Photoshop

Adapted from Photoshop CS4 Bible (Wiley Publishing) - By Stacy Cates, Simon Abrams, Dan Moughamian
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Making images or parts of images lighter, or brighter, is a commonly needed adjustment. There are many ways to lighten an image in Photoshop. You can use a lightening process that lightens the light and/or dark qualities of an image (the luminosity or luminance) along with the colors in an image.

But let’s say you’ve got the color the way you want it — you just want to lighten part of the image and avoid risking a shift in the color while you’re at it. In that case, you can use a lightening technique that lightens only the luminosity and does not affect the colors. There are also lightening techniques that can better preserve contrast in an image, and others that may reduce contrast. You can use certain methods to make broad changes or you can use methods that allow you to target specific areas.

Read the full article on Graphics.com

Photoshop files tend to be huge. If you want to save disk space both on your primary HD and your backup disks there is a very simple trick that can reduce files sizes by more than 50%. Before you save just switch off the visibility of all layers. With the layers switched off, Photoshop will not save layer previews resulting in smaller file sizes. At times the saving is as little as 10%, but in other cases it can be up to 90%.

Besides saving disk space you will also save time, because saving and opening smaller files takes less time as well. If you work with large files this can result in serious productivity gains.

There are obvious benefits to spending the extra time and effort grouping your layers into folders and naming them appropriately.

For one you will appreciate the organization if you have to work further on the file after considerable amount time went by. Second, your coworkers or your css programmer will appreciate a neat file as well.

There are some less obvious and immediate advantages to such tidy practices. Design is not done on paper or on screen. Design is something you do in your mind. You continuously evaluate your work and make further design decisions while you work. Design is an internal dialogue and the result is your design work.

Adapted from Photoshop CS4 After the Shoot (Wiley Publishing)
By Mark Fitzgerald
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

I work with lots of photographers, most of them professionals. When I first begin to work with a new photographer, one of the first questions I ask is how she handles sharpening in her workflow. That’s because sharpening is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the postproduction workflow. When it’s done incorrectly, it can have a detrimental effect on the final image. If someone is making this mistake, I want her to know before moving on to other things.

Understanding Sharpening

Digital photo sharpening is nothing more than enhanced edge contrast. Photoshop tricks you into thinking a photo looks sharper by isolating edge detail and enhancing contrast along those edges. One side of the edge is lightened while the other side is darkened. The enhanced edge contrast is referred to as haloing because of the effect it causes along these edges.

There is no magic formula for sharpening because the amount of sharpening for a particular image depends on two very different things — the content of the image and its overall dimensions. Images with lots of edge detail, like the bowl of silver rings shown below, can handle more sharpening than images with fewer hard edges, such as photos of people or a photo of a landscape on a foggy morning. This is because lots of sharpening adds to the feel of the ring photo, while it would detract from the softer feeling of the portrait or foggy landscape. Additionally, a smaller print of this shot doesn’t need as much sharpening as a larger version would require.

Read further on Graphics.com

The next iteration of its Creative Suite will not only feature new features, but it will also be rewritten in Cocoa for 64-bit native support. This will give us another good reason to upgrade to Snow Leopard when CS5 comes out. Unfortunately it will only run on Intel machines.

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone provides users a simple way to view photos with full-screen previews and edit images with gesture-based editing. You can transform your photos with basic editing tools like crop, rotate and flip; as well as adjust color with saturation and tint tools, enhance exposure and vibrancy and convert images to black and white.

You can read more about it here.

While I can't say that there's a huge desire by any designer to do photo editing for client work on their iPhone or iPod Touch, it's nice to see even basic editing arrive on our favorite Apple pocket device!

Download here: http://mobile.photoshop.com/iphone/

Sometimes you may want to look at you artwork at different angles. In fact many designers prefer looking at their designs upside down to find mistakes or ideas for further improvement.

You can do this virtually in Photoshop without affecting the pixel information in your image.

Click and hold the Hand Tool, it will open up an option called Rotate View Tool. Now you can rotate your image to any degree. If you use an Apple laptop you can use the rotate gesture to freely rotate the image around as well.

Adapted from Photoshop CS4: Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks (Wiley Publishing)
By Lynette Kent
Dateline: August 17, 2009
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

You can paste one image onto another and blend the pasted image into the Background layer by changing the blend mode. The layer blending modes control how the colors in the top image combine with the pixels in the underlying image. They do not affect the texture of either image. To make the top image blend into the texture of the base image and make the final image appear more realistic, you can use the Distort filter and a special file called a displacement map.

Adapted from Printing with Adobe Photoshop CS4 (Focal Press)
By Tim Daly
Dateline: August 12, 2009
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Toning

Historically, photographic print toning has used chemical toners like sepia and selenium to make prints with fairly limited colors ranging from brown to purple-reds. With the digital process, however, there are many more color options available together with a near Zone System level of control. For the fainthearted, this digital route is also reversible, so there’s no danger of ruining your perfectly good image file. Subtlety, if you want it, is there in bundles, with no need to produce intimidating Colorvir-like prints, unless hallucinogenic effects are your thing. Digital coloring in CS4 means you can have infinite control over the toning process adding color across the whole image or dropping it in up to ten different tonal sectors. Following is a number of different routes to image toning, starting with the easiest and ending with the more interesting Duotone techniques.

We've discussed techniques for enlarging images before using Photoshop commands. Re-sizer is an action pack that uses a series of such commands as an action pre-packed for you to achieve the best possible result.