Table of contents for Teach Yourself Image Editing in Teach Yourself Image Editing

Image editing, in regards to photography, is the process of manipulating a photograph visually in order to change or improve the appearance. In analogue photography this would be done in a darkroom where the photographer could adjust exposure, alter dark and light areas and retouch small sections of the image before fully developing the photograph. In the digital world this is more easily done nondestructively, as you are able to keep the original image intact, and even undo processing steps. The principal variables you might control during image editing are as follows: size, shape and orientation; exposure across all tonal values; vibrancy of colour, or specific colours; sharpness; correction distortions associated with optical errors, such as chromatic aberration and vignetting; and other special effects. Image-editing software is now affordable for…

With as many colour and tonal changes made to your RAW files as possible, most images will have to be brought into Photoshop, in order for the finishing touches to be added. As accomplished as many RAW converters have become, they do not feature the vast range of retouching tools found in Photoshop and so are unsuitable for high-end work in this area. The following techniques make use of the most dynamic components of the program, layers and brushes, which cannot be currently supported in Camera Raw, Lightroom or Capture. These allow complex modifications to be made very precisely, on a highly local basis – brushes in ACR work in a similar way to Photoshop brushes, but offer nowhere near the same level of sophisticated control. There is also the…

In the previous chapter we demonstrated how to import images into Lightroom. We also touched on ways to organise your assets by placing them in Collections. In this chapter we’ll delve deeper into the Library module and demonstrate how it can help you to manage (and edit) your images. You may have thousands of photos to deal with, and they may be scattered across a variety of folders and external hard drives. Without Lightroom’s Library module, you’d have to rummage around in those separate folders looking for specific photos. Lightroom gathers assets together and places them in its Catalog, so that they are all under one roof. You can then see your images more conveniently in the Library module. On this spread we introduce the key panels and tools in…

The facial recognition feature within Lightroom’s Library module enables you to organise your photos by person, and keep track of family, friends and clients. It works by detecting faces in a group of images, then allows you to tag them with the person’s name. The clever part is, as you add more names, the feature gets smarter, seeking out similar faces and suggesting names for you. So it takes less time than you’d think to tag faces in a large collection of images. As such, it’s a handy feature for organising family photos, snapshots, weddings and the like. Once a face is tagged, it appears in a list of named people, so that you can quickly find images featuring that person whenever you like. The tag is stored in the…

At the end of the previous chapter on the Library module, we touched on ways to improve photos using the Quick Develop panel. This aptly named panel enables you to quickly tweak some of the most common image-related issues Once you’ve imported and organised your collection of digital negatives into Collections and added keywords, you’ll be ready to deal with more complex image-processing challenges – and this is where the sophisticated Develop module comes in. Adobe invented the .dng (digital negative) format to make it easier to store and access unprocessed raw files. The word ‘negative’ harks back to the traditional days of analogue film. Before you could see a film negative’s true colours and tones, it needed to be developed in a darkroom, which is why the Develop module’s…

If you plan to share your edited photographs online then you don’t need to worry as much about over-saturating the colours. Computer screens can reproduce millions of colours, but if you’re planning to print your photos then you need to be more careful about avoiding over-saturated colours at the editing stage, because printers can’t reproduce as many colours as you can see on a monitor. If you print over-saturated colours, they may look garish and lack detail in the print version. We’ll look into ways to get more faithful-looking prints but it’s worth being aware of the concept of printable and unprintable colours at an early stage. Lightroom is also designed to help you counteract colour casts. These warm orange or cold blue tints can occur when your camera’s automatic…

On the previous spread we demonstrated how to use the Adjustment brush to dodge a dull foreground, while burning more detail into the brighter sky. By altering the size, softness and flow of the Adjustment brush, you can target and tweak the tones of specific objects with precision. When you click a photo with the Adjustment brush you place an Edit pin. This pin records the position and strength of all the tonal adjustments you make. Thanks to Edit pins you can make multiple adjustments to a photo and then click a pin to fine-tune its effect at any time in the future. If you click a pin and drag it to the right, you can increase the value setting of each associated slider to, say, brighten the image more…

Certain colours are weaker in some photos than in others. If you boost the overall colour intensity of the image using the Basic panel’s Saturation slider, then weaker colours will have more impact, but the stronger ones may become over-saturated. This can lead to colours that won’t print correctly because they’ll be clipped and lacking in detail. In addition, a model’s skin tones may become too orange and garish. The Vibrance slider is designed to solve this problem by enabling you to increase the saturation of weaker colours without over-saturating the stronger ones. It also tends to boost natural landscape colours such as blues and greens more strongly than oranges, which helps you to avoid creating over-saturated skin tones. If you venture beyond the Basic panel you’ll find some alternative…

When shooting a high-contrast scene it can be a challenge to capture detail throughout that scene’s full tonal range. If the camera’s metering mode attempts to capture detail in a bright area (such as a background window) then a shaded room may be plunged into shadow. If the camera meters to capture detail in shaded areas, then the shot’s sunlit sections may blow out. When you review a photo on your camera’s LCD you may not see any detail in the brighter highlights, but if you’re shooting in raw then Lightroom’s Develop module will come to the rescue. Because raw files are always packed full ofinformation about a scene’s tonal range, you can overcome common exposure problems with ease, and restore detail to clipped areas. As we have seen already,…

On the previous spread we demonstrated how the Detail panel enables you to sharpen a photo while keeping noise at bay. Noise is added to a photo when using a high ISO sensitivity setting on your camera, or when shooting at night with a slow shutter speed. There are two types of noise – luminance (greyscale) and chroma (or colour). Luminance noise appears throughout the image’s tonal range as tiny dots. Chroma noise manifests itself as tiny patches of distracting rainbow colours, which are especially noticeable in detail-free sections of a JPEG image, such as a sky. Luminance noise can be compared to character-adding film grain, so it isn’t as distracting or undesirable as chroma noise. We’ll show you how to use the Detail panel’s Noise Reduction tools to get…

Custom Blue Filter preset Here’s the result produced by the customised Blue Filter preset in our four-step walkthrough. We darkened the reds to darken the brick so that it stands out in contrast with the bright sky. We also darkened the blue of the sky slightly, for for more detail High contrast Red preset This preset filter applies values that lighten the reds and oranges of the stone for greater contrast popular in landscapes and mid-day lighting. This exagerrates the ‘ho’t feel of the Roman sunlight and creates a strong monochrome image. Cross Process 2 preset This Lightroom preset mimics a traditional darkroom processing technique by tweaking the Tone Curve and adjusting the HSL panel’s Saturation and Luminance sliders. We’ll explore cross-processing in more detail in the following chapter. Old…

A traditional darkroom photographer had a suite of tools to call upon when processing images, such as bits of card that enabled selective lightening (dodging) or darkening (burning) of parts of a picture. Other tools included an enlarger that equipped the photographer to produce prints of specific sizes. Photoshop has a vast suite of equivalent darkroom tools to help us process a picture, or to crop them to improve composition, for example. In the darkroom a photographer might use a brush to paint over unwanted objects. We can mimic this challenging retouching task more easily in Photoshop’s digital darkroom, thanks to features such as the Clone Stamp tool. Photoshop has a wide range of image-editing tools packed into panels and buried in menus and sub-menus. The most useful tools are…

Once, every adjustment you made to your images in Photoshop was applied directly to the pixels in your photo. There was no going back, at least not without duplicating layers, using the History panel, or reverting to a backup. But the introduction of adjustment layers changed all that. Adjustment layers merely change the appearance of the layer(s) below without modifying any of the pixels. You can change an adjustment layer’s settings long after you’ve created it and you can stack adjustment layers to produce cumulative editing effects. If you save your images in the Photoshop (.psd) format, the adjustment layers are saved with them and remain fully editable. The only time their effect is made permanent is when you save a copy of your image in another file format. Adjustment…

Colour adjustments are central to much of the photo enhancement work we do in Photoshop, and much of the time we simply want more! One way of doing this is with a Vibrance adjustment layer – which actually has two sliders, one for Vibrance and one for Saturation. The saturation slider is a pretty crude tool which increases all colours equally, while Vibrance is more sophisticated and strengthens weaker colours more. But neither offers any control over individual colours, and for this you need a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Now at first sight this doesn’t appear to be very helpful because it simply offers global hue, saturation and lightness sliders – and the saturation slider appears to offer no particular advantage over the version in the Vibrance panel. However, the Hue/Saturation…

In this Tool School lesson, we take a look at the many applications of the Quick Selection and Magic Wand tools. From replacing dull backgrounds to making faster selective adjustments, these nifty Photoshop devices will help you enhance your images and speed up your selection workflow. The Quick Selection and the Magic Wand tools select pixels based on colour and tonal similarity, so they share the same Toolbox compartment. However, like any double act they have their own individual strengths. To start making a selection with the Magic Wand tool, you simply click an area to sample it. The tool will then select similar pixels based on the colours and tones that you first clicked. By brushing the more intelligent Quick Selection tool over your subject, it will create a…

On the previous pages we introduced you to simple selection tools such as the Rectangular and Elliptical marquees. These primitive selection tools are fine for selecting basic shapes, but not much help if you need to select more complex or irregularly shaped objects, such as the jagged mountain in our starting image. The Lasso tools are directly beneath the marquee tools in the Tools panel. The basic Lasso tool enables you to draw a quick freehand selection marquee, which is good for making quick but rough selections. You have to make a freehand Lasso selection in one operation by clicking the mouse button, then holding it down as you draw. Once you let go of the mouse button the marquee selection is completed. Some selection challenges require a lasso tool…

When you shoot with a wide-angle lens you may notice that the scene’s horizontal and vertical lines appear curved. This is referred to as geometric distortion. The amount of lens-induced geometric distortion varies from lens to lens (and it also depends on the focal length you’ve used to capture the scene), but these dramatically curved lines can detract from the authenticity of a shot. Distorted lines that bulge outwards are said to be suffering from barrel distortion, while lines that curve inwards are afflicted by pincushion distortion. Older versions of Photoshop CS enable you to tackle most types of lens distortion by using the Lens Correction filter. Geometric distortion (curved lines) can be straightened using that filter’s Remove Distortion filter. Perspectival distortion – where the lines converge inwards towards the…

Photoshop CC has a ‘Select and Mask’ option that enables you to refine and improve existing layer masks with rough or pixelated edges. In fact, it offers tools that you might be familiar with from the Refine Mask option in previous versions. To show you how this works, we’ve created a layered image montage combining this travel shot with a new and more interesting sky on the layer below – to try this out yourself, load up the before_masks.jpg sample file. This Select and Mask dialog can be used to modify an existing selection, or to make a new one from scratch. In our example image here, we’re using the Quick Selection tool to select the blank blue sky in the top layer (it’s quicker than trying to select the…

Powerful as Photoshop is, there are some jobs it just can’t do – or which would be too difficult and time-consuming to figure out. Adobe happily acknowledges that there are specialist tools out there which can do particular jobs better or faster than Photoshop can, which is why it’s built in support for plug-ins. These are essentially mini-applications which you can invoke from within Photoshop and which return a new version of the picture to Photoshop when they’re done. There’s a booming market in plug-ins, and for this tutorial we’re using the Google Nik Collection, which has recently been made completely free and can be downloaded from www.google.com/nikcollection. If you’ve never tried plug-ins before, prepare to be amazed… The Google Nik Collection, like other plug-in software, comes with an installer…

While the photographer does all they can to appropriately expose a subject, by dialling in the right aperture, shutter speed and ISO, some things are out of the control of the photographer, even impossible to do in real life. For example, controlling every hair on a person’s head for a neat portrait, or rearranging the clouds in the sky. That’s where some more advanced image retouching skills come in handy. Editing software is now so intelligent that almost anything can be done. Removing blemishes from skin and adding artificial graduated neutral density filters to bright skies are just the start. It’s now possible to get software to use artificial intelligence to identify faces, which then provide us with the tools we need to quickly and creatively alter features or poor…

We often talk about ‘essential’ techniques in the context of both taking photographs and then processing them in software. For even the most experienced digital photographer however, this term can seem a little opaque, with a level of uncertainty about what exactly constitutes essential in this case. While there is a great degree of personal judgement involved in deciding what shooting and processing actions are required for an image, there are some ‘tricks of the trade’ that must be employed in order to create the quality of images demanded by the world today. These cover the key elements of a successful image – correct exposure, balanced colour for a natural appearance and critical sharpness where it is most needed, such the eyes in a portrait. Other staple processing steps in…

Photoshop Lightroom combines the professional raw-processing tools in the more expensive Photoshop CC with the asset-organising powers of the cheaper Photoshop Elements. It also has plenty of unique photo-fixing and organising tools of its own, as you’ll discover while working through this book. One of the biggest challenges that we face as digital photographers is managing our collections of images. Lightroom enables you to take the tedium out of asset management. It provides easy ways to add keywords to batches of files as you import them from a memory card, so you can find specific images more quickly in the future. We’ll look at Lightroom’s asset management functions in more detail later. You may be dealing with thousands of images that are scattered across folders on your PC as well…

If you’ve imported thousands of photos into Lightroom’s Library module, you may be daunted by the challenge of finding specific files when you need them. Fortunately, Lightroom is packed full of tools and commands that are designed to help you separate the wheat from the chaff. In chapter one we demonstrated how to add selected photos to Collections, so you could group images together in a similar way to putting prints into a photo album. We also demonstrated how to use the Smart Collections feature to collect and display files according to specific metadata criteria, such as whether they had a portrait or landscape aspect ratio, for example. Lightroom displays all your thumbnails according to the date they were captured, so you can scroll back through time and rely on…

After travelling abroad it used to be traditional practice to print your holiday snaps and store them in an album to flick through. Now, you can gather your holiday-sourced photos together in a Lightroom Collection (see chapter one). Alternatively, you can use the Map module to present your photos according to where they were captured, which provides a fun and informative way to find particular files. When you take a photo on your smart phone, the software records the location of the photo using GPS (the satellite-based global positioning system). These coordinates are stored in the image file’s metadata, so when you import it into Lightroom the software can read the map coordinates and display the photo’s location in the Map module. Here you can see a map, see little…

The histogram window is one of the most useful tools in the Develop module. The histogram graph performs a similar function to the medical chart clipped to a hospital patient’s bed. Just as a doctor or nurse can use a chart to help diagnose the health of a patient, we can look at the shape of a photo’s histogram graph to see if the image is under- or over-exposed. We can also use Lightroom’s histogram window to help us create an image that has a healthier spread of tones that displays more detail in its shadows, midtones and highlights. In the walkthrough below we’ll show you how to analyse a histogram so that you can understand how parts of the undulating graph equate to a photo’s tonal characteristics. Our starting…

While looking at a scene through your camera’s viewfinder, you can zoom and pan the lens to compose the photo. You may know what makes a good composition, or you might employ a more intuitive point-and-shoot approach. Often, it’s only when looking at photos on the camera’s LCD display (or even in Lightroom’s Library) that you can spot a photo that stands out as being well-composed. When taking the picture you may not notice a distracting object at the edge of the frame. For example, when directing a model in the studio you’ll be more attentive to her pose than concentrating on any bits of backdrop or lighting kit that might be straying into the photo. And you may not notice problems such as tilted horizons until you’ve imported a…

Despite our best efforts to keep our lenses and cameras clean, we may find that some photos suffer from sensor spots. When you swap lenses over on location, tiny fragments of dirt and dust can enter the camera body and adhere to the sensor. These sensor spots can then show up in a photograph as small, soft, dark blobs. These blobs are particularly annoying because they appear in the same parts of every photo from a shoot. They are particularly noticeable in clean smooth areas such as skies (as you can see in the starting image). Your DSLR camera may attempt to remove sensor spots by vibrating the sensor, but this automatic mechanical technique may not prove effective. For a more thorough clean you can activate the camera’s sensor cleaning…

The Graduated Filter is one of the most useful tools that Lightroom has on offer. It works by creating a gradated tonal blend between any two points in an image. The area behind your first point is completely affected, and beyond your second point remains unaffected, with a blend in between. What makes it such a powerful tool is the fact that, just like the Radial Filter and Adjustment Brush tools, you have complete control both over the area it affects, and the type of tonal changes that you’d like to make in that area. You can click and drag a line in any direction to create your blend, but the classic example of a graduated filter in action is to darken a sky in a landscape. One problem that…

The Develop module’s Basic panel is designed to help you reveal a photo’s missing tonal details by independently targeting and adjusting the Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. This enables you to lighten or darken problematic areas without changing correctly exposed ones. The Tone Curve panel that was featured on the previous spread provides you with an additional and effective way to target and tweak specific tones. You can combine the controls in the Basic and Tone Curve panels to overcome any tone-related problem. Lightroom has two new powerful techniques to manipulate the Tone Curve; parametric adjustment sliders and the targeted adjustment tool. The parametric adjustment sliders are useful for choosing precise values for accurate tonal changes, as they split an image into four distinct sections: Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows…

Many digital cameras provide the opportunity to process a photograph immediately as they capture it, using a range of built-in presets such as Portrait, Landscape, Neutral and so on. These presets change the look of the captured photos’ colours and tones. For example, a camera’s Landscape preset might boost the saturation of blues and greens. The Neutral preset will avoid boosting the colour and contrast so that you can get the look you want in Lightroom. If you shoot in JPEG format, then the results of these in-camera presets will be harder to alter in Lightroom. However, if you shoot in your camera’s raw format then you can experiment with different looks quickly and effectively in Lightroom, courtesy of the profiles and sliders in the Camera Calibration panel. This panel…

Lightroom’s Merge Panorama command stitches several horizontal or vertical frames together to create a panoramic raw file – perfect for those times when your lens can’t fit everything in, or if you want to pack in extra detail. When shooting the frames for a panorama, use a tripod to keep the camera position fixed and make sure that the panning motion remains perfectly level by checking the horizon as you pan (a spirit level comes in handy here). Shoot with your camera in vertical orientation to record the maximum amount of detail, and allow for a generous overlap between each segment. Lightroom’s Merge Panorama command offers three Projection modes that stitch the frames in different ways. Spherical maps the frames as if on the inside of a sphere. It’s ideal…

In this Tool School, we look at the Crop tool. This tool has a lot to offer when it comes to making shots look their best. It enables us to remove or crop the edges of a photo to create a new composition or take out unwanted objects at the edges of the frame, much as a traditional photographer would use a guillotine to trim photos after printing them. When shooting on location, we may not have enough time to think about the best way to compose a scene, especially if we’re rushing from A to B. The Crop tool enables us to reframe the photo’s subject matter at our leisure. As well as removing distracting objects, the Crop tool also allows us to correct common mistakes. For example, when…

Levels adjustments don’t look terribly sophisticated when you compare them with what you can do with a curves adjustment layer, but they are a really quick and easy way to optimise your image ahead of any more detailed work. Often, it’s only when you’ve got the levels right that you can properly see what to do next. The key to this is the histogram display in the levels panel. From this you can tell whether your image has a full range of tones. If not, you can drag the black point and white point sliders underneath to line up the left and right edges of the histogram. Our walkthrough, opposite, shows how this works on a real-life image and some of the hidden depth of levels! By default, levels adjustments…

Black and white photography shows no signs of dying away. In fact, it’s become a mainstream creative choice for photographers attempting to capture the world in a dramatic or timeless way. But creating a successful black and white image isn’t as simple as just removing the colour information, because the way different colours translate into different shades of grey makes a massive difference to the finished picture. In the days of film you would control this using different-coloured ‘contrast’ filters on the lens. These days, you can do it using a Black & White adjustment layer in Photoshop. With this, you can control the relative strengths and hence brightness values of the colours in the photo as they are translated into shades of grey. In the old days, this would…

When faced with the challenge of selecting and replacing an unwanted background we’re spoilt for choice thanks to Photoshop’s comprehensive collection of tools. If you gave three Photoshop users the task of removing the clutter in our opening image’s background you might see three different approaches. To remove the sky, Photoshop user number one might reach for the Magic Wand to sample the sky pixels and then Shift-click to add other background details to the selection, and use Edit>Cut to remove the selected pixels. Due to the complexity and variety of some of the background details, Photoshop user number two might decide to select the parrot instead of the background, using the Quick Selection tool. A few swipes of this brush-based tool would select most of the parrot, although some…

You can make quick, rough selections by manually drawing a marquee using the Elliptical or Rectangular Marquee tools. Alternatively, you can use manual selection tools such as the Polygonal Lasso tool to select more irregularly shaped subjects such as a jagged mountain. The Tools panel has a third compartment containing the intelligent selection tools. Tools such as the Magic Wand tool enable you to make selections based on similarities in colour and tone, so you can select large areas such as skies with a few clicks. This tool is handy for instantly hunting out bits of sky between tree branches. The Magic Wand tool shares its Tools panel compartment with the Quick Selection tool. Like the Magic Wand tool, the Quick Selection tool recognises changes in colour and tone, making…

For this tutorial we set out to shoot a mid-air self-portrait inspired by an image of Salvador Dali, taken by one of the greatest portrait photographers, Phillippe Halsman. Halsman captured Dali mid-air among flying cats, canvas, chairs and a plume of water. 28 attempts were needed before the combination of flying objects looked right, with everything having to be cleared and reset after each attempt. Here, rather than doing it all at once, we’ll show you how to capture several levitating objects separately, then combine the frames in Photoshop using simple masking and selection skills. To shoot images for this effect, use a tripod and keep the focal length, focus point and exposure consistent. We used a remote trigger to fire the shutter. For lighting, we set the speedlight to…

It can be a challenge to get your images looking sharp. Many digital cameras have a built-in filter that blurs the image in an attempt to avoid producing moiré patterns. This low-pass (or anti-aliasing) filter can also soften important details and create a photo that lacks impact. What looks sharp on the camera’s LCD screen may turn out to be soft. A slow shutter speed may also induce blur, which is more difficult to fix. Photoshop has sharpening tools that are designed to tease out detail in a soft-looking shot. This post-production sharpening works by increasing the contrast around the edges of details in the image, giving them more impact. However, when you sharpen an image using filters you risk exaggerating picture noise in smooth areas, such as in the…

In this Tool School, we’ll explore ways to make tools perform more effectively, thanks to the Content-Aware option. This intelligent feature can dramatically speed up your editing. When you paint with the Spot Healing Brush over an unwanted pimple on a model’s cheek, the tool will automatically sample adjacent skin pixels, place them over the pimple and seamlessly blend the join between cloned pixels and their neighbours. However, if the pimple is too close to a facial feature such as an eyebrow, the brush may inadvertently sample some hair and place it over the pimple. This forces you to undo the edit and switch to its cousin the Healing Brush, so that you can manually Alt-click to choose a patch of clear skin to place over the pimple. Alternatively, by…

For many photographers, post-processing is a fundamental step in the finalising of an image, but is not necessarily a desirable artistic opportunity. For other creatives however, photo editing has become the dominant stage in the production of their signature photographic style, with the majority of work done at the computer, rather than behind a camera. Some may dispute that this stretches the definition of traditional photography too far, yet with care and consideration we can create images that would otherwise be impossible using traditional photographic methods. With so many photographers producing imagery, this can be beneficial for introducing unique qualities to otherwise similar compositions of already well-studied subjects. While it is possible to become overly preoccupied with finding a style, especially as a beginner, devising a balance of exposure, colour…

It is generally accepted that a RAW workflow should be the choice of most professional photographers. Unless there is a specific reason for choosing JPEG as a file format, such as maximising memory card space and buffer capacity, RAW files offer far greater flexibility. There is still some confusion amongst photographers surrounding the actual advantages offered by RAW, however. Unlike JPEGs or even TIFF files, RAW images contain all of the data captured by the imaging sensor, including full colour information. This allows changes to be made to white balance at any time and in a manner that is similar to in-camera colour temperature selection. The true benefit is that of future-proofing – any adjustments made can be revisited and altered indefinitely, without loss of image quality and risk of…

1 Choose a source Lightroom collects files from a variety of sources and displays them in its Catalog. After launching Lightroom, click the Import button at the bottom-left of the interface (or choose File>Import Photos and Video from the main menu.) An import window will appear. In the Source section, browse the files and folders and choose a source such as a memory card, your camera if it’s plugged in, or a folder of photos on an internal or external hard drive. 2 Check or uncheck? The assets in the selected source folder or memory card will appear as thumbnails. Use the slider to increase the thumbnail size for a closer look. All the files are checked automatically. You can tick Uncheck All and then manually check the thumbnails of…

We just looked at ways to begin sorting your collection of photos by adding ratings and flags, and using their existing metadata to filter photos according to certain criteria, such as aspect ratio or camera model. Later in this chapter we’ll learn how to locate photos according to where they were captured, thanks to the GPS coordinates stored in the metadata. It’s handy to be able to search for files according to coloured labels or shooting locations, but these tools will only go so far. To find a photo according to its actual subject matter, we could try to remember when it was taken and then scroll down through the Grid view in an attempt to identify its thumbnail. Alternatively, we could add keywords to our photos and then use…

As you’ve already seen in this chapter, the Library module enables you to organise your digital assets so that you can find specific files more easily. You can even automatically edit your images as you import them to improve their contrast. To do so, go to the Apply During Import section in the Import window. Set the Develop Settings drop-down menu to Lightroom General presets and choose Auto Tone. This preset will then analyse each photograph’s histogram and adjust it automatically to create a healthier spread of tones. We’ll look at histograms in more detail in the next chapter. You can also manually adjust a photo’s colours and tones using the aptly named Quick Develop panel in the Library module. This enables you to quickly correct colours and increase contrast…

As we revealed in chapter one, Lightroom can gather photographs from a variety of locations (such as external hard drives) into its Catalog. It then creates and stores standard-resolution previews of each imported photo on your PC’s hard drive, while storing the original high-resolution images on your external hard drives. This enables you to save valuable disc space on your laptop or PC. However, if you plan to use a laptop to edit your photos while away from the office, then you won’t want to have to lug around a collection of hard drives in order to access and edit your images. By creating a Smart Preview of a photo, you can edit the image while on the move, without requiring access to the external hard drive. After you disconnect…

What you see with the naked eye isn’t always what you get in a photo of the same location. When shooting with a wide-angle lens, the edges of the frame can become distorted, with horizontal and vertical lines appearing curved instead of straight. This barrel (outward) or pin-cushion (inward) distortion is especially noticeable when looking at architectural photos that feature lots of straight lines. Cheaper lenses can also add colour-related artefacts to a subject. When faced with a high-contrast edge (such as a white swan against a dark blue lake), you may find fringes of purple clinging to the edges of your subject. This ugly and distracting chromatic aberration is caused by the lens’s inability to focus different wavelengths of light onto the same spot on your camera’s sensor. Also,…

When it comes to exposure, most photos will benefit with a few slider tweaks in Lightroom’s Develop module to reveal more tonal detail. The Basic panel’s Exposure slider makes global adjustments that evenly lighten or darken the tones in the photo. This slider works well if the entire image is slightly under- or over-exposed. However, if you use the Exposure slider to lighten under-exposed shadows, then you may blow out (or clip) correctly exposed highlights. If you try to claw back missing highlight detail with the Exposure slider, then you’ll plunge the shadows into clipped darkness. To help you make selective tonal adjustments you can use other sliders (such as Highlights and Shadows) to target and adjust specific tones. The Highlights and Shadows sliders are able to target and adjust…

Just like the two other selective tools – the Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush – the Radial Filter tool enables you to alter the tones in parts of an image. The difference is in the way you define the area you’d like to change. While the Adjustment Brush works by painting and the Graduated Filter works by creating a straight-lined blend, the Radial Filter enables you to create a circular blend between the area affected by the tonal changes, and the area that remains unaffected. As such it’s very useful for creating subtle vignettes that draw the eye towards your subject and away from distracting edge details, or for softening parts of an image you want to de-emphasise. Here we’ve used the tool for two very different tasks. For the…

Lightroom’s HDR feature enables you to merge several different exposures into one, providing a high dynamic range with detail in the brightest highlights and darkest shadows (which makes the feature particularly useful for high-contrast landscapes and interiors). Best of all, it then creates a merged DNG raw file packed with tonal information. Understandably, the feature isn’t as in-depth as dedicated HDR software like Photomatix or Nik’s HDR Efex Pro, or even Photoshop’s own Merge to HDR command. But Lightroom’s approach is slightly different. It creates a detail-rich raw file without resulting in the over-processed look that puts many photographers off HDR. As such, it’s more HDR as a utility than as a style, and all the better for it. While limited, the options in the Merge HDR command are very…

Getting your photos looking pin-sharp can be a challenge for a variety of reasons. Many digital cameras have a built-in filter that blurs the photo a little in an attempt to avoid producing moiré patterns. This low-pass (or anti-aliasing) filter can also soften important details such as our flower’s fine stigmas. By placing the camera close to a small subject (such as a flower) you risk getting a shallow depth of field. This means that only a narrow band of detail will be in focus. Features in front of and behind this sharply focused zone will look blurred. An image that appears to look sharp on the camera’s small LCD may turn out to look disappointingly soft when examined on your PC’s larger screen. Fortunately, Lightroom’s rather aptly named Detail…

One way to discover more about how Lightroom’s sliders and panels function is to experiment with presets. In the previous chapter we demonstrated how you could use presets to change a video clip’s colours and tones using the Library module’s Quick Develop panel. However, video clips only have access to a limited range of preset effects. When editing raw files you can take them into the more sophisticated Develop module and apply a wider range of effects to your photos, as you’ll see on this spread. You can use presets as a starting point for a range of looks and then fine-tune them to customise the results. 1 Preview the presets Open before_presets.jpg in the Develop module. Toggle open the Presets panel below the Navigator. Toggle open a folder such…

Since its debut in 1990, Photoshop has grown and developed to maintain its role as the world’s most popular image-editing application. Indeed, the name Photoshop has become synonymous with the act of digitally processing a photograph (though Adobe doesn’t approve of this usage!). Although this book focuses on Photoshop CC and CS, we’ll start by placing this most expensive and powerful version in context with the other versions of the Photoshop application so you can understand its strengths. Adobe has now created a whole slew of free mobile image editing apps for smartphones and tablets, including Photoshop Express, Photoshop Fix and Photoshop Mix. These are designed for quick image manipulation while you’re on the move. The next one up is Photoshop Elements for regular desktop and laptop computers. This is…

When you’re preparing your photos for printing it’s easy to get caught up in the confusing array of options for width and height, percentages, pixel dimensions, resolution and resampling. It’s just as difficult when you need to resize photos for use online. The key concept to keep in mind at all times, though, is ‘resizing’ versus ‘resampling’. Resizing is a non-destructive process that simply changes the size at which the pixels will be reproduced. It’s completely reversible and doesn’t actually change the image itself. This is what you use to create different-sized prints from within Photoshop. But when you’re creating images for online use you need to work directly in pixels. You can’t display a 6,000 x 4,000 pixel photo on a web page only 1,024 pixels across! This is…

1 Add punch Add a Curves Adjustment layer, then drag the top part of the curve upwards to lighten the image. Click the bottom of the curve to add a second anchor point, then drag this point downwards to darken shadows. 2 Tweak the colours Add a Curves layer, then choose Blue from the dropdown menu. Drag the bottom-left point upwards to add blue to the shadows, and the top-right point down to add yellow to the highlights. Photoshop Anatomy The Curves controls Use these Curves controls to bring your images to life TONE CURVE Camera Raw has its own version of the Curves command: called the Tone Curve, it works in much the same way. Raw files are usually a little flat, so will often benefit from increased punch.…

Layer masks are a powerful tool because they enable you to modify selections made by Photoshop’s selection tools until they are perfect. By painting white or black strokes on a mask you can show or hide pixels on the image layer the mask is attached to. This enables you to hide an unwanted sky, for example, and show through a more interesting one on another layer underneath. But layer masks are also invaluable when it comes to common image adjustments – in fact, every adjustment layer you create comes with a ready to use layer mask. In the case of our starting image here we need to darken the over-exposed sky with a Levels adjustment layer to reveal missing detail and colour. However, this will plunge the correctly exposed foreground…

Many of Photoshop’s tools and menu commands enable you to change the colours and tones in the entire image. However, in some cases you may need to alter the tones of a particular area without changing the image as a whole. You may also want to isolate a particular element from one photo and add it to another to create a composite image. This is where the selection tools come in handy. There are nine selection tools in the Tools panel, and in this chapter we’ll show you how to put them through their paces so that you can find the right tool for any selection challenge. The selection tools work in different ways, but they all produce a selection marquee – a straight or curved line made up of…

As we mentioned earlier in the chapter, digital images are made up of millions of tiny square pixels. These building blocks of colour and tone combine to create the illusion of reality. Pixel-based images are called bitmaps. Photoshop also enables you to produce content from scratch using tools such as the Pen tool. This tool enables you to draw graphic components for design projects (such as an icon or logo, for example). The Pen tool uses mathematics to describe the vector shapes that it produces. A vector shape consists of a series of anchor points. Between these moveable points are curves that you can bend to change the filled vector shape. The vector shape’s mathematical nature enables you enlarge a shape without any drop in quality, whereas a bitmap photo…

Photoshop has plenty of tools that enable you to select parts of images based on properties such as colour or tone. In the case of our starting image, we have a basic sky that can easily be selected with a few clicks using the Magic Wand tool. After selecting the unwanted sky we could double click the background layer to unlock it and then choose Edit>Cut to remove the sky. We could then replace the original sky with something more interesting, such as a dramatic cloudscape. After cutting out the sky they will be permanently deleted from the image layer. If it turns out that you’ve also selected and deleted the edges of a building, then you won’t be able to recover those deleted details. However, by converting a selection…

When you capture an image on a digital SLR you can add in-camera blur effects to enhance your images. By using a wide aperture setting such as f/2 you create a shallow depth of field, for instance. This makes the focal point, such as the face in a portrait, look nice and sharp, while blurring out the distracting background elements. If you have a tilt-shift lens you can take even more control over where blur appears in your images. This specialist lens enables you to create a narrow band of focus sandwiched between two blurred sections. This narrow band of focus mimics the effect you get when shooting a small subject close up, which makes life-size scenes look like scale models. Producing good selective-focus or tilt-shift effects in camera can…

When shooting with a traditional film camera, you could use film with different ISO speeds to capture more detail in low-light conditions. The faster (higher) the film’s ISO speed, the more sensitive it was to available light. A fast film enabled you to avoid using slow shutter speeds in low light, so you could capture detail without the need for a tripod. You could also shoot handheld in locations where a flash was prohibited, such as in a museum or church. However, fast ISO speed film added clumps of grain to your negatives. The higher the ISO speed, the grainier the images would be. Digital cameras recreate the traditional ISO film speed effect to enable you to capture more detail in low light. As with film, higher ISO settings (such…

In this Tool School, we look at the versatile Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools. These useful brush-based tools let you lighten (dodge) or darken (burn) shadows, midtones or highlights in specific areas, offering a quick and easy way to fine-tune exposure-related problems and reveal more detail. We’ll come back to the Sponge tool in due course, because it’s not a major player compared with the Dodge and Burn tools. The Dodge and Burn tools take their names from traditional darkroom techniques. Negatives were developed by shining light from an enlarger onto a piece of light-sensitive paper. If you placed a small object between the light and the paper during the exposure, you could cast a shadow on a specific part of the print. Since the shaded (dodged) area received less…