Digital Photography Guide

Photoshop CS4 Extended

There appears to be no dramatic changes to this widely used app. However a number of aids will make any image work much easier: a tabbed interface should make the work area much simpler to get around. And noticeable is the attention given to purely photographic tasks.

Vibrance

In using the Adjustments panel you don’t have to fight your way through a dialog box and its options: the new Vibrance adjustment allows increased control over colour saturation but still preserves such sensitive tones such as skin colours. There’s now a wide variety of modifiable presets for each type of change, plus more than 20 new preconfigured, customisable starting points.

Masks

With the Masks panel and working with pixel and vector masks it is now much easier to apply effects to precisely defined image areas. Using simple sliders the density and feathering of a mask can be adjusted, so you can control both the sharpness of the mask edge and how degree of adjustment you’d like to expose.

Dodge, Burn and Sponge

There have been many times I have needed to vary the exposure of an image, with a need to fix specific areas, such as unevenly lit flash shots. It has often been a pain to fix. Now you can enjoy natural results with the Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools. Tonal quality can be preserved while exposure and colour saturation can be spot-corrected.

After Effects’ new Cartoon effect stylises video sequences to impart a CGI look.

Panos

There are plenty of panorama stitching programs, some even bundled with compact digicams. Until now, Photoshop’s Photomerge (is it called that?) feature did work better than most of these, but in my opinion, not quite get there.

The upgraded Photomerge feature now blends with new vignetting and geometric distortion corrections.

Adobe has now built in enhanced blending actions along with new vignetting and geometric distortion corrections; a new option can create 360 degree panoramas. Plus there is a way to find and fix fisheye lens distortion … that is, if you wanted to correct fisheye shots!

Swings, Shifts

Ostensibly in an attempt to remove the need for the need to make shifts and swings, only available in high end cameras or perspective control lenses, Photoshop CS4 can now enhancement a scene where lighting and depth of field are limited. This appears to be a feature which leans heavily on the technology used in the Photomerge function in that it stitches separate shots and bends together their exposure variations. So, if you’ve shot a series of images that have correct focus and exposure — in parts — Auto-Blend Layers can merge these together into one acceptable single image.

Want to fix depth of field and exposure outages? Head for Auto-Blend.

Up, Down

Not all of us like to work on an image with the picture straight up and down, especially when using a graphics tablet. The new fluid canvas rotation action lets you work almost as though you were working at an easel. You can drag the image to turn the canvas to any orientation; a compass guide graphic can even be used to help you orient the image to a specific angle.

Following a similar track you can now zoom in or out smoothly and not by fixed enlargement degrees … 125 per cent, 300 per cent etc.
Integration

It’s obvious that the separate application Lightroom has bolted from the stable and won many friends for its ability to polish and improve photographic images. There is now improved and tighter integration with Photoshop. You can even open images from Lightroom directly into Photoshop CS4 as a layered Photoshop document, high dynamic range (HDR) image, panorama, or Smart Object. This means the nondestructive changes you make in one application will be recognised when you open the image in the other.

Vector Photography

Recently I discovered that much of the high end photography of cars is being displaced by vector art, which allows dramatic angle changes as well as major lighting tweaks, working with original data files.

Edit 3D Layers

Now, with Photoshop CS4 Extended, you can work with 3D models in similar fashion to dealing with 2D images, without no need to navigate through dialog boxes and special layer contents.

Merging pixel and vector art is a new trick for Illustrator — the Blob Brush extends and embellishes a Bezier-drawn object much as you would use a paint program.

Intelligent Scaling

A wow of a feature is Intelligent Image Scaling or Content-Aware Scaling. It may be of more interest to designers or photographers who have to prepare material for press in multiple formats but nevertheless it is an impressive feature.

Let’s say you have a nice picture, horizontal in format and you need to re-purpose it for a vertical page layout. Content-Aware Scaling lets you resize and recompose images simultaneously. What happens is that this feature automatically analyses the image as you adjust it and intelligently recomposes it to preserve the most visually interesting areas. It doesn’t just squeeze the image laterally; it uses an understanding of the image contents, then lets you convert a horizontal layout to a vertical.

Intelligent Image Scaling Illustrated

Using no cropping as such, the feature automatically identifies and protects important image elements, such as people, from unwanted distortion, even though the overall aspect ratio is changed.

If you need even more precise control, you can use a simple alpha channel to preserve selected image areas during scaling.

As indicated earlier, there appears to be no dramatic changes as many of the new features are layout oriented and don’t delve into an image at pixel level, which is the way that Photoshop has worked before. Is this the sign of a trend? Will it be the practice that any new tricks Adobe’s team conceives will appear in Lightroom instead?

Maybe.

Photoshop CS4 Extended Screen Shot

System Requirements

Mac OS: PowerPC G5 or multicore Intel processor. Mac OS X v10.4.11–10.5.4.
Windows: XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (certified for 32-bit Windows XP and Windows Vista).

Pricing

Photoshop Extended CS4: $999.00 USD (price currently at Amazon) (or $349 for an upgrade pack).

Need an excuse to go music shopping? I love to browse the CD covers at my local secondhand music store – the cover images are a great resource when I’m looking for new ways to showcase my photos. As an added bonus, when you copy an effect you’ll find yourself developing new Photoshop skills along the way.

My most recent inspiration came from the album Synchronicity by The Police. The album shows three black and white collages stacked down the cover each covered with a splash of paint. Check it out to the right so you know what we’re aiming for.

While my solution does away with the collages – they really deserve a post of their own - it does mimic the basic design philosophy of the CD cover. Here’s how to create this effect – the key to getting the project done fast is some smart cropping, some layer alignment tricks and the Multiply blend mode.

Step 1

Start by creating a square image the size of the final project. Mine is 1800 pixels x 1800 pixels at 300 pixels per inch in resolution and it has a transparent background.

Step 2

Open the three images to use. You want photos that you can crop to a wide rectangle and which have good detail in the cropped area. Convert your images to grayscale using your favorite tool – I used the Black & White adjustment in Photoshop CS3 – in earlier versions use the Channel Mixer – enable the Monochrome checkbox and adjust the sliders to get a good grayscale.

Step 3

Instead of simply cropping the images to size, we’ll adjust the cropped image resolution to match the final image at the same time. To do this, click the Crop tool and set the width to 5 inches, the height to 1.5 inches and the resolution to 300 pixels per inch. Drag a crop rectangle over the area of image to use and double click to crop it. Repeat for the other two images.

Step 4

Flatten each image if it is not already flattened. Then drag and drop the three image layers into your main image. Position the layers in roughly in position. Add a new layer, fill it with white and drag it below the image layers.

Step 5

Control + Click (Command + Click on the Mac) on the layer thumbnail for the white filled layer so its contents are selected. Control + Click on the other three layers (not the thumbnails, just the layers) so the layers are selected and not their contents. Choose Layer > Align Layers to Selection > Horizontal Selection – this aligns the layers with the images on them so they are centered in the image.

Step 6

To distribute the layers vertically, select all three layers that have the images on them and choose Layer > Distribute > Vertical Centers so the spacing between the images is evened out.

Step 7

Add a new layer (or drag the empty one from the bottom of the layer stack to the top). Select a bright yellow as the foreground color. Select the Brush too, add the Wet Media brushes and select the Oil Heavy Flow Small Tip brush. Adjust the brush size to around 400 pixels, set the Flow and Opacity to 100 each. In the Brushes palette, adjust the angle of the brush using the Brush tip shape options so it is aligned vertically and not at an angle.

Paint unevenly over the middle image. Repeat and paint cyan on the top image and red on the bottom one.

Step 8

Set the blend mode for the paint layer to Multiply so you can see the image under the paint. Add some text using the same blue and red colors and you’re done.

Here’s the finished result:

We’re photographers. Our craft is our work. Our work is our art. To be moving forward with our work, we must be constantly on the search for creativity. We must develop; broaden the perspectives we see and the images we produce and the art we define.

When you come to that point when nothing seems to be new, and you have become stuck in a rut with your images, your editing, your creations, it may be worth your while to take a look at Lightroom’s Split Toning.

I Just Need Perspective

Can’t fix the white balance of an image with Lightroom’s standard White Balance Treatment? Try adjusting the picture with the Split Toning Feature.

The Steps:

1. Select your image
2. Adjust your highlights to the tone you desire [to get rid of an orangey tone, try adjusting toward the blues]
3. Move the Highlights Saturation scroll bar to achieve the desired tone.
4. Don’t stop there. Evaluate your image. Determine other tones that need fixing.
5. Adjust your shadows to the tone you desire
6. Move the shadow scroll bar to achieve the desired tone.
7. Evaluate image and make adjustments from there.

In Practice:

To warm up this image (the original is above right), I went through all the basic steps above in about 2 minutes.

I simply went to the split toning tool bar, and adjusted my highlights and shadows to add the same lighter but warmer hue to both. From here, I adjusted the balance so the highlights were a bit intensified. Already, my image is markedly where I like it.

I Just Need Change:

Just want to do something different with your images? Many professional photographers have a signature “tone” to their images. Blue hints. Orange hints. Etc. Play around with adding these tones to your pictures to add a bit of flair to the editing style you already have.

The Steps:

1. Select your image
2. Adjust your highlights to the tone you desire [Add blue, red, orange, or green tones]
3. Go too far. Sometimes you won’t discover new things unless you try something you would’ve never done before. Use your scroll bars to go beyond what you normally would, and then adjust from there.
4. Move the Highlights Saturation scroll bar to achieve the desired tone [make sure you balance the colors already in the image with what you are adding.]
5. Evaluate your image. Cool? What you want? Needs’ something else?
6. Adjust your shadows to the tone you desire and move the shadow scroll bar to achieve the desired tone.
7. Play with the balance between the highlights and the shadows. This will either intensify the shadow tones while minimizing the highlight tones, or it will intensify the highlight tones while minimizing the shadow tones.
8. Don’t’ stop there. Go to the Hue, Levels, and Saturation toolbar to reduce or accentuate individual color tones in your image. What happens if you eliminate all the greens for example? Or adjust the hue of your reds?
9. After you have discovered a new angle on your creative editing, be sure to create a preset for your edits. Check out how well it works with other images.

In Practice:

I took this picture of a friend of mine in a little coffee shop in MN. It began slightly cold in tone, and I’ve been enjoying editing with a warmer tint. To achieve this, I added a warmer green yellow hue to my highlights and increased the saturation over 60 percent. I then adjusted my shadows to add an almost lavender hue and saturated it only by 20 percent. The picture still was a bit off, so I then went to my individual colors and de-saturated blues and purples. Viola!

Need Help?

If you want to learn more about split toning, but don’t know how to start, go ahead and begin with Lightroom’s Selenium tone preset. From here, you can adjust the colors, saturation, and balance of split toning without having to start from scratch.

In Lightroom 2 the collection of Basic fixes available for your image includes three Presence sliders that sit together in the Develop module: Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation.

This week I’ll explain the differences between these three adjustments and how they affect your photos. In each of the screenshots below I have set the slider value to 100 – way more than you would use to fix your image but a setting that will show clearly how the fixes work.

Step 1

Let’s tackle Saturation first. The Saturation slider works similarly to the Saturation slider in Photoshop or any other graphics software. It lets you adjust the saturation of the colors in the image – drag it to the right to brighten and deepen the colors in the photo. If you drag to the left, you remove some of the depth and brightness in the colors and, if you go all the way to -100 you end up with a desaturated or monochrome image.

One of the problems with using the Saturation slider is that it adjusts all the pixels in the image – those where the color is lacking in saturation and those that are already highly saturated. In trying to fix the pixels that need a color boost you can end up shooting some other pixels into right over the edge so the colors tend towards the ridiculous.

Step 2

The Vibrance slider solves some of the problems that you’ll encounter when trying to boost color saturation because it is more particular about what it adjusts. With vibrance only the least saturated colors in the image are adjusted and those pixels which are already relatively saturated are adjusted less. The result is that you’ll get a general improvement in the saturation in colors in the image but not to the extent where colors become unrealistically bright. Vibrance also offers some protection for skin tones which makes it a good choice for adding saturation to portraits as it is less likely to over saturate and destroy the subject’s skin tones. In many instances you can safely bypass the Saturation slider and adjust Vibrance instead.

Step 3

The Clarity slider affects the contrast in the midtones in the image. It works by increasing some of the edge detail in the midtones giving a general sharpening which adds punch to your photo. Typically you will want to adjust the Clarity of your image in a positive direction using a setting of around 10 to 15. If possible, view your image at 100 percent so that you can see the changes that you’re making to it as you adjust it.

How about some “family friendly” imaging software? Play! with Pictures is a newly released piece of software from Vertus that could fill that requirement.

A fun new program for kids and families that is an easy, creative alternative to more intimidating imaging software. Anyone of any age or software experience level can take ordinary photos and turn them into creative compositions for family albums, greeting cards, calendars, school projects, or even jazzing up profile pics for Facebook or MySpace. Here’s a sample image for your facebook page, perhaps?…

PLAY! With Pictures is going to be given away FREE for the first ten thousand copies so make sure you get in quick if you’d like to check it out!

http://www.playwithpictures.com

You can find PLAY! With Pictures on Facebook, Flickr and they also have a blog.

Here’s a picture I made after installing (2 minutes of my time) and having a look at the application (5 minutes of my time!) …Hope you like it! (I call it “hot, cold, no hands!)