Photoshop CS is the undisputed leader in
photo-editing software. Widely used by photographers, graphic
artists, printers, designers, and other creative professionals,
it has something for everyone. It’s this breadth that lies at
the heart of its complexity—there are tools for everyone and everything.
Our goal in this book is to simplify your
introduction by focusing on those aspects of Photoshop that are
most useful to digital photographers. From this single perspective,
the program becomes much easier to master because you follow a
single main road through the program. Detours along the many back
roads of the program are left for another time and another book.
We recognize that digital images can be
edited in a wide variety of ways. In some cases you’re a photographer
trying to improve an image by eliminating or reducing its flaws.
In other cases you are a graphic artist taking an image to a new
place, making it something it never was, or incorporating it as
one element in a larger project. In this book we focus on the
photographic aspects, but in the process introduce you to many
of the same tools you need to combine photography and the graphic
arts.
This book is divided into eight chapters
and an appendix.
Chapter 1 Getting Started
introduces you to the Photoshop CS screen
display and tools. This chapter lays the foundation for the rest
of the book.
Photoshop is a powerful program suitable to even the most technically
oriented photographer. Because it can do so much, it initially
looks complicated, and in many ways it is. However, since
it’s a program you won’t outgrow, it’s worth the time it takes
to master it. In this chapter we lay the foundation for everything
to come. You’ll learn about the screen display, help system, the
toolbox, palettes, basic commands and undoing mistakes. Once you
understand this material, you will be ready for the chapters that
follow on viewing, opening, printing and editing your images.
Chapter 2 Working with Image Files
introduces you to basic procedures such as opening, saving and
printing images.
Your digital
camera (or scanner) stores images in files that
are then copied to the computer for editing. As your collection
grows, managing images so you can find them later becomes very
important. To assist you, Photoshop has a File Browser that displays
thumbnails of images and lets you manage the collection using
features such as keywords, ranking, flagging, and sorting. In
this chapter you learn how to use the File Browser and other methods
to organize, view, open, print and save images. These are important
procedures that support the main functions of a photo-editing
program—editing and improving images—discussed in the chapters
that follow.
Chapter 3 Fixing Your Images
shows you how to evaluate tones, colors, sharpness, and other
characteristics of an image and how to select the tools you use
to fix or improve it.
It is the rare
image that can’t be improved by tweaking.
You’ll find that you are often adjusting the image’s size, tonal
range, colors, sharpness, and retouching small defects or blemishes.
In this chapter we start by showing how you analyze an image to
see how it can be improved. Until you can look at your images
critically, it’s hard to know what needs to be done to make them
better. You’ll see how to evaluate tones, colors, sharpness, and
details. In this same section we also help you choose the tools
and procedures you need to make needed adjustments—with the best
highlighted. The rest of the chapter covers each tool in detail,
showing you how to use it and choose among the many options you
are presented with. As with most things in life, knowing what
to do and how to do it well can make all of the difference in
the outcome.
Chapter 4 Working with Selections
shows you how to select areas of an image
to copy, move, or enhance.
When
editing a digital photo, commands usually affect the entire image.
However, if you first select an area of the image, you can confine
adjustments to just that area. You can also select areas and then
copy, move, or delete them, perhaps to create a collage or to
paste part of one image into another to create a composite image.
There are a number of ways to select the areas of the image to
be affected. The approach you choose depends on the nature of
your image, the changes you want to make, and the area you want
to select. For example, the Magic Wand tool is useful for quickly
selecting areas of similar color, such as a clear blue sky. To
select a more complex area, such as a person standing in a crowd
of people, you can use the Lasso tools.
Chapter 5 Working with Layers
discusses how you use layers to adjust your
images.
When
you first open a digital photograph it contains a single layer.
However, you can add additional layers either directly or indirectly.
Why would you want to do so? In some cases you have no choice.
For example, if you use the Type tool to add text to an image
or a shape tool to add a shape, the text or shape is automatically
entered on a new layer. In other situations you want to add layers
yourself. For example, you can add an adjustment layer to change
such image characteristics as levels, brightness and contrast,
or hue and saturation. If you later hide or delete this layer,
the image reverts to its original form. Before layers were introduced,
changes were always made to the original image and were difficult
or impossible to undo later. Every change had to be well planned,
as if you were carving in stone. Now you can use layers to make
changes and modify and delete them at will without affecting the
original image. The more you learn about layers, and the tools
you use to manage them, the more uses you will find for them.
Chapter 6 Painting & Drawing
shows you how to use the program’s painting,
drawing, and erasing tools used to improve selected areas of an
image.
The
author of a book on making black and white prints from negatives
called his chapter on spotting prints to remove dust spots “So
You Have To Know How to Paint After All.” That would also be a
good title for this chapter because painting and drawing are useful
tools in digital photography. Although often used by graphic artists
to add elements to photographs and layouts, these tools are also
used to fix or touch up areas of your images or to select areas
that you want to change. You can paint, erase, and draw shapes
with several different tools, all of which are introduced in this
chapter. In the next chapter you’ll learn how to use these tools
to create masks that precisely select the areas of your image
you want to adjust.
Chapter 7 Creating and Using Masks
shows how you work on specific channels
or areas of your images.
In previous chapters, you were introduced
to making selections, using layers, and painting and drawing.
In this chapter we bring these elements together to create masks.
These powerful tools are used to confine adjustments to selected
area of an image or to make one are of an image transparent so
the layer below shows through. Unlike a selection, a mask is a
grayscale image just as your images are. This means you can edit
one just like you edit images; using brushes, erasers, fills,
filters, and almost every other tool and technique you have learned.
Having all of these tools at your disposal means you can create
more complex selections than you can with the selection tools
you learned earlier.
Because
masks make precise selections possible, they lie at the heart
of compositing—the creation of a new image by piecing together
parts of other images. You can either cut and paste selected areas
or make some areas transparent so layers below show through. Once
you master a few basic tools, the possibilities are endless.
Chapter 8 Automating Tasks
shows you how to automate processes involving
more than one image. These processes include printing contact
sheets and picture packages, creating a Web gallery, stitching
images into panoramas, creating PDF presentations including slide
shows, and batch renaming files, creating actions and batch processing
files.
In some ways,
we’ve reserved the best for last because it’s now
time to discuss some of the many things you can do with your digital
photographs. Digital photography opens up a vast new range of
exciting ways to display and share the best of the images you
capture. Projects are limited only by your imagination, and Photoshop
has brought automation to the process to make things easier and
faster. In this chapter you’ll see how to print contact sheets
and picture packages like those made by professional studios.
You’ll learn how to create a Web gallery to showcase or share
your images, stitch together images into panoramas and create
PDF’s that can be displayed as slide shows on the computer or
TV. All of these possibilities and many others are fun to explore
and easy to accomplish.
You
can use commands on the File Browser’s Automate menu to
perform these automatic processes. You can also run these commands
by selecting File>Automate from the main menu,
but running them from the File Browser saves you a lot of time,
because you don’t have to open each individual file.
Chapter 9 Color Management
discusses how to make sure your prints match
what you see on the screen.
Colors
in the original scene pass through a number of steps before they
finally emerge to be displayed on the screen or in a print. To
ensure that colors change as little as possible as they pass from
one device to another, you must perform at least three basic steps
in Photoshop—calibrating your monitor, customizing color settings,
and creating profiles of your equipment. Although you don’t have
to do these things, you should do so because the choices you make
influence how the colors in images are displayed and printed.
The entire process is referred to as color management and
it sounds more complicated than it is. Taking the time to color
manage your system saves you much uncertainty and frustration
in the long-run, especially when capturing photos where color
accuracy is important. Much of the background of color management
is discussed in The Textbook of Digital Photography and
that lengthy discussion isn’t repeated here.
Note.
Photoshop CS runs on both
Mac and PC systems and you will find minor differences between
the two platforms. These differences are limited to a few keys
on the keyboard and a few menu commands. Although this book features
the PC version of the program, you should be able to master the
Mac version using this book.
