PCPhoto
4 Fundamental Photoshop SkillsLearn these essential tools and techniques and you'll be equipped for most common image enhancements |
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Page 4 of 6 2. Set whites. Hold down the Alt/Option key as you click on the right, white slider. As you move the slider, the screen will change to a black-and-white threshold screen that shows where whites are. Most of the time, you’ll move the slider only until whites just start to appear. Colors on the screen are showing the RGB channels as they max out on the bright side. In Camera Raw, use Alt/Option with the Exposure slider for the same threshold screen. 3. Fix Midtones. A photo can look under- or overexposed, depending on midtones. Curves are the best way to adjust midtones, but you can use the middle gray slider of the Levels control, too (do it as a separate adjustment, however, from the blacks and whites to give you more flexibility, especially if you use adjustment layers). With Curves, just click on the center line and drag it up slightly for a brighter image, down for darker (you really don’t have to move this a lot). The Tone Curve in Camera Raw is a Curves adjustment (the Brightness slider can also be used for midtones). This simple adjustment will often give a solid boost to the colors in your photo. At the minimum, it will make the image have good contrast that will give prints some snap and life and make other color adjustments more reasonable. Keep in mind that this adjustment must fit the photograph. It won’t work on foggy scenes, for example, because there should be no pure black or white in such an image. Remove Imperfections Text And Photography By Mike Stensvold  Photoshop provides lots of great retouching tools, including some introduced with the most recent versions, such as the handy Spot Healing Brush. But for general retouching versatility, you can’t beat the trusty Rubber Stamp, a.k.a., the Clone tool.Basically, the Rubber Stamp samples (copies) an area of an image, then pastes it over another area of the image. You select the area to be sampled and the area(s) over which to paste the sampled area. The most common use for the Rubber Stamp is to remove unwanted objects from an image, but you can also use it to add objects. Using Rubber Stamp The basic operation consists of two steps. While holding down the Alt/Option key, click on the area you wish to sample; this will copy that area. Then release the Alt/Option key and click on the area of the image where you want to paste the sampled area. To paste the sampled area over a larger area, you can either click repeatedly across that area, or click and drag across the area. To remove a dust spot from the sky area of a landscape image, click in the sky near the dust speck to copy the sky, then click and drag across the dust speck to paste sky over it.   |
