Advanced Photoshop – Dramatic Mono Conversion
This tutorial looks at ways to convert your image to black and white using the tools available in Photoshop CS3. There may be work-arounds for other versions of photoshop or other image editors, but the work horse in this tutorial is the powerful ‘Black and White Tool’ in CS3 which has a great selection of filter pre-sets. To emulate this without the tool, you could try blending channel levels. The first step is to prepare your image. Black and white has a higher dynamic range than colour so it may be advisable to create a HDR from multiple exposures or even tonemap a single...
Read MoreCreate a photoshop action – Colour boost
This tutorial offers an alternative to the saturation option when you wish to dramatically boost the colours in an image. We will make a photoshop action for this colour boosting technique so that it can be applied easily to any image in the future. More information about creating an action can be found here. The first step is to create a folder for your action. You can call it what you want, I have called it ‘ColourBoost’. Give the first step a logical name and start recording. LAB Convert your image to LAB mode. LAB means there are three channels L=lightness and two colour...
Read MorePhotography techniques – focus stacking
in Photography Techniques, Photoshop Techniques | 5 commentsThis articles looks at a lengthy and complicated procedure to render every part of a scene with perfect focus. the aim is to achieve a high depth of field (DOF) whilst maintaining the high quality of your lens’ sweet-spot. The main challenge is, maybe, deciding what situations exactly would require this sort of treatment. This technique is popular for macro work, where the DOF is usually too shallow to capture all the sharp detail in a subject. Landscape could benefit as there is a requirement for sharpness throughout the scene. Usually an f/16 and careful hyper-focal calculations will...
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Basic adjustments – Sharpen and save for the web
Basic adjustments – Sharpen and save for the web This tutorial is about creating small files for your website or online portfolio. This is assuming that you have an image that you have finished processing at its full size and you want to get the best possible quality when someone views it on the internet. It is always best to do most of your adjustment such as levels and curves while the image is at full size (before you reduce the size), but if you put a full size image on the web, it will load slowly and look odd. Maybe your website has a way of reducing the file size, but it is far...
Read More Layers and Masks 1 – The Layers Palette
Layers and Masks 1 – The Layers Palette For this guide you need to have Photoshop open with an image and be able to see the ‘Layers’ palette. If you can’t find the layers palette, go to the ‘windows’ tab and select layers. Now you can see it, so let me explain the different parts of the window… we will look at each aspect in greater detail later. Mask – this button creates a mask for the selected layer, it won’t work with just one layer Adjustment layer – this button will create another layer for the sole purpose of adjusting...
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