Share Your Photoshop Tips & Skills Here

[astral]

The "Evaluate My Photo" sub-forum has been a great success with many members coming forward with some delightful images.

What is even more impressive is the "adjustments" that the more advanced members are putting up.

Would any members consider sharing their "tricks" in this thread?

I ask this question as the point has been raised with me from other members

If necessary I will pin this topic at the top to make it easy to find.

Thanks

Astral

[The Vulcan]

I support Astral most enthusiastically on this point.

I personally don't have the technical ability to assist, but I sincerely hope others who have so impressively put forward their work on the site will come forward.

I hope you will all be kind enough to share your abilities with us.

[The Vulcan]

Here's my limited input to start the ball rolling:

In sharpening an image I've always used "unsharp mask" as opposed to the other selections.

I use the following settings:-

Amount 50% (occasionally 100%)

Radius 1.0 pixels

Threshold 2 levels.

I find this more satisfactory than other variations and stops the final product looking over sharpened

[quiksilva]

I have mostly played around with image manipulation in photoshop rather than actual photography touch up

I have started a new thread with some examples of my work, as there quite a few images there and its not tips per se, but I'd be happy to give a few pointers.

Here's one for starters:

1. Open an image in photoshop, use one that looks a little washed out.

2. Open the layers window

3. Select the background layer and duplicate it

4. Select the new background copy layer

5. Change the blend mode to overlay and adjust the opacity to 50-60%

This technique works well on portraits.

Get creative, play around with the blend modes and opacities.

Add some fog to for your photo.

1. Open your image

2. Create a new layer and select it

3. Go to render / cloud

4. Then render / difference cloud

5. Then render /cloud (stick with that or repeat those steps until you get an effect you like)

6. Adjust the opacity to create a fog like effect.

7. Select the eraser tool, and go to the brush size, select a large soft edge brush, and adjust its hardness to 0 and opacity to 40-50%

8. Softly apply the tool to areas of the photo to which you may wish to draw some attention (probably foreground objects)

Edited January 18, 2008 by quiksilva

[quiksilva]

I have posted these before in forum 47, but I suppose this is a better place to display them.

These signatures use a wide range of effects and animation techniques, some of which took only a few minutes to make, and some took several hours.

Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool, and is capable of producing incredible effects, especially with the enormous amount of plug ins available (although I rarely use them only the hydroman version used a plug in for the water effect).

[jayenram]

I was about to post a couple of my efforts but they look pathetic at the side of yours.

How do you get the animation effects using Photoshop? I particularly like the idea in the second banner (Professor X).

[quiksilva]

There is another application that comes with photoshop called image ready. I use that.

I'm quite proud of the effect in the Professor X sig (even if the guy I did it for never used it.!)

The background was created through quite a complex series of steps. In fact I can barely remember all that I did to produce it. I started by creating a grid of black and white lines, and applied numerous blur effects and fliters. I then 'bent' these gridlines around the central character by using the liquify tool. Then applied a hue and some lighting effects to get the final result. I have often tried to duplicate it since but have never quite been able to.

[jayenram]

There is another application that comes with photoshop called image ready. I use that.

I didn't even know I had that! Doh!

I've found it now, cheers. Now for a little experimentation.

J

[The Vulcan]

Brilliant quicksilva. What a great start.

Lets hope others follow your lead.

[quiksilva]

There is another application that comes with photoshop called image ready. I use that.

I didn't even know I had that! Doh!

I've found it now, cheers. Now for a little experimentation.

J

Thanks Vulcan.

Jayaneram here's a tip for getting started with animation

Create a starting frame with the object you want to animate, out of view on the left hand side

Then create a new frame

In the new frame move your object out of frame on the right hand side.

Then press the tween button (3 circles) to tween with the last frame and select the desired amount of frames (10-20 is good).

If you plan to run it on a continued loop (forever), delete the last frame for a smoother animation.

Start simply. Think of it like those cartoon animations where you can draw a stick man on a corner of a piece of paper. Its exactly the same principle, look at bullseye where the cards seem to come out at you, again same principal, but in this case I not only changed position, but also its size.

Have fun with it, get creative, what other effects can you animate, colours? Transparencies? The only limit is your imagination.

Edited January 18, 2008 by quiksilva

[canuckamuck]

Ok Vulcan asked me to describe the technique I used to move the fish in Skippy Bangkok's clear water shot.

First of all I have to say that I knew right away that this shot lent itself easily to what I did. It takes a lot of screw-ups before you begin to see which pictures can be played with and those that are extremely hard.

A sharp image with definite edges is easier to lift, and water is a great place for a floating image. No shadows to recreate.

1) I increased the size of the image substantially probably around 20MB from 280KB. I like to have a big file, even if it is going to be small later. Photoshop effects work differently on different sized images. You have more control with big files.

2) I duplicated the original and left it as the background. That becomes my eternal undo. No matter how bad I screw up I can always erase down to the original and bring back part or all of an image. Or I can overlay the original with the new image pull back the opacity to soften an effect.

3) I made a path around the fish using the pen tool. Make sure it is not set to make a shape layer. I do this at 200 or 300 percent, and I do it the old fashioned way, one segment at a time. Get good at paths, and the hard stuff gets a lot easier. This path took about 2 minutes

4) I went to the paths palette and chose save path. Then I made a selection of the path and went to the select menu. I choose feather, 2 pixels. This gives a subtle softness to the edge of the object selected. If you don't do it, your image can look a bit artificial.

5) I copied and pasted the fish so that it now swam in it's own layer.

6) You won't like this one. I repainted in the area where the original fish was with a complex combination of rubber stamp tool, spot healing brush, and the paintbrush. This was the only time consuming part for me, it took about 15 minutes to get it where I liked it.

7) I went back to the fish layer and moved the little guy around until I found a place where there was balance. I liked that he was looking at the divers so I rotated him to do that some more. I also made him a bit bigger.

8) I cropped it a bit flattened it saved it to 700 pixels wide, hit save for web and that's it.

Hope it helps some.

[quiksilva]

Nice steps there canuckamuck, I agree bigger files the better (far easier to downsize an image than it is to blow it up).

I usually use the extract tool or a magnetic or polygonal lassoo to extract my objects but your way (step 4) makes alot more sense I have never used paths much but will certainly play around with them now, thanks!

[jayenram]

Thanks for the great advice folks.

I tried some easy sort of animation stuff but couldn't get it to w*rk on "Imageready". I wanted to animate a candle flame using liquify but any effect is duplicated on all the frames. I've now prepared a set of images on Photoshop and imported them into Imageready but it appears to be a long way around.

Cheers

J

[canuckamuck]

Thanks for the great advice folks.

I tried some easy sort of animation stuff but couldn't get it to w*rk on "Imageready". I wanted to animate a candle flame using liquify but any effect is duplicated on all the frames. I've now prepared a set of images on Photoshop and imported them into Imageready but it appears to be a long way around.

Cheers

J

I prepare my frames as numbered layers in photoshop before I go to Imageready.

Then you have to make sure you only have the relevant layers visible as you make each step. IR is fussy, and it is a bit of trial and error before you get a system that works for you. I find myself learning all over again each time because I don't do it enough.

Quicksilva is doing stuff way over my head, maybe he has a protocol to use?

[The Vulcan]

I wonder if one of you wonder guys could help me?

I shot this pic of my niece some 20 years ago. I backlit the subject but overdid it a little and washed out part of her blonde hair.

I like the image but hate the washed out hair and feel it ruins it all. I like the light on her shoulders and around the rim of her hat.

How do I correct this?

[quiksilva]

Thanks for the great advice folks.

I tried some easy sort of animation stuff but couldn't get it to w*rk on "Imageready". I wanted to animate a candle flame using liquify but any effect is duplicated on all the frames. I've now prepared a set of images on Photoshop and imported them into Imageready but it appears to be a long way around.

Cheers

J

Easy?

Convincing animation of fire is extremely difficult to do. By nature it is chaotic. Its not like getting an object to move across the screen, thats easy, if they follow a nice predictable path.

See the bullets fly here in my first ever animated sig.

Fire moves and sways and flickers at random.

There are tricks you can do to make it look like a convincing, but even these have their limits.

Take my 'Torch" sig, it looks like its on fire as if flames are rising behind it. Well they are, but its all illusion, the flames are in fact two duplicated layers twice the height of the sig, continuously scrolling. Its a cheat but it looks quite good

As Canuck says, you need to prepare all the frames you need as seperate layers in photoshop, before importing into IR.

When that image with all its layers is imported make sure to make every layer you dont want to see invisible in that first frame (what you do in 1st effects all later frames).

Then duplicate your frame make the desired layer visible and tween behind (if you need plenty of frames (more frames slower action)

then duplicate again delect the frame you dont need to see and select the one you do need and tween and repeat.

To run a continual loop duplicate your first frame and move it to the very last position and tween behind

Make sure to delete the final frame otherwise when it runs as a loop the last frame will be repeated when the first frame runs again so it will appear to 'stutter'.

.

[quiksilva]

Canuck, I have never got around to using actions etc I just gop step by step and lots of trial and error, I just stop when I like what I see.

I wonder if one of you wonder guys could help me?

I shot this pic of my niece some 20 years ago. I backlit the subject but overdid it a little and washed out part of her blonde hair.

I like the image but hate the washed out hair and feel it ruins it all. I like the light on her shoulders and around the rim of her hat.

How do I correct this?

Vulcan , try the clone tool, take your time with it.

I did a very quick job at it, but it can offer a glimpse at what is possible. I also did a little brush work (select a portion of the hair layer by copy, select that and define it as a brush and paint with it), that with a little soft eraser work can look good.

If I was taking my time I would have done the clone stamp on new layers and adjusted opacities as well to make it look more natural.

Edited January 19, 2008 by quiksilva

[The Vulcan]

Thanks quiksilva, I never thought of using the brush angle.

Looks like tomorrow's taken care of!

Thanks again for the tip.

[canuckamuck]

Well I guess me and Quicksilva were working at the same time. I did mine the same as his, except I used a donor image, I simplly searched images on google, search term blonde. I found a likely donor, desaturated the image and used it to do my cloning. The rest I did the exactly the way Quicksilva explained to be the longer way. And yes it is the longer way. I used mutiple layers and opacities to get a natural feel.

I found it was important to keep the orignal image as a background and then when all the upper layers were merged into one top layer I pulled the opacity back and let the background image shine through so the backlighting looked more real.

Cheers

[The Vulcan]

Thanks canuckamuck.

Both you guys have, in a matter of hours, taught me so much more about PS.

[NordicMan]

I wonder if one of you wonder guys could help me?

I shot this pic of my niece some 20 years ago. I backlit the subject but overdid it a little and washed out part of her blonde hair.

I like the image but hate the washed out hair and feel it ruins it all. I like the light on her shoulders and around the rim of her hat.

How do I correct this?

Vulcan, are you familiar with the term "to blow the highlights"? This is what has happened to her hair. In a digital image, once the brightness reaches maximum, that's it. It is pure white. A large part of her hair is now only a block of pure white. There are absolutely no details in it.

You can not recover any details directly from the hair itself now as it is now.

Perhaps you can rescan the original image at a darker setting. You can scan it twice, one at a dark setting, one at this setting. The dynamic range in your original film is higher, there is potentially still some details in the highlights there, which is not shown here. With these two scans, there are a number of technicues you can use to merge them in a natural-looking way.

If this is all you have, you need to "cheat" like canuck has done. You need to copy in hair from another source. From somewhere else in this image, or from another image. This new hair is then blended in to match up suitably.

If you shoot RAW on your camera nowadays, you have some more protection against blown highlights than with jpg. The dynamic range is higher in raw, and you can develop it into two jpgs (dark and normal) as blend in the bright items from the dark version.

PS! For quick-and-dirty work, the highlight/shadows tool in photoshop can work wonders. I find it especially useful if some dark areas got darker than desired. Almost like adding fill-flash after the photo is taken

cheers

nm

[The Vulcan]

NordicMan

Thanks for your reply.

I know what I did wrong (blown highlights) but unfortunately I no longer have the negative and am confined to working on a scanned in print. This limits me as you can imagine. And you're right; there's no detail whatsoever in the blown section to recover. That's why I asked the others what was the best way to "cheat" the image.

Seeking "donors" and using the brush just never occurred to me.

Seems an old dog can learn new tricks (with a lotta help)!

p.s. the shot was the first (and last) of my attempts to "backlight" the subject!

p.p.s and I don't do blondes anymore!

[NordicMan]

p.p.s and I don't do blondes anymore!

I bet you didn't know that Debbie actually was a brunette.

(sorry for sloppy masking)

cheers

nm

[jukapot]

[

Hope I uploaded the right picture. I think this is near what we want.

It was done with the RAW processing program of Photoshop CS3 which can be used for JPEG and TIFF also. Its very similar to the Raw program in Lightbox.

The bad news is I cannot duplicate the process to explain what I did. Can anyone take it from here and help?

Edited March 3, 2008 by jukapot

[jukapot]

I find that the greatest source for free photoshop tips is in iTunes podcasts. I have downloaded over a thousand podcasts, mostly photoshop video tips lasting from 1 minute for a PHOTOSHOP KILLER TIPS to TV shows like PHOTOSHOP TV. which lasts over a half hour. Also they have extensive selections of videos on LIGHTROOM and many other Adobe products. Some podcasts are sound only, but most are video.

My big problem is that I love to watch the tutorials and often don't get to practice what I just learned. Sometimes, something sinks in and I use the collection as a big reference library to search.

I assume that iTunes for the PC is the same as for the Mac and includes so much more than downloading songs. The iTunes program is a free download from apple...A guess a simple search for Photoshop podcasts would work great too.

[jukapot]

I made a great discovery several months ago for processing photos in Photoshop. Don't, Just kidding . I use The Adobe Bridge program included with my photoshop CS3 suite and do basic photo editing. Bridge has come a long was with the latest version in CS3. Now I weed out the unaccceptable photos and place the photos in their proper order.

Now I set the preference in Adobe Camera Raw to accept Tiff and Jpeg files as well as Raw. The RAW program does not accept psd files so it is necessry to change all my photoshop files (pdf) to tiff. For those using Lightroom, this is the same Raw program found there. The program is quick, easy and powerful.

If there is more work to be done I will go on to Photoshop to finish the job. I thought this process was my secret until I discovered the same method described in a book about Raw Photos. My secret is out !!!!!!!

I eventually move the photos to either lightroom for my main files.

Edited March 19, 2008 by jukapot

[quiksilva]

Google photoshop tutorials. I learned most of my tricks at a site called good-tutorials.com its an excellent resource. I prefer the step by step web based tutorials as I can follow them at my own speed and have them open whilst I do my work.

I often just follow their examples directly reproducing their tutorials as exactly as I can, whilst I do this I really learn how the effects work together and how some effects are produced.

Once I have this I can then apply it to my original pieces.

[The Vulcan]

That's a good tip "quicksilva" - thanks for sharing it

[jayenram]

I know it's an old idea but I tried it anyway

Image ready

I copied the original outline then pasted as a new layer and reduced the image by 5% moving it a few slots to the right. When complete, I saved the images as .jpg's making each layer visible in turn. I've reduced the .gif file for speed of loading.

[The Vulcan]

That's great. I see what you've done BUT how do you get it to move as it does?

Love to hear more