Guest Post: Why Photoshop?

In the present day, people love taking photos and keeps it with them as it stands as a great tool to keep some loving memories forever. People always love to take some quality images and they used to do everything to make their images look like as excellent as possible. People have a good amount of mediums available to them to make their image of top quality. People can edit their images these days with most modern technologies in order to make their image look as it great. One of the top tools available to people to make their images top quality is Photoshop.

Photoshop is good software that allows people to organize, edit, and create images. Photoshop and its tools are well known for its ability to edit and make changes to the picture that you have already taken. There are many people in the world who make use of Photoshop mediums in order to make their photos in exceptional quality. Photoshop is wonderful software as it can be used to edit the digital image application, assists you to perk up the quality of a photograph and let’s make special effects to the image.  It aids the artists to make the artwork and give a final touch to the images to give fresh visual effect.

Here is a look at how Photoshop graphics helps you to make special effects for your images:

Great Finishing Touch

Photoshop graphics can give a great finishing touch to the images. The images and photos that you created or edited in Photoshop let you make a great finishing touch. As far as the people are concerned, there is a need to give finishing touches to the content because it not only helps them to make the image better quality but also look as it professional. The finishing touches can come in the type of editing their work down to a superior cut, blending the audio, and even building up the titles or graphics for the content.

Do Wide Range of Tasks

Photoshop helps people to do a wide range of tasks with ease and effectively as well. Photoshop persists to be the design software of option for millions of designers across the world for a number of people to carry out their wide range of tasks. Some of the most notable tasks that they do with the help of Photoshop include photo editing, graphic design, typography, illustration, 3D modeling, and animation. Photo editing, graphic design, typography, illustration, 3D modeling, and animation are common that can be seen in the entertainment industry. However, you can make use of these tools to retouch your marriage photos or other photos that you took during some other important functions.

Improves Creativity

Photoshop is a good tool for the people to improve their creativity when it comes to editing their images. Creativity is an essential thing for the editors and people who are closely associated with photo editing to make their tasks as effective as possible. With the most recent tool of Photoshop, people can improve a lot of features of a photo that they have already taken. Photoshop has some potent facial detection skills, allowing it to identify parts of the face, such as the eyes, mouth, and nose and on the whole face shape.

Digital Effects

Photoshop helps people to make some special effects in their images. Today, we live in a digital world and the field of photo taking has become attached to the changes made by the digital world. With the Photoshop tools, people can make digital effects in their chosen images. Photoshop elements make it effortless to touch up your digital photos and make it exceptional by adding special effects, filters, and styles. Photoshop lets you make Animated GIFs which is a great method to make your designs more stunning. With the use of Photoshop tools, you can modify any animated GIF to go well with the style of your task.

Other Notable Features:

  • Photoshop helps you to improve your skills and knowledge in editing images. Some of the most notable tools of Photoshop allow people to resolve the blemishes and the defects that are common in the photos.
  • Photoshop is a great medium that assists you to improve the overall nature of a picture. You can take away and adjust the backgrounds in the photos in order to look the image as perfect as possible.
  • Photoshop is a better tool that allows you to fix the issues found in your photo and using it, you can make your image error free. The images can be amended to repair the faults. It is possible for you to give a professional look to your images using Photoshop. It also has techniques to create images and edit the images for its better look.
  • It is very effortless to start editing the photos using Photoshop even for beginners. It helps people to help you to amend the skin tones of people in your pictures.
  • You can bring into play Photoshop to import the videos and the photos into the software rapidly and without difficulty.
  • You can set photos in a neat and orderly way using Photoshop. You can keep your images in an organized way especially when you take care of hundreds or thousands of photos and videos.
  • Using Photoshop tools, you can change photos to black and white, resize them, generate diverse effects, and unite stylish techniques and a lot of others.
  • Photo manipulations and photo special effects are amusing. There are a lot of people who love to manipulate and bring in special effects in photos. By Using Photoshop you can carry out lots of innovative, ingenious and incredible special effect to your photo.
  • Being capable of layering multiple layers, filters, effects and much more, Photoshop is one of the finest editors and manipulators of images around. It has progressed to generate and edit video, make 3-D images and make an easy graphic design.

This is a guest post from Stephen. Should you have any queries, please reach out directly to him. You can find his details in the author box below.

Day 24 – Adjustment Layers in Photoshop – Solid Color, Gradient, Pattern, Brightness, Levels, Curves, and Exposure

Hey, folks! How was your weekend? Pretty exciting, huh? Mine was also. I hope that you also followed my last tutorial on Camera RAW. Why not? It was an amazing tutorial. I explained everything about Camera RAW. Today, we’re going to learn Adjustments Layers in Photoshop.

To apply tweaks like brightness, exposure, contrast, saturation, or etc. you don’t need to open Camera RAW every time. Photoshop gives you a nice and clean way to change it on the go. All of this can be done with the help of adjustment layers.

So, let’s begin with the most basic question.

What’s Adjustment Layer in Photoshop?

The Adjustment Layers in Photoshop are a group of some useful, non-destructive image editing tools that add color and tonal adjustments to your image. Did you read the word “non-destructive”? Yeah, all of the changes will be done without harming the original image. Means that you can go back to any point of time without any loss. It’s like a Time Machine in macOS and Win7 backup in Windows.

Where are Adjustment Layers Located in Photoshop?

Adjustment layers are located at the bottom of layer panel (press F7 to open).

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All the things that you’d use daily are present here. Be it Brightness, Color Balance, Photo Filter, Gradient, or even Invert are present here.

Now that you what and where of the Adjustment layer, let’s explore it. I am going to explain each layer in a two separate tutorial. In the tutorial, I’ll cover Solid Color, Gradient, Pattern, Brightness, Levels, Curves, and Exposure. The rest of the things will be covered in the next tutorial.

What is Solid Color in Photoshop?

Solid color fills the image with one color and you get to decide the color.

Go to Solid Color and choose the color you like and press OK. I chose a shade of Blue.

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You see that the entire image is filled with the color that you chose.

You think that what the hell. Why would I fill my entire image with a color? Hold on! You can do some artistic effects. If simply change the Blend Mode to color, I get Blue tint. Isn’t it looking nice? I know it doesn’t but don’t be rude and say yes… haha…

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What is Gradient in Photoshop?

This adjustment layer works exactly similar to the Gradient Tool that we learned a while ago. So, I am not going to much details on this. Click on it and you’ll figure out how to use it.

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What is Pattern in Photoshop?

This option lets you fill your image with the patterns of your choice. The pattern will fill the entire image.

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Like Solid Color, you can play with Blend Modes this time also. I chose Color Burn this time.

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What is Brightness and Contrast in Photoshop?

I am damn sure that I don’t need to explain these two. You did tweak these two when you edited your first digital photo around 10 years.

Ummm… Still, I’ll explain you.

  • Brightness brightens or dims the image
  • Contrast increase the difference between the whites and blacks of the image

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What is Levels in Photoshop?

This is a bit tough to explain. There is one slider with three control points named as A, B, and C in the below image.

A: Drag it to the right to increase the black
B: Drag it to the right to increase contrast and drag it to the left to decrease contrast
C: Drag it to the left to increase white

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To make things simpler, Photoshop provides presets also which are highlighted with a blue rectangle. You may want to use it.

What is Curves in Photoshop?

If you see the graph, the y-axis is divided into 4 parts. Each part represents a region. Upper parts demonstrate the light and lower parts demonstrate the shadow.

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  1. Highlight: It affects only the upper regions
  2. Light: It mainly affects the upper two regions but slightly affects lower two regions as well
  3. Darks: It mainly affects lower two regions but slightly affects upper two regions as well
  4. Shadows: It only affects lower two regions

What is Exposure in Photoshop?

The Exposure slider is probably the least mystically named of the control sliders and unsurprisingly it allows you to adjust the exposure of your photo. Dragging to the right will lighten an image while dragging to the left darkens it.

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The Offset slider isn’t obviously named, but this control has the greatest influence over the dark tones of photos. Sliding it to the right will lighten shadow areas, but you should take care as you’ll quickly see that images can start to look washed out as this is adjusted in this direction. Sliding to the left will darken your shadow areas and if you overdo this, you will start to see some unnatural color shifts occurring.

The Gamma slider has the greatest effect over the mid-tone range of your images, though the direction that you adjust the slider is counter-intuitive. To darken the image, you need to slide it to the right and vice-versa to lighten it.

This is all for today. I hope that you enjoyed the tutorial.
Check out the other tutorials from 30 Days to Learn Photoshop series.

DAY 23 – THE CAMERA RAW FILTER IN PHOTOSHOP: PART 2

Welcome back, folks! Today, we’re going on more details in Camera RAW in Photoshop. This tutorial in the continuation of my past tutorial on Camera RAW in Photoshop – Part I. Last time, I covered Basic, Tone Curve, and Detail tabs. In this tutorial, I’ll cover HSL, Split Toning, Lens Correction, and Camera Calibration.

You’re not going to use the tabs frequently that we’re going to learn today. Whenever I open Camera RAW, I use Basic and Noise 70% of the time and rest of the tabs 30% of the time.

So, let’s begin with the tutorial.

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Step 1: HSL and Grayscale in Camera RAW

HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. I think that there is no real estate available in Photoshop interface so Adobe decided to go with the short form.

In this tab, you can change the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance of an image or convert an image to Grayscale (Black and White).

First off, I’ll show you how to convert an image to Grayscale. All you need to do is to click on “Convert to Grayscale”.

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Now that you know how to convert an image to Grayscale in Camera RAW, time to learn HSL. If you look at the below screenshot, you’ll find three tabs which are Hue, Saturation, and Luminance.

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Let’s understand each of them one by one.

  1. Hue: Hue is the color in your image. It changes your color. Look at the first slider which is Red. If you drag all the way to left, all red present in your image will become Pink. If you drag is all the way to the right, the red in your image will convert to Orange.
  2. Saturation: Saturation is the intensity, or richness, of that color. Switch to the second tab. Now if you drag the Red to the left, the Red will become gray. If you drag the Red to the right, it’ll become more saturated any may be unpleasing to the eyes.
  3. Luminance: Luminance controls the brightness value. Switch to the third tab. If you drag it to the left, Red will get darker and then to Black. If you slide it to the right, Red to turn lighter and then to White.

Step 2: Split Toning in Camera RAW

Split Toning is the easiest way to give a very colorful effect to your photos.

Split toning involves tinting the shadows of an image in one color and the highlights in another color. Although mostly applied to black and white images, this method can quite successfully be used on color images.

In the image, I kept the image colored and applied Split Toning.

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It has three sections which are Highlights, Balance, and Shadows.

In the Highlights section, if you change the Hue slider, the highlights of the image will have a hue of that color.

The same goes with the Shadows slider.

Note: You must drag the Saturation first at least to 10 before you slide the Hue slider. This is because, if Saturation is 0 then you won’t see any difference if you drag the Hue slider.

In the Balance slider, you can set the balance between highlights and shadows. I have set it to 35% which means that whatever is less than 35% brighter than the absolute mid point, will be considered as the highlight.

Step 3: Lens Correction in Camera RAW

This tab is used to correct all the defects that a lens add.

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Let me explain each slider one by one.

  1. Distortion Amount: Even lenses worth of $2,000 distorts the image. They make the image blobbed in the middle which disturbs the lining of the images. Use this slider to remove the blobbiness.
  2. Defringe: In some images, you see either a purple or green line around the edges of things in your image. Generally, these lines are noticeable only when you zoom in the image. This defringe slider helps you to remove it.
  3. Vignette: You already know what a vignette it. It’s the black or white circular shape which fades into its background without a definite border. You can either add or remove vignette using this slider. Drag it to the right to remove and drag it to the left to add.

Step 4: Effects in Camera RAW

Adobe named this panel as Effects but I personally don’t believe that you can create any nice looking effects from this panel.

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First is Dehaze. It does what its name suggests. This slider helps to remove or add the haze in the image. Photoshop is not a magical tool so let’s not expect any magical return when using this slider. 🙂

Grain adds grain in the images. You may want to use it if you’re a wedding photographer. Most wedding photographers intentionally add grains to make the images beautiful.

You are wondering that why is Vignette also here even if you saw it in the previous panel. Both will give the same result as long as your image is not cropped. I’d like you to do a task. Close Camera RAW and crop an image. While cropping, make sure that you don’t turn on “Delete Cropped Pixels”. Once done, again open Camera RAW and try the two sliders. You’ll see the different results. I leave it to you to figure out why did you see different results.

Step 5: Camera Calibration in Camera RAW

In this tab, you can define the process in Camera RAW.

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The process version is the Camera Raw technology that Photoshop uses to adjust and render photos. The latest version in 2012.

This is the place where you calibrate the RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) of the image. You probably don’t want to change it because it is really tough for a beginner’s eyes to detect the miscalibration in R, G, and B.

That’s all, folks!

Let’s meet next week. Make sure you watch other tutorials on 30 Days to Learn Photoshop series.