Starting with Photoshop, for absolute beginners.
Today in my grade 10 class we will be starting with photoshop. For some of my students it will be their first time ever logging in to the program. The question is, where do we start?
Photoshop has so many features that can be explored from photo touch ups, to drawing with the various brushes, and using some of the many photo filters. Today we will be starting with simple image adjustments and maybe some effects.
Today we are going to start with a common problem for photographers. You take a photo and because of whatever camera settings or light available the image dosen’t quite come out the way you like it.
For todays exercise lets see if we can improve on the quality of this image of warwickshire castle from my recent trip to England.
There are a few key photoshop tools we will use to accomplish this task.
Lets start out with some of the image adjustment tools.
You can use many of these tools to adjust the look of the image be careful however not to distort the image too much or you will reduce the quality of the image. Reducing the quality of the image could be in the form of reducing the sharpness of it, the amount of colours or the exposure. Some of the key tools to use are the Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Curves, Exposure, Vibrance, and Hue/Saturation. Some of these tools I would recommend only for finishing touches while others can apply drastic transformations to your image.
Starting with Brightness and Contrast This tool can be used to shift the colours and image data. If done correctly no image quality needs to be lost to apply a linear shit to the entire document. Here you can see the Brightness and contrast tool in action.
1 problem that arises with this tool however is that the light gray colours that were the clouds, almost completely disappeared. It did make the castle look brighter and nice but it made the sky too light. So maybe I need a tool that will lighten the dark colours without lightening the light colours.
For this I go to the curves tool. With the proper technique rather then performing a linear shift for the entire image to the light or dark side you can perform more of a quadratic shift where the extremes of dark and light are not brightened or darkened as much as the rest of the document. The one problem with this tool is that if its done too drastically it can significantly reduce the amount of colours and contrast that your image has.
To lighten the image using an arc transformation rather then a linear transformation use the curves tool as follows.
To darken the image if needed simply drag the curve to the bottom right of the screen.
Some time when working with an image you want to make the dark areas darker and the light area’s lighter adding more depth and light contrast to your image. You can also do that with the curves tool by using what’s called the “flat S” approach.
For this image however the flat S does quite the opposite of what I would like to accomplish so I will try it with the reverse of a flat S. I have to be careful however not to over do it or it will really reduce the quality of my image.
Here you can see I was able to keep the contrast in the sky while lightening the castle gets pretty close to my desired result. The one draw back from this as you may be able to see is that there is a bit of graininess in the image that was there before but is just now more obvious. I may be able to fix that later on down the road.
Getting rid of grain involves a little bit of cheating with the photoshop images filters. Its definitely one of the harder image flaws to correct and its almost always better to start with an image without grain but I will be posting ways to deal with image grain in a later tutorial.
