For Design Lovers

Are you a so called Photoshop specialist photographer who can correct an image that was destined for the ‘Recycle Bin’ and produced an image that can be uploaded and sold through Microstock?

Do you justify your Photoshop expertise by explaining that the landscape shot was ruined because it had an overflowing litter bin in the foreground? Or are you the portrait photographer telling me how you had saved your embarrassment of a reshoot because they had cloned in a corner section where the background was missing?

It’s absolutely fantastic that we can all use Photoshop to correct our mistakes. But my question is – Should we make the mistakes in the first place? I come from the days of film and one of the first things that you were instilled to do was let your eye roam around the viewfinder. Then when you were happy with what you saw, you took the picture. Notice I did use the term we. I admit on a bad day I am just as guilty as anyone else.

What we need to do is to pay more attention to the shooting of the image and less to the post shoot correction techniques. In other word stick your camera on a tripod if possible and let your eye roam around the viewfinder looking for anything that you can see that shouldn’t be there. It’s so easy to simply shoot what you think that you see only to find that object that has crept into the picture that is clearly visible on the monitor. How did I miss that when I took the picture? I ask myself. That’s when I also think, thank goodness for Photoshop.

A very experienced photographer once explained to me that when he ‘went digital’ he got lazy when taking the shots. He had heard before going digital Photoshop solved all your picture taking problems. Like a lot of photographers he began to rely on the qualities of such a superb piece of software. He ended up spending more time working on the images in Photoshop than he did actually taking the shots. He simply had taken for granted the fact that simple mistakes could be easily rectified. But he also realised that every minute spent checking the picture at the time of shooting saved him ten minutes work in Photoshop. He began to wish that he had stuck with film and thought about returning to his old ways.

But after analysing his situation and evaluating his photographs he realised it wasn’t the digital image that was the problem. It was his technique; he had assumed that this was how you approached digital photography. So now he has reverted back to his old style of shooting by taking more care when taking the picture. Not only has his picture taking improved but he has a lot more spare time.

Let’s suppose that you had decided to shoot a still life set up comprising a bottle of wine, a glass of wine and a few grapes. You spent your time getting the composition looking just right and started to shoot away, changing the viewpoint and moving in closer. You must have at least ten saleable images. You transfer the files to a folder on your computer and open each file.

But your excitement turns to horror as the first image has a dirty great thumbprint on the glass slap bang in the middle of your picture. So you decide to rectify the mistake in Photoshop. It’ll only take ten minutes or so. That’s ten minute per image time ten of course. So in fact it will take you the best part of two hours to correct something that should have been spotted at the shooting stage. Incidentally, when I shoot any shiny objects I always move the objects wearing white cotton gloves.

What you should be doing is simply tweaking the image. Maybe giving is a slight increase in contrast or burning in, very slightly, the label on the bottle. Just the odd corrections that make a good image become excellent. Remember that you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear. The same goes for Photoshop

So maybe you can save the once in a lifetime picture by adjusting it in Photoshop, sometimes mistakes can’t be helped. Think of the potential market for a portrait photographer that can make the model look thinner and younger. Photoshop has set the Industry Standard and is a superb tool in the Photographers Arsenal – Providing that the Photographer has the knowledge to use it and realise its limitations. If you really want to be an expert in ‘Post Image Manipulation’ or to simply correct your images in Photoshop take a look at my website www.gbphotostock.com and go to the Photoshop page.

Photos are considered to be priceless by a lot of people. It serves as a great way to preserve memory and it also has this sentimental value especially when the photo is very old. For example, if you have a photo of your grandmother and grandfather together, you have to consider the fact that it will start to wear out sooner or later. It will not be as vibrant as before, and it may even fade in time. Also, the elements can ruin the photos, such as moisture and even sunlight. Adobe Photoshop is the answer for this problem.

There may even be some tears on the photograph. Getting it restored by a professional can cost you a lot of money and you have to consider the fact that you are not really sure about the quality of the restoration procedure.

If you want to restore old photographs that you consider to be priceless, then there is a way where you can do so by yourself. With a scanner and a photo editing software, you can make the picture look as if it was taken and developed yesterday. Adobe Photoshop is considered to be one of the leading software programs that will enable you to edit photographs.

The first step in editing old photographs is by turning it in to digital format. To do this, you have to scan the photo and save it in your computer. Then, the next step is to open the photo with Adobe Photoshop.

Once you opened the photo with the photo editing software, the next step is to start editing it. Make sure that you create a backup copy of the original picture in order for you to start over when you make a mistake when editing.

To mask out the torn part of the picture, you can just use the smudge tool. In most cases, the smudge tool is what you will be using most of the time. This particular tool will be able to erase blemishes on the photograph, such as moisture stains, and sun damage. It can also fill out torn pieces on the photograph and even improve the overall look of the picture.

You can also adjust the brightness of the picture if you think it’s too dark. Also, you can adjust the contrast in order to make the picture more crisp and clear. The sharpening tool can also help in making the picture clearer.

These are just some of the tools that you may need to use when restoring old photographs. As you can see, it is very simple to do when you have Adobe Photoshop. In fact, with this photo editing software, you can even improve the overall quality of the picture by removing any imperfections in the original picture. If you are good enough, you can even make a black and white picture a colored picture just by using the tools provided in Adobe Photoshop.

These are the great things that you will be able to do with Adobe Photoshop. Restoring old pictures aren’t the only use for Adobe Photoshop, but you will also be able to edit your pictures by removing undesirable objects in the picture, such as a trash can or a plastic bag lying in the middle of great looking scenery.

There are more things that you can do with Adobe Photoshop. Just be creative.

When you hear talk about product marketing, you hear words like, ecovers, ecover generators, and even using photoshop actions and templates to make CD Covers, DVD Covers, Ebook Covers for your products.

If you’re selling information products, you want a quick and smiple solution for getting your customers familiar with your product, and increasing sales volume.

The buzz about using ecover software and Photoshop as a time & money-saving alternative started around May of 2003 when several web marketers found thier nitche, and the idea was successful.

Andrew Jackson of MGI Software, an Internet software and services company, says that “there is a 30% increase in sales and a 50% reduction in returned goods with the use of 3D imaging.” – Los Angeles Business Journal, December 17, 2000

Do a search on DVD Cover Designs, CD Cover Designs, or eBook Covers, and you’ll find a handful of website that sell a kit specifically designed to save you time and money.

Photographers and Graphic designers charge you between $50 to $80 per hour for the work.

When a highly respected product photographer takes a photo, more than likely it will be digitized into Photoshop for color correction and enhancement. Using photoshop for making ecovers just makes perfect sense.

“A growing number of e-businesses are experimenting with the rapidly emerging field of three-dimensional web technology. Others are counting on 3-D to add new levels of excitement and realism to e-commerce websites (…) Photo realism really enhances believability.”
CIO Magazine, “3-D Finally Gets Serious”

Some of what you may find are packages containing pre-made Photoshop templates and Photoshop Actions that let you add your own text, have full control of fonts, background images, colors, and even add effects that best match your product or company brand.

Photoshop actions work well because the actions are nothing more than a series of recorded tasks that have already taken place in order to create the stunning ecover.

The awesome combination between premade photoshop templates and actions work much better than the ecover generator sofware for several reasons:

1) You’re working with relyable software from a wellknown company like Adobe. You know that the software is stable and is used by design industry professionals.

2) Free Trial Versions are most always available to try for free.

3) The people behind the photoshop ecover designs are more than likely graphic designers. Check thier work for attention to detail depending on how realistic and professional looking you want your ecover to be.

4) Unlike software “generators”, you are limited to the effects and options that are knowhere near the expertise, freedom, flexiblility, and raw power of Photoshop & actions.

Where product photographers require you bring your products and to come to their in house studio and pay around $50.00 per hour (not including setup fees), automated product cover software allows you to design and upload a professional image of your product in less than a few hours.

With the speed of automating a 3 dimensional image that looks just as good as the real thing in under 5 minutes, that is cost effective!

But buyer beware. Some automated product cover design packages are not created equal. Most only allow you to make images of your products at only 72 dpi, while others like Grant’s 5-Minute DVD, CD, and Ebook Cover Designs and Actions for Photoshop (http://www.designbygrant.com/marketing-products.php) allow you to create images at up to 300 dpi.

This means that you can take full advantage of almost every marketing effort you can think of, including:

-Product Posters & Billboards
-HDTV Broadcast Comericals
-Trade show banners and backdrops

What’s the best part you ask? That’s simple. The best part is that if you already have Photoshop, you can save hours and even days to effectively market your product on the internet, and anywhere else you can reach your customers.

If you don’t have Photoshop, download it directly from the Adobe website and try it free.

© Copyright 2006. Grant Freeman

About The Author
Grant Freeman has been a Freelance Graphic Designer, Web Designer, Photographer, Video Editor, and Creative Director for over 13 years. His most noted clients include Sony, Bertolucci, Land Rover, and various International Recording Artist in the U.S.

Visit Grants website online at www.designbygrant.com for Photoshop learning, and various creative business to business solutions.

If you’re a Photoshop user with a working knowledge of the basics, you may well enjoy the Advanced Artistry Photoshop tutorials. With this intermediate level training package you can hone some very advanced Photoshop skills. Here is what you’ll learn.

The Introductory CD will tell you all about the course and the instructor, including some tips on how best to learn from the Photoshop tutorials. You’ll learn about the technical aspects of the presentation and its variations from Mac to PC.

The next of the Photoshop tutorial CDS is called Utilities. Machine basics are included in this lesson plan, as well as PS preference and essential shortcuts. You’ll learn navigation shortcuts, as well as those for imaging, tools, and workspace.

You’ll get a quick review of all the keystroke and Photoshop super shortcut techniques and help setting up your own workspace.

The next of the Photoshop tutorials tackles the subject of retouching. In this CD you’ll learn the professional retouching techniques, how to assess the Photoshop image, how to analyze the histogram, as well as the contrast, lighting and texture.

You learn how to do an analysis of the focus and to manage the contrast controls. You’ll learn the ins and outs of contrast levels, and the use of each level. You’ll learn to use curves, to enhance color and the advanced techniques to avoid saturation.

These Photoshop tutorials will also teach you to use the patch tool and the healing brush, and to burn and dodge demos without destruction. You’ll also master the technique of red eye reduction.

Advanced artistry tutorials in this Photoshop lesson package will also include a CD that teaches how to adjust for focus and the center of interest, how to sharpen the focus, how to enhance the field depth and how to fish or burn edges.

In the fine art toning CD you learn intermediate and advanced techniques of producing black and white photos from color originals, how to work with and create sepia tones, selenium tones, digital cyanotypes and maps with gradients.

Fine art photograph effects lessons include soft focusing, angelic and dramatic posing, high contrast and high keys and cross processing.

Including in this Photoshop tutorial is mastery of fine techniques for people’s skin, giving them the look of perfect skin, of radiant and dramatically glowing skin, advanced techniques in metal skin looks, infrared and translucent skin, and the use of maps for displacement.

Natural media and landscape techniques are taught in Photoshop advanced artistry tutorials as well.

Enhancing the skies and adding sky from other photos are techniques taught, as well as using the history and art history brushes, and burning and dodging without being destructive.

If you want to create a professional hand drawn look you can master that technique through Photoshop tutorials, and can also learn watercolor, logos, and vector illustration too. Hand tinting lessons are varied and include painting in a color mode and adjusting of layers.

Grid and Tech glows, TV scan lines, pixel drags, and edges and borders that are soft, painted, beveled or burned are all advanced artistry Photoshop tutorial lessons.

Adobe has its own Photoshop tutorials that run the gamut of instruction.

You can find Photoshop tutorials on the Adobe site on abstracts, automation, animation, the basics of using Photoshop, buttons and brushes, using color effectively, digital art, drawing, creating desired effects with drawing or photos, retouching photos, photography in general, scripting, textual effects, Photoshop patterns and textures, graphics for the Web, and layouts for the Web.

One of the most basic of Photoshop tutorials is a complete explanation of all you’ll find on the Photoshop toolbar.
You’ll learn lessons that include the use of the marquee tools. There are several: the elliptical, the single row, the single column and the rectangular.

The rectangular and elliptical marquee tools lets you expand or reduce an area that is shaped as the tools indicate. You can use a tool to size one row or one column with the appropriate marquee tool.

These basic will be taught in this Photoshop tutorial, along with the use of the move tool which lets you create movement of a layer, the lasso tool which lets you capture a specific area, and the magnetic lasso tools, which lets you change the location of images with varying colors.

The polygonal lasso tool, in contrast, will go from point to point in a straight line or lines. You’ll even learn how to use a magic want with Adobe Photoshop tutorials. This magic want tool lets you click inside a one color area and move only that area.

The Photoshop crop tool, part of this tutorial, lets you delete parts of a photo.

Wit h this Photoshop tutorial you’ll learn other basic tools such as the spot healing tool, the healing brush tool, the red eye tool, the patch tool, the brush tool, the pencil tool, and the color replacement tool.

With the clone stamp tool, you’ll learn how to use Photoshop to copy only parts of a particular image, while the pattern stamp tool will teach you how to take an image and brush a pattern on to it.

The Photoshop tutorial will teach you the mechanics of history brush tool use, how it is used to undo what you’ve created by simply brushing over the image you’ve altered and taking it back to the image it was before.

It has an even more advance use, though, in that, you can actually undo the image change in only the specific parts from which you wish to remove your latest alteration.

The art history brush, another tool taught in Photoshop tutorials, is much the same as the history brush except that it also lets you style at the same time.

Photoshop tutorials teach three eraser tools – the standard eraser, the background eraser and the magic eraser tool. With the first you can do just as its name suggests – erase part of the image you’ve created with Photoshop.

With the background version you can erase only the image background, while the magic eraser which lets you make even more varied choices of what to eliminate from the image.

On the 23 September 2008 Adobe Systems announced the release of the highly anticipated latest version of Photoshop, Photoshop CS4.

Photoshop has long been the industry standard professional digital image manipulation program. It fact it would be hard to get a job as a graphic designer if you didn’t have experience using Photoshop.

So lets explore the new features in Photoshop CS4 and then decide whether for $199 it’s worth upgrading from CS3 to CS4. If you are still working on an older version of Photoshop such as CS2 or CS then I would definitely recommend upgrading. This article is going to focus on the top 5 new features in Photoshop CS4.

1. Smoother panning and zooming and fluid canvas rotation

Working with bitmap images often involves editing pixel by pixel. The smoother zooming feature will give you much more control as you zoom in and out of your bitmaps. Plus the new rotation feature is very cool and is a huge improvement on the somewhat clumsy rotate image handles. I give these new features 9 out of 10.

2. New Adjustments Panel

This panel contains some of the most commonly used color and tone correction tools. Tools, which Photoshop users use every day such as Levels, Curves and Hue & Saturation are now all located on this single panel. Photoshop allows you to edit in a non-destructive mode using an Adjustments layer. Even though this feature is not new per se, this new Adjustment panel makes it easier to work with many of these stable Photoshop tools. I give this new feature 5 out of 10.

3. New Masks Panel

This is a very cool new feature. The new Masks Panel is really powerful and it gives you full control over both pixels and vector masks. You can adjust mask density and feathering, easily select non contiguous objects, and much more.

You can still create layer masks in the old fashioned way but this new panel is much more powerful and will make learning masking easier for new users of Photoshop. I give this new feature 8 out of 10.

4. Content-Aware Scaling

This is my favorite new feature in Photoshop CS4. This new and revolutionary Content-Aware Scaling feature is used when re-sizing images. Users can select an area of an image that you do not want to lose when resizing and Photoshop will protect it, by removing other areas first.

Content-Aware Scaling automatically recognizes skin tones to keep people from being squeezed when you resize an image. So as you resize an image, people in the picture may move closer together or further apart, but they will remain properly proportioned whilst the background changes. I would have to give this feature a 10 out of 10.

5. Many enhancements

My final new feature is really just a whole bunch of cool improvements to existing features in Photoshop CS3. These include:
1. Improved color correction with re-engineered Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools
2. Improved auto-blending of images.
3. New preview feature on the Clone Tool.
4. Better raw image processing. I give these new features a 7 out of 10.

So in conclusion, Photoshop CS4 introduces some very new and exciting features such as fluid canvas rotation and content-aware scaling, a few new panels such as Mask Panel and Adjustments panel which help to improve your workflow, and a whole bunch of enhancements to existing features.

Overall I would have to say that $199 investment to upgrade is a no-brainer. Enjoy!

Anyone who plans on spending any length of time wandering the halls of Photoshop should consider learning how Photoshop layer sets work.

Layers are crucial to the entire mechanism of Photoshop design and enhancement.

The Photoshop “Layers” palette maintains a precise history of all your keystrokes… so you don’t have to remember anything.

Layers can be likened to your command post, so it behooves you to spend some time in there. Let’s take a brief look around right now.

Hmm, looks complicated, doesn’t it? Well, unlike a lot of other functions inside Photoshop, Layers really is pretty simple.

Basically, it isolates different sections or transformations so you can work on them without affecting the rest of the image.

Which really comes in handy when you find yourself up against the wall and need to start that particular enhancement over: just throw that layer away.

Your Photoshop Layers box will automatically create a new layer for you for some changes, but you can also create a new yourself.

On your top menu bar, click “Layer,” then “New.” You’ll see a brand new, empty layer appear inside your Layers box. Notice that it has been highlited and the “background,” or original, layer is not.

The highlighted layer is the active layer, meaning that’s the one you’re presently working on. To activate a different layer, simply click on it, and Photoshop highlights (activates) it for you.

Becoming aware of this one function is essential for successfully working in layers.

(Note: Photoshop CS2 lets you activate multiple layers.)

Once you have a few layers inside your Layers dialog box, try clicking the eyeballs next to each one.

You’ll see that in this way you can visually isolate layers so you can tell exactly what it is you’re working on.

At times, you will find yourself creating many, many layers for a single image. When that happens, it gets difficult to find the layer you want to affect.

The solution to this problem lies in creating groups, or “layer sets.” Grouping layers allows you to place them into a folder. (In Photoshop CS, first link the layers, then choose “New Set from Linked” on the side menu of the Layers box.)

In Photoshop 7, you create a group by choosing each one, then clicking “Group with Previous” inside your Layer option in the top menu. Or you can click the tiny folder icon at the bottom of the

Layers palette and drag the layers into that layer when it appears, then click the collapse arrow to the left of the set folder to hide the layers inside the folder.

If you want to get rid of the set folder later, highlight it, then click Layer, Delete, Set, then choose either “Set and Contents” or “Set Only.”

Some versions of Photoshop require you to choose your layers and then “Shift-Click” on the bottom folder icon to create a set folder. In Photoshop CS2, you can align layers by choosing View > Show > Smart Guides.

Like all the other fabulous Photoshop functions, Layers offers almost limitless ways to affect your photos and the way you maneuver around inside Photoshop itself.

Master The Basics Of Adobe Photoshop With My 2 Hour Easy To Use Photoshop Video Tutorial.