WDCC – 15 Top Tips on Adobe Photoshop

NB: All examples taken from Adobe Photoshop 6 (or higher) and using an IBM PC running Windows xP / 2000 / ME.

If you have Photoshop 5 upwards most examples hold true. Minimum specification of PC is 400mhz Pentium2 with 128MB RAM. Have a go at some of these techniques & have fun!.

Right Click on your windows desktop & choose ‘Properties’

On Memory & Image Cache preferences:

• If you are short on RAM, set Cache levels to 0, Otherwise set to 6.
• Set RAM used by PS to 80%. This reserves this amount of free memory for PS when it starts. If short of RAM, never open additional applications with PS.

Right click on the windows desktop and on the Desktop tab, set color to the medium grey colour. Click OK to apply.

Open a colour image in PS

Drag the left edge to reduce PS to about 1/3 of the width of the screen.

To start Adobe Gamma, click Start>Settings>Control Panel>Double Click the Adobe Gamma Icon

Your desktop should look a little like the example above.

Choose Step By Step and follow the wizard steps. Note the changes to the opened image.

For Phosphor type, generally P22-EBU or Trinitron covers most displays.

Uncheck View Single Gamma Only to calibrate Red, Green & Blue levels.

Hardware White Point will most likely be defaulted correctly. Some monitors do allow custom white point settings.

The final part of the wizard allows comparison of before & after. When happy, click ‘Finish’ and give the new settings a name.

Open the levels dialog (Image>Adjust>Levels)

Adjust the triangles under the main histogram to set alternative Darkest point, mid tones point and lightest point in the image. To set a lighter ‘light’ point, double click the white (rightmost) eyedropper. Set the B(rightness) % to 95% (to force top 5% of whites to pure white). The Black eyedropper can similarly be set to force near blacks to pure black.

Finally, adjust the mid slider for appropriate amounts of shadow detail. On clicking OK, your image will be adjusted to new selections.

A colour cast is a particular colour that affects your whole image. It might be from unusual lighting or a dodgy scan. The first step is to detect your colour cast.

Click Window>Show Info to open the information palate. Click the eyedropper & switch to RGB colour. Colour values will then be displayed. (Activate the marque tool to get a cross hair cursor). Drag into shadow or grey areas & note any colour which is dominant. EG if the blue & green are quite close and red is significantly higher, you have a red colour cast.

The example above has a Blue value of 11, Green 8, and Red 44 in shadow areas, so this image has a red cast. Black areas should be low values.

In contrast, white areas should be close to 245-250 for each colour for an overall neutral balance. For white, a little added blue gives a brighter white.

To correct, use the Image>Adjust>Colour Balance OR Image>Adjust>Curves dialogs, carefully making adjustments in Shadows, Mid-tones or highlights.

Note that the info palate shows the improvement if the eyedropper cursor is positioned over parts of the image while making changes.

A steeper curve provides more contrast. Click and drag over parts of the image to see where on the curve, colours lie.

Use of an adjustment layer allows changes to be made and then a brush/tool used to selectively apply the effects to lower layers.

Use the background/foreground colours to toggle the adjustment layer effects on/off. For a graduated / less / more subtle effect, adjust the chosen drawing tools pressure.

Setting background/foreground colour.

The black areas on the Hue/Saturation layer show the extent of the drawing tool.

One of the most flexible methods is to use the Channels palette.

Click on Channels & click on each channel (Red, Green, Blue) and view the BW image.

Click on the Channels trash bin to delete any channels not needed.

The remaining channel will then be a greyscale (B/W) image.

The channel mixer can conveniently combine one or more channels to help you arrive at the perfect conversion to greyscale.

Click on RGB to show all channels (otherwise channel mixer is unavailable), then select Image>Adjust>Channel mixer.

Check the Monochrome box and decide which %’s of each of the 3 channels you would like to mix together. Best results are obtained when the total is 100%.

Above, the resultant image is 80% green + 20% red channels.

Then click on Image>Mode>Greyscale to fix as a Greyscale image.

When using selections, remember that quick mask can be toggled on and a painting tool used to adjust or extend a selection at any opacity.

Make the required selection (feather if required)

Click the quick mask icon to toggle quick mask on.

In quick mask mode, the selection is indicated in red. Use an appropriate tool (airbrush in this case) to add / change the selection. To toggle add/delete just toggle background/foreground colour.

A quick reliable method of adding a realistic out of focus effect is to add a layer for blur then erase areas that should remain sharp.

IE

• Click Layer>Duplicate Layer (call it ‘Blur’)
• Then Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Use a pixel radius of around 5-10
• Click the Eraser tool and choose an appropriate size brush.
• Remove areas on the ‘Blur’ layer to have the sharp background show through.

If you want to easily assemble more than 1 image on 1 page, use the Automate>Picture Package facility.

Select the image and layout.

See also File>Automate>Contact Sheet.

When resizing an image to a slightly larger size than you really should, one tip that sometimes helps is to over-resize, sharpen, then reduce to the target size. This hides the lack of quality. Do experiment! As images vary.

IE

• Image>Image Size> Resize up to A3 dimensions
• Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask Radius=4 pixels or larger
• Image>Image Size> Resize down to A4 dimensions

Add the appropriate amount of canvas (background) to your print to ensure the lab will size as you require.

To crop in precise dimensions using the crop tool, type the appropriate sizes into the toolbar to constrain proportions.

Resolution should be a minimum of 205dpi. Save on to CD / Zip / Smart Media card as a JPG (quality 12) or TIFF.

Have your target images in a folder of their own and use

File>Automate>Web Gallery

Set titles / source etc and let the wizard go.