Photoshop Tips & Tricks for Photographers

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

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!

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.

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 ;-)

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:

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:

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 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.

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

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