Sunday, October 12, 2008

Start editing your photos with photoshop, learning just got easy

By David Peters

Ghosting is perfect for pictures involving subjects in motion, taken when the camera and the background is stable (not moving) and the subjects move through, around, or across the frame. I have had great success using this effect when photographing people moving about an historic site or children as they scamper over rocks. I have also used this effect for weddings and sports shoots. Example: In one wedding photograph, the groom stood still at the bottom of stone steps to an historic dwelling, his hand extended towards his bride, who slowly moved down the steps toward her groom. My six deliberate 'clicks' of the shutter created an airy, surreal picture of the wedding couple. Depending on the speed of the moving subjects, the shutter can be held down in rapid fire mode or each exposure can be meticulously choreographed: 1) each subject deliberately positioned in the frame, 2) one 'click' of the shutter, and 3) repeat steps 1 and 2 to the total number of multiple exposures you set in your camera.

Through highlighting edges of your photo, you also highlight its details. The method of unsharp mask and others like the difference of Gaussians increase the change in brightness close to each step. This technique's standard version adds a bright halo along the bright edge of the step and a dark halo along the dark edge. Depending on what effect you'd like for your image, there are advantages in just using one or the other. Using both may not do very much to improve your image, though.

Photoshop Brush Palette is collection of all Brush Shape Presets that allow you to create new brush, load, save or modify brush size, brush shape and brush dynamic in one single palette. The primary advantage of the Brushes palette is that you can define your own brush shapes and adjust various exciting dynamics. Whether you're using a mouse or a pen and tablet, every tool behaves differently based on the size and shape of your cursor (the brush tip), and brush tips come in many different styles (called brush shapes, or typically just brushes). A big, round brush paints in broad strokes; a small, elliptical brush paints in thin, hairline strokes. Of course, there's much more going on in Photoshop than just big, small, round, or elliptical.

You may be looking at a photo you took on your last vacation of the crystal blue waters on the ocean, but all Photoshop sees is a gray ocean. Did you manage to snap a picture of a rainbow arching across the sky after a summer evening storm? Photoshop sees it as a beautiful assortment of shades of gray. And that famous pot of gold at the end of it? To Photoshop, it's a big ol' pot of gray. Don't feel sorry for Photoshop though. It's perfectly happy in its colorless world. In fact, the only reason it shows us our images in color at all is because we as human beings expect to see them in color. We wouldn't know what to think if everything was appearing in black and white. But not Photoshop. To it, life just couldn't be sweeter than in black, white and gray.

If you have tones of images to resize or you want to perform the same action the next day or so. It's tedious to repeat these steps. Photoshop Actions allows you to record the steps you perform and re-play with one click so you don't have to keep on doing the same thing again and again. Using Photoshop Actions: Open up an image you want to resize and bring up the Photoshop Actions panel (Windows -> Actions) At the bottom of Action panel, click on the Create New Action button.

If you try to learn Photoshop yourself, a trial and error method of learning will allow you to become pretty good at a few fundamental techniques. But you'll never begin to imagine the unlimited potential of Photoshop CS2 until you sign up for Photoshop training. If you deal with images or graphics of any type in your work or in your favorite hobby, Photoshop training can help you reach your full potential. Adobe says that Photoshop CS3 Extended is ideal for film and video professionals, professionals in the manufacturing industry, medical professionals, architects and engineers, and scientific researchers. Photoshop CS3 lets professionals render 3D images and incorporate them in 2D composites. When CS2 came out, professional and novices alike were thrilled with the new Font Preview capability. And if you're considering a career as a graphic designer or visual effects artist, Photoshop training is one of the best ways to achieve your career goals.

Pictures are made up of many things, editing requires knowledge of all 3: 1) Contrasts adjustments (the highlights and the shadows) 2) Neutral tones balance (color cast on grey) 3) Increasing or decreasing the saturation The work flow of the photographic post production can be performed with many adjustment tools as: Brightness/contrast - Color Balance - Hue/Saturation, or Levels - Hue/Saturation, or Auto-Adjustments - Sponge. This tutorial is very brief and introduces a new method to decrease color cast on neutral tones. The picture has a really intense orange color cast. I took this picture of Christopher Columbus' statue along the "lower pavement" in Funchal (Madeira Island). No need to be a colorimetric expert to understand that, the light effect due to the night orange lights is to much. The goal is to decrease color cast, of course, without changing the "meaning" of the picture.First of all we duplicate the background layer. Then we apply Filter>Blur>Average, that will transform the picture's layer into a colored "stain" by the average pixels' color. Then we have to invert (ctrl i) the obtained color in order to see the opposite color.Now we change blending mode to Color (read also Blending modes tutorial) and decrease master opacity until we obtain our goal. And that's all!

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