Beautiful photographs speak for themselves. An amazing photo will capture the eye and hold it. Digital cameras are the main tool of today’s photographers as they are easy to use and provide instant feedback as to the quality of the photo that was taken. Unfortunately even professional photographers using the best cameras on the market don’t always take perfect photos. For professionals and amateurs alike it is important to understand how to use Adobe Photoshop to enhance your photos.

Adobe Photoshop is basically a software program that is used by a lot of people to edit and enhance digital photos. With this particular software, you will be able to touch up the photos you take and give it that professional look and feel.

Photoshop has been used for many years by photographers’ who wish to enhance, edit, restore, and touch up dull looking photographs and turn them in to something elegant looking with vividly sharp colors that would be good enough to publish in magazines and newspapers.

With today’s technology you don’t need to be a “professional” photographer to create amazing photos. There is no longer a need to completely understand what shutter speeds, film speeds, exposure compensation, white balance, and other photography jargon means. All that is required is that you point, shoot, upload, and print. Top of the line, expensive cameras are not a requirement any longer. With a regular digital camera, and Adobe Photoshop installed in to your computer, you can easily create amazing, high quality photos. You can easily correct color saturation, light balance, and exposure compensation after you take the pictures, saving on time involved during the photo shoot itself.

Even if your photos are taken in poor lighting conditions you are able to edit them with Photoshop and make them look as if they were taken in the best possible lighting condition.

Photos that don’t stand up to the test of time can also be edited in Adobe Photoshop. Old faded, yellowed, torn photos with water damage can still be repaired with Adobe Photoshop. All you need is a scanner which will create a digital copy of the old photograph. The faded picture can be repaired as well as other damages, such as water damage, and tears. With Adobe Photoshop, you will be able to turn old, faded, and damaged photos in to something that looks as if it was taken and developed moments ago.

Even close up headshots are not a problem any longer. Typically these shots magnify imperfections and must be taken carefully. Many people resist having close-ups taken because of their imperfections. Thankfully Photoshop allows us to you will be able to solve all these problems.

The amazing thing is that you can do all this and more. You can make wrinkles disappear, make the face look thinner or fuller, make the zit disappear, and even add a healthy color to a pale looking face. In fact, you can even make someone look as if they just went to the beach for a tan.

There are so many tools in Adobe Photoshop that you will be able to use. As a photographer, you will definitely love Adobe Photoshop as one of your tools in photography. You can be sure that you will have lots of fun with this software and also be sure that you will be able to produce high quality photos.

Photos that hold your attention speak for themselves. Taking photos that capture the viewer’s imagination and hold their eye will make you famous. In today’s market most photographers use digital cameras. It is easier to use and provides instant gratification. Whether you are a beginner or a professional, Adobe Photoshop may be the digital photo editing software program for you.

Adobe Photoshop is basically a software program that is used by a lot of people to edit and enhance digital photos. With this particular software, you will be able to touch up the photos you take and give it that professional look and feel.

Basically, Adobe Photoshop is used by photographers’ world wide to enhance, edit, restore, and touch up dull looking photographs and turn them in to something elegant looking with vividly sharp colors that would be good enough to post in magazines and newspapers.

With today’s technology you don’t need to be a “professional” photographer to create amazing photos. There is no longer a need to completely understand what shutter speeds, film speeds, exposure compensation, white balance, and other photography jargon means. All that is required is that you point, shoot, upload, and print. Top of the line, expensive cameras are not a requirement any longer. With a regular digital camera, and Adobe Photoshop installed in to your computer, you can easily create amazing, high quality photos. You can easily correct color saturation, light balance, and exposure compensation after you take the pictures, saving on time involved during the photo shoot itself.

What this means is that even if you take a picture in a poor lighting environment, you will still be able to edit it with Photoshop and even make it look as if the photo you took was taken in the best possible lighting condition.

Even old, faded, yellowed and torn photos can be edited in Adobe Photoshop. Even water damaged photos can be restored and made new again. Simply use a scanner to create a digital copy of the old photograph. Once the photo has been scanned into your computer you can open it up in Photoshop and begin to fix it. This is an amazing way to keep those old photographs that you have cherished for years.

There are also times where you will need to take headshots. What headshot means is that you will need to take close up pictures of someone from the neck up. Now, you can be sure that someone will complain that they look too old in the photos or that they look too pale. Some will even say that they hate their headshots because of a zit or pimple in their face. With Adobe Photoshop, you will be able to solve all these problems.

It is easy to remove any imperfections that appear. Easily make wrinkles disappear, make the face look thinner or fuller, make the zit disappear, and even add a healthy color to a pale looking face. In fact, you can even make someone look as if they just went to the beach for a tan.

There are so many tools in Adobe Photoshop that you will be able to use. As a photographer, you will definitely love Adobe Photoshop as one of your tools in photography. You can be sure that you will have lots of fun with this software and also be sure that you will be able to produce high quality photos.

Want to add some metal and ink to people in your family, well read this: Press SHIFT+M and cycle through the marquee tools until you come to the circle (alright, elliptical marquee tool) . Once that’s selected, you’ll see some options at the top of the canvas. In the drop down list next to Style, choose ‘Fixed Aspect Ratio’. This of course gives us a perfectly round circle selection every time. Go ahead and drag one out now. Not too big, though. Good. Now we need to go Select-Modify- Border. A screen pops up asking you how many pixels wide you want it to be. I put 3 here. Now we need to put something in it. Stop! Before we fill it with color, we have to make a new layer (CRTL+SHIFT+N). Now press SHIFT +F5 to bring up the Fill screen, and from the drop down menu choose ‘50% grey’. We don’t need the selection now, so CRTL+D to deselect. Now a round circle isn’t going to be very realistic. What we need to do now is distort it a bit. Press CRTL+T to enter transform mode, then right-click and choose ‘Distort’ from the menu. Now play around moving the handlebars around the square. Good. We could now just take the eraser tool and get rid of that bit in the middle. A better way, though, is to use a mask. At hte bottom of the layers panel you’ll see a little grey rectangle with a white circle in it. Click it and our layer gets a brother. The foreground/background colors also change to black and white. Now if we paint black, it will take away the ring, and if we then paint white, it will bring back what we painted black. Just to the left of the mask icon on the layers panel, you will see as well the Layer Style icon. Click it now and from the list that springs down, choose ‘Bevel and Emboss’. This is pops up another screen with lots of options on it. We don’t need to change anything for now, though. You will also see that our ring is updated in real time, so we can see the results straight away. To give it more highlights and make it shinier, hit the ‘Gloss Contour’ box. Another screen pops up where you can alter the mapping. Just click and drag the black line until it is like the example.

Photo retouching is sometimes quite important to your photo. You can change your photo to black and white, take out some unwanted acne, fix a blurry line. Well, here are some instructions on how to sharpen your image. Start by opening your image Duplicate the background layer by pressing control+j. Press shift+control+u to desaturate the layer. Go to filter - thers - high pass and give these values, Radius of 0.4 pixels. Press control+l to open levels. Finally, change this layer’s mode from normal to overlay. If you find excessive sharpening then reduce the opacity of this layer. You now have sharper image and it works on almost any image.

Brightness/Contrast is a super important technique in photo manipulation. You can alter the complete mood of photos with brightness and contrast. I will demonstrate how. First get a picture of anything in the world you want. ANYTHING! Now go to Image - Apply Image and apply your image on a new layer. Then go to Image - Adjustments - Brightness/Contrast. Then mess around with the settings. I tend to make the lower the brightness and raise the contrast. But see what is best for your picture. After applying Brightness/Contrast/ Do you see the changes? I sure do. I completely changed the mood of the picture with Brightness/Contrast. So as you can tell this is a very important and helpful piece of Photo manipulation.

It’s time to introduce Adobes ExtendScript Toolkit which is the environment which you will work in to create scripts for Photoshop CS2. In this tutorial I will introduce Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit, reference documents that you will need when writing scripts and in the end I will guide you through a hello world program for Photoshop scripts. ExtendScript Toolkit. If you have Photoshop CS2 you probably already have the ExtendScript Toolkit, to test if you have it create a new file and name it test.jsx. When double-clicking the file ExtendScript Toolkit should open.

Start with a blank photoshop document of size 1024*768 and white background. Choose the brush “rough round bristle” from the toolbar. Create a new layer and draw some lines. Right click on the new layer and choose “blending options”. Choose the values. DROP SHADOW INNER GLOW BEVEL AND EMBOSS; For “texture”, choose “satin” as the pattern. TEXTURE Now add some motion blur to this layer from filters - blur - motion blur. Similarly, add gaussian blur also to this layer with the radius around 72. Not so catchy yet. Well try this. Change the background color of the default layer as black by choosing Edit - Fill from menu. Now look at the output. Ahh, that looks much better, isn’t it ? You can add some text to this texturized background if you wish.

As with many applications, working in Photoshop can be made far easier and more efficient by using keyboard shortcuts.Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + N New layer Ctrl/Cmd + J Duplicate current layeR. Here are a few useful shortcuts: Ctrl/Cmd + [ Move layer downwards Ctrl/Cmd + ] Move layer upwards Ctrl/Cmd + E Merge linked layers Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + E Merge visible layers Ctrl/Cmd + A Select all Ctrl/Cmd + D Deselect Ctrl/Cmd + L Levels Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + L Auto levels Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Alt + L Auto contrast Ctrl/Cmd + M Curves Ctrl/Cmd + I Invert colors Ctrl/Cmd + Z Undo Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + Z Step back in history Ctrl/Cmd + F Apply last used filter Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + X Liquify tool Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + Shift + X Pattern tool

For those interested in coloring graphically upon the computer, painting, pastels, colored pencils, markers, and any other coloring tool, skin tones are necessary part of human color. The world is full of variety in color, including the human skin. I look around, and I see many people getting the skin colors wrong. It can be too yellow, too pink, or just not the right color. Getting a realistic skin tone can be a really tricky business, but, there is an easy solution to this dilemma. I created this tutorial for Photoshop on Photoshop 7. I’m not sure what else will be compatible before Photoshop 7, or other products, but I would think that the steps would be similar. For some quick skin tones, you can grab a tones chart like the basic one I made on left, to use for coloring. Now, on the tones chart to my left, I have the tones for three nationalities- Caucasian, Asian, and African — which I’ve personally seen the most often in the art that I see at various art sites. These are approximate, no set exact for what the colors are. Also take into regard that these are around the extremes. The lightest lights, the mid tone, and the darkest dark.

Want to get rid of that nasty shine that you get taking pictures? Well now you can, follow these easy steps: Let’s start with a great, overlooked trick. After opening the image, open the same image again in a new window. In Photoshop, choose Window - Arrange - New Window. In Elements choose View - New Window. This allows you to view one window zoomed in for detail work and the other window at 100% so you can judge the effects. Using the magnifying glass tool draw a box around the area of shine. Make the box big enough to also show a fair amount of un-shiny skin. Select the Clone tool. At the top of the page select Mode: Darken and use the slider to set Opacity at 50%.Using the Clone Tool, select an area of un-shiny skin by putting the circle over the area and holding down the Alt button while left-clicking the mouse. To best match skin tone try to select the area of skin closest to the shine. Quick tip, to easily re size the Clone Tool circle simply use the bracket keys, and - much easier than moving your cursor back and forth between the photo and the Size slider. Now simply click on the shiny area and watch the magic happen. You’ll have to experiment a little for best effect, and for larger areas be sure to resample the un-shiny skin frequently. In the zoomed-in image the effect might look too obvious, so you’ll need to keep an eye on the 100% image to track your progress. Notice the difference on the tip of the nose, the cheek, and above his eye.

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!

Gradient maps can help your coloring on Photo manipulations a lot. They can be used to help blend things in and to make the colors in things the same. So you should have the same picture from the section Textures open. Okay now looking at you textures picture. You might think. My textures don’t really blend in well with my face. So I am going to show you how to blend those in better using gradient maps. So I want you to decide what you want your face to look like (mainly color wise). So to make my textures blend in more I start off by going to Image - Adjustments - Gradient Map. Since I want a green picture I am going to pick a green/yellow gradient map. Then I am going to set it on soft light. After I put the opacity down a bit. Then I added a black and white gradient map. I did this because I wanted to make the picture a bit darker. I left the black and white gradient map on normal and set it on around 50% opacity. It will get rid of a bit of the color but thats what the green and yellow gradient maps were for (they were to add color so it didnt look really bland when we added the black and white one). Here is my picture after adding gradient maps.

Open the JavaScript Reference Guide and click the Art Layer bookmark to the left in Adobe Reader, now you can first se all properties available for ordinary layers and after that is all the methods available for it. Hello world, now it’s time to try your wings by creating and running your first script for Photoshop. As always the first program you create in a new programming language should always output the Hello world sentence. To install a script you simply copy it to Photoshop’s scripts folder which in windows is located in: c:Program Files - Adobe Photoshop CS2 Presets Scripts Before you can use it from Photoshop you have to quit Photoshop and restart it. Once you have done this the script is available under File - Scripts

Open up a new 5×5 pixel image with a transparent background. Select your Pencil Tool and set it to 1 pixel. Set your foreground color to black. Now draw something like a plus sign on your image (You might have to zoom in on your image). Define the pattern by going to Edit - Define Pattern. Now open up the image you are going to be applying the grid to. Now grab your Paint Bucket Tool and in the options bar (Window - Options), change the Fill to Pattern. Next to Fill option you will see the Pattern Option. Find your pattern in there and then create a new layer. Use your Paint Bucket Tool on the layer you just created. In the Layers Palette, adjust the opacity to lighten or darken the grid.

Layers are an integral element of Photoshop. They allow you to edit images more easily, and use transparency to its full effect. By default the background layer (Locked and labelled “Background”) is white, and any subsequently created layers are transparent by default. Layer Opacity: The opacity of the current layer, 0-100%. Blending Mode: The manner in which this layer interacts with layers below it. See below. Active/Linked Layers: A small paint brush icon appears in this space to indicate the active layer, and chain icons signify other layers that are linked with the active layer. Layer visibility: An eye in this area signifies that the layer is visible, and an empty box means it is hidden from view and exempt from formatting. Layers: Two example layers showing an example background layer and new (transparent) layer (Layer 1). New Fill/Adjustment Layer: Creates a layer that can add a gradient to or adjust the hue, etc. of the layer below. New Layer: Creates a new layer [ctrl/cmd + shift + N]. Delete Layer: Deletes the currently selected layer. New Layer Set: Creates a folder for layers to be put into for easy organization of layers. New Layer Mask: Creates a sub-layer with which you can use all normal tools. Adding black to a layer mask, for example, means that that part of the layer is invisible. Layer Effects (Styles): Applies various effects to the current layer - can also be reached via.

For those interested in coloring graphically upon the computer, painting, pastels, colored pencils, markers, and any other coloring tool, skin tones are necessary part of human color. The world is full of variety in color, including the human skin. I look around, and I see many people getting the skin colors wrong. It can be too yellow, too pink, or just not the right color. Getting a realistic skin tone can be a really tricky business, but, there is an easy solution to this dilemma. I created this tutorial for Photoshop on Photoshop 7. I’m not sure what else will be compatible before Photoshop 7, or other products, but I would think that the steps would be similar. For some quick skin tones, you can grab a tones chart like the basic one I made on left, to use for coloring. Now, on the tones chart to my left, I have the tones for three nationalities- Caucasian, Asian, and African — which I’ve personally seen the most often in the art that I see at various art sites. These are approximate, no set exact for what the colors are. Also take into regard that these are around the extremes. The lightest lights, the mid tone, and the darkest dark.

Want to get rid of that nasty shine that you get taking pictures? Well now you can, follow these easy steps: Let’s start with a great, overlooked trick. After opening the image, open the same image again in a new window. In Photoshop, choose Window - Arrange - New Window. In Elements choose View - New Window. This allows you to view one window zoomed in for detail work and the other window at 100% so you can judge the effects. Using the magnifying glass tool draw a box around the area of shine. Make the box big enough to also show a fair amount of un-shiny skin. Select the Clone tool. At the top of the page select Mode: Darken and use the slider to set Opacity at 50%.Using the Clone Tool, select an area of un-shiny skin by putting the circle over the area and holding down the Alt button while left-clicking the mouse. To best match skin tone try to select the area of skin closest to the shine. Quick tip, to easily re size the Clone Tool circle simply use the bracket keys, and - much easier than moving your cursor back and forth between the photo and the Size slider. Now simply click on the shiny area and watch the magic happen. You’ll have to experiment a little for best effect, and for larger areas be sure to resample the un-shiny skin frequently. In the zoomed-in image the effect might look too obvious, so you’ll need to keep an eye on the 100% image to track your progress. Notice the difference on the tip of the nose, the cheek, and above his eye.

Photo retouching is sometimes quite important to your photo. You can change your photo to black and white, take out some unwanted acne, fix a blurry line. Well, here are some instructions on how to sharpen your image. Start by opening your image Duplicate the background layer by pressing control+j. Press shift+control+u to desaturate the layer. Go to filter - thers - high pass and give these values, Radius of 0.4 pixels. Press control+l to open levels. Finally, change this layer’s mode from normal to overlay. If you find excessive sharpening then reduce the opacity of this layer. You now have sharper image and it works on almost any image.

Gradient maps can help your coloring on Photo manipulations a lot. They can be used to help blend things in and to make the colors in things the same. So you should have the same picture from the section Textures open. Okay now looking at you textures picture. You might think. My textures don’t really blend in well with my face. So I am going to show you how to blend those in better using gradient maps. So I want you to decide what you want your face to look like (mainly color wise). So to make my textures blend in more I start off by going to Image - Adjustments - Gradient Map. Since I want a green picture I am going to pick a green/yellow gradient map. Then I am going to set it on soft light. After I put the opacity down a bit. Then I added a black and white gradient map. I did this because I wanted to make the picture a bit darker. I left the black and white gradient map on normal and set it on around 50% opacity. It will get rid of a bit of the color but thats what the green and yellow gradient maps were for (they were to add color so it didnt look really bland when we added the black and white one). Here is my picture after adding gradient maps.

There is only two things you have too know about the ExtendScript Toolkit program right now: Select target application, ExtendScript must know which application you are writing the script for. In the top left drop down menu select Adobe Photoshop CS2 and if asked if you want top start it choose yes. Running script, to run a script you have written you press the button that looks like a play button. Reference documents - All objects have different properties that can be set and methods that can be executed and right now you probably don’t know any of these, this is where the reference documents come in. The reference document for JavaScript contains information about all objects available in your scripts.

Start with a blank photoshop document of size 1024*768 and white background. Choose the brush “rough round bristle” from the toolbar. Create a new layer and draw some lines. Right click on the new layer and choose “blending options”. Choose the values. DROP SHADOW INNER GLOW BEVEL AND EMBOSS; For “texture”, choose “satin” as the pattern. TEXTURE Now add some motion blur to this layer from filters - blur - motion blur. Similarly, add gaussian blur also to this layer with the radius around 72. Not so catchy yet. Well try this. Change the background color of the default layer as black by choosing Edit - Fill from menu. Now look at the output. Ahh, that looks much better, isn’t it ? You can add some text to this texturized background if you wish.

This section describes how to use some of the basic tools that you will need to use in the tutorials. This section in particular will be added to over time.The airbrush is the favourite tool of most digital artists. The tool options (just below the drop down menus) can be altered very subtly to achieve a range of effects - this is the most creative aspect of many of these tutorials. The tool shape selection menu at the left of the tool bar can alter the brush’s shape - soft to hard edges, as well as special shapes such as blades of grass. The size can also be altered with obvious effects. The layer style for the brush can be altered - for more information see the section on blending layers elsewhere in the tutorial. The opacity slider will affect the opacity of the paint that is applied. The flow slider effects the speed at which the paint is applied.

Our eyes can sometimes deceive us. Everyone’s eyes see slightly different colors. One person will see a purple color, while another will see a blue. Those that are colorblind cannot distinguish some colors from another. While we see it to be a good skin tone, it may not be seen as one to someone else. Also, depending on the monitor that you own, you may see a different color than other computers. Making palettes straight from photos enhance more realistic, more accurate work. Also, these color palettes are used professionally. Those who work with color correction use this to help them with their vocations. Even the printing press use this. You can also take colors from the lips, eyes and hair to help with realistic color of those. You would use it the same way as you did for the skin. Finding the darkest, the mid tone, and the lightest before creating a palette to use.