but when it comes to publicing on a website I resize them. Here's a step-by-step guide:

Step 1: The start image

For obvious reasons I will not post the start image here, but here's the stats:
Resolution: 3472 x 2312 pixels
File format: JPEG
Size: 4.10 MB

Step 2: Resize

For forum use a max width or height of 640 pixels is usually more than enough! If people want to see larger versions, you can always send them a link to download a larger version of your photo. Go to the Image Menu and select Image Size...



This brings you to the following screen:


Now make sure you have the Constrain Proportions box ticked and make sure you have the size in pixels instead of percentage. Then change either the width (or height if your original photo is portrait mode) to 640 pixels, it will automatically adjust the height to keep the same proportions.



Now click OK and the file will be resized to the new dimensions.

Step 3: Save for Web

Select Save for Web from the File Menu


Now have a look at the top right hand side of the screen that pops up:


Here you can see the settings I'm generally using when I use the save for web function of photoshop. As I prefer to have the file output format in JPG I selected JPG rather than GIF, I still want to keep high quality as I don't want to much JPG artifacts in my resized photo's and I keep the quality slider at around 75%. You can experiment with this and use whatever setting here that suits you best.

In the lower left hand side corner you can find the new file size if you choose to save with the current settings you have selected:


In my case about 42 kb! That's a huge difference from the original 4,1 MB...

And here's the result:

Fenster

Applying a fake vignette effect:

I often use this to darken the corners or a side of a photo, so that the eye will focus more readily on the subject. Its especially useful with macro shots, such as those I posted yesterday, and its quite easy to do. In my case I am using the Gimp under Linux, but the process is absolutely identical in Photoshop.

To start, open up the layers tab and duplicate the layer. You click either the "Duplicate Layer" button in the Gimp or just drag the layer in question to the "New Layers" button in Photoshop.



Next off, click on the new layer in the Layers tab and right-click it. Select "Add Layer Mask" and make it full white:



Your next stop is the Blend tool (Gradients in Photoshop). Firstly make sure the layer mask of the duplicate layer is selected in the layers tab, by clicking on the mask. Select the shape of the gradient you want and then drag from the point you wish to start to the point you wish to end the gradient. Although a Radial gradient is selected in the photo, I actually used a Bi-Linear one, so I could darken the tops and bottoms of the photo. Go me.



Once the gradient applies, go back to the layers tab and click on the layer:



Now just apply whatever effects you wish. They'll only be applied within the gradient. In this case its the top and bottom of the photo, where I darkened it and applied a light gaussian blur:



And behold! The final effect:

CoolBoardr

Dimy wrote:

Step 3: Save for Web

Now have a look at the top right hand side of the screen that pops up:


Here you can see the settings I'm generally using when I use the save for web function of photoshop. As I prefer to have the file output format in JPG I selected JPG rather than GIF, I still want to keep high quality as I don't want to much JPG artifacts in my resized photo's and I keep the quality slider at around 75%. You can experiment with this and use whatever setting here that suits you best.

At this stage here you can click the little arrow (to the right of the Preset setting). This allows you to enter your target output size (ie. 100kb). Photoshop will then automatically set the JPG quality to the optimal setting.

Dimy

Can this thread be moved to the Digital Darkroom subforum? Maybe we can give it some new life there

Mr.Diagnostic

Hi,

I have just started playing with Photoshop CS. The posts above are great and very helpful.
One thing I would like to do, and so far have failed in, is to combine 2 images. What I mean is have a place background image behind a foreground using layers.
If someone would like to do a tutorial that would be great.

Thanks

Dimy

Mr.Diagnostic wrote:

Hi,

I have just started playing with Photoshop CS. The posts above are great and very helpful.
One thing I would like to do, and so far have failed in, is to combine 2 images. What I mean is have a place background image behind a foreground using layers.
If someone would like to do a tutorial that would be great.

Thanks

If you could post images that you would like to use as "background" and "foreground" I will give it a try. I'll have a look in my own portfolio to see if I have anything suitable for this kind of tutorial.

Dimy

In addition to Fenster's tutorial above, here's a method I'm using in Photoshop CS2 to add a vignetting (the darkening of corners) effect to my pictures.

Here's the starting picture for this tutorial:



1. Make a rectangular selection using the Rectangular Marque Tool in photoshop:



2. In the "Select" menu choose the "Feather..." option (or use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Ctrl+D):



3. Next thing you need to do is type in the Feather Radius in pixels, this completely depends on the resolution of your image, in my example a Feather Radius of 25 pixels will do just fine. Experiment with the radius if your unsure untill you're satisfied:



After completing this step, you're selection will look like this:



4. The next step is to invert the selection, go to the "Select" menu again and choose the option "Inverse" (or use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Ctrl+I):



Your selection has been inverted and will now look like this:



5. The next thing we do is add a "Levels" adjustment layer:



Make sure you have the "Preview" box ticked and play around a bit with the sliders beneath the histogram untill you achieved a satisfying result:



6. The last step is to merge the layers, in the Layers menu select the "Merge Visable" option (or merge down):



Then you can save the image in the format you desire.

The final result should look like this:

Dimy

In this tutorial I show you a very easy way to create an image with selective colouring (black & white background with coloured subjects). There are different methods create this effect in Photoshop, but in my opinion the method described below is the easiest way.

Here's the starting image:



What I want to achieve is a coloured steering wheel and the rest of the image converted to black & white.

1. Add a "Hue/Saturation..." Adjustment Layer and move the Saturation slider to -100:





If you click on OK the picture will be converted to black & white.

2. The next step is to use the Brush or Pencil tool and "colour" the steering wheel or whatever subject it is you want to have in colour by painting it BLACK.



I prefer using the brush tool as this creates a softer effect around the edges, but the pencil tool is just as effective. Set the foreground colour to black and start painting/brushing over your subject. You'll notice that the parts you paint "black" will actually become coloured!
If you accidently colour something that you would like to keep in black & white you can easily correct this by painting it WHITE.

3. Once your happy with the result the next step is to merge the layers, go to the Layers menu and click on "Merge Visable" or "Merge Down":



4. Now... because the black & white part looks more like grayscale I usually play around with the "Shadow/Highlight..." sliders and "Brightness/Contrast..." in the Image -> Adjustments menu:



5. Last but not least I created a vignetting effect using the method described in the tutorial above. The final result looked like this:

trilo

Dimy i've just been reading through this thread and i have to say you do a very good job at explaining the how to do? in PS. It's both easy to understand and clearly explained. You have a good way of thinking and explaining, especially some of the terms for example, vignetting (the darkening of corners)

mikeanywhere

I also have a pdf that I got from Adobe which is a great way to do things. It helped me create this image.

If you want the pdf, them pm your email addy and I will send it to you.

Dimy

trilo wrote:

Dimy i've just been reading through this thread and i have to say you do a very good job at explaining the how to do? in PS. It's both easy to understand and clearly explained. You have a good way of thinking and explaining, especially some of the terms for example, vignetting (the darkening of corners)

Thanks for the nice comments trilo, I'll soon be adding a new tutorial in this thread

Valentia

Yep. Thanks Dimy. Can you tell me what the difference between "Merge" and "Flatten" are in the Layers menu?

Dimy

Valentia wrote:

Yep. Thanks Dimy. Can you tell me what the difference between "Merge" and "Flatten" are in the Layers menu?

I believe the difference is that with Merge Down you will merge the selected layer with the layer directly beneath it. Merge Visable will merge all the layers where you ticked the "visable" box (the eye shaped icon) and Flatten Image will merge all layers regardless if you made them visable or not.

If that doesn't make sense, I'll try to explain with screenshots later on.

Valentia

It makes perfect sense. Thanks a million.

CraggyIslander

Thanks Dimy, their excellent howto's.. I'll give em a lash on the weekend... first time in ages that I've actually got time to play with my pictures

Dimy

Thanks Fred, have fun

peckerhead

I've got some very good ebooks on CS2 from www.ebookshare.net. Just haven't got around to reading/studying them yet!

Scobius90

this could do with a bump

shepthedog

anyone have a good tutorial on cloning in Lightroom?? Have some troublesome branches to remove..

Big Nasty

Hey dudes! Question: I'm only really getting into this gig and I was wondering does one have to buy / download the whole adobe photoshop thing or will photoshop express do? Also is there anyway of registering and uploading your photos pre-edit so as you don't have to download the program to your pc and take up a s**t-load of space. My pc is already near maxed out with current photos, mp3s, movies and vids I have made. I have already cut lotsa stuff to an external hard drive but my pc is still quite full and any more applications are just gonna slow it down.

Advice please dudes.......

5uspect

Get the GIMP (gimp.org). Its a free alternative and very powerful.
It may be clunky but its pretty useful.

Dimy

First of all my apologies for the thread necromancy, but this topic is ageless. I just realised that all of my original images for the tutorials are no longer online. I had them stored on my webserver but changed webhost last year.

Unfortunately I don't have backups, but I'm now in the process of replacing the original images with new ones so this thread is actually useful again. Of course Photoshop CS2 has meanwhile been replaced by CS4, but that doesn't make too much of a difference.

Dimy

I just realised I'm unable to edit my old posts. Can a forum mod please help me with this?

mrboswell

Is it just me or are the original images viewable?

Dimy

mrboswell wrote: »

Is it just me or are the original images viewable?

A few of them are (the tutorials not posted by myself) I've tried to contact some of the board admins to allow me access to edit my posts with new links but so far no reply