Practical Photoshop November 2019

DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES HERE http://bit.ly/pho_104 ON YOUR PC OR MAC WATCH THE VIDEO http://bit.ly/31uubyh 1 MY PHOTOS ARE TOO NOISY If your high-ISO images are plagued by unsightly noise, there are two excellent features in Camera Raw and Photoshop that can clean things up… 1 DETAIL PANEL The Detail Panel in Camera Raw/Lightroom is the easiest tool Adobe offers for noise reduction. The Luminance slider tackles grainy image noise, so start here first. Increasing Luminance reduces the grain, but at the expense of image detail. So it’s always a balancing act between noise, detail and sharpness. 2 REDUCE NOISE FILTER Found in Photoshop under Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise, this tool offers similar noise reduction controls to the Detail Panel, but with the added option (under Advanced) to apply noise reduction to individual color channels.…

WATCH THE VIDEO http://bit.ly/2j9mow3 When it comes to HDR, the key is to treat the technique like a utility rather than an effect, because it’s the ‘effect’ side of things that gives HDR a bad name. Photoshop’s HDR Toning command is a case in point. The command offers a range of presets that seem to cover all the worst crimes of the HDR ‘look’, from eye-popping saturation to crunchy, halo-tastic edges. But if you bypass these horrors and treat it instead as a tool for teasing out detail at the tonal extremes, HDR Toning becomes a very powerful command indeed. The feature is designed to be used with 32-bit HDR images, which are created by merging several bracketed exposures into one (using either Photoshop’s Merge To HDR command or a dedicated HDR…

The most successful portrait retouching tricks are those that let you enhance the subject, without resulting in hyperreal or unnatural effects. Here we’ll look at how to boost your portraits with a technique in Photoshop CC for smoothing out skin tones. A cunning combination of filters and Blending Modes creates the effect. The best thing about it is the results are not over the top. Plastic-looking skin is one of the worst sins of retouching: with this trick, you can avoid this by smoothing out blotchiness while retaining the texture. The other good thing about this technique is that it doesn’t take an age to apply. It may not be as finessed as more involved skin-enhancing tricks (like frequency separation or pixel-level retouching), but it makes up for this by being…

WATCH THE VIDEO http://bit.ly/2bfhm1n One of the most fun things you can do with Photoshop is blend photos into an entirely new image. This can lead to all kinds of weird and wonderful results, but it’s not all about making double exposures, blending a crocodile with a kitten, or sending your grandmother to the moon! Sometimes it can be just as eye-catching to craft a subtle composite from slightly altered versions of the same scene. This is exactly what we’ve done for our precarious portrait. We need a series of shots with slight changes: one of the model perched on a ladder, another of the stack of chairs, and a couple of frames to fill in the gaps. By shooting these frames all in alignment—thanks to a tripod and careful positioning—the Photoshop side…

1 TRIPOD We need to take a series of shots for this effect—and it’s vital that the camera stays still throughout so that they’re all in alignment. As such, a tripod is essential for this project. It’s best to shoot this on an overcast day so that the lighting remains constant. 2 LOW ANGLE A low camera angle emphasizes the height of our model, pushing her upwards in the frame and allowing for an interesting perspective. It also strengthens the depth of the scene by allowing us to frame our model against the treetops in the distance. 3 CAMERA EXPOSURE The exposure and focus should be consistent over all frames. After focusing, we switch to manual focus to lock it. We need to work out a manual exposure: 1/200 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 here. You…

01 SHOOT THE MODEL We need four shots to create our balancing effect. For our first frame, we place the ladder and ask the model to climb up and perch on the top. At this point, we focus on her with autofocus, then switch to manual focus to lock it in place. We experiment with a few different poses to give ourselves plenty of options. 02 BALANCE THE CHAIRS For our second shot, we ask our model to climb down from the ladder and bring in our stack of chairs. We balance the chairs against the edge of the ladder so that it looks as though they’re teetering on two legs. We check the frames to make sure the top of the ladder lines up perfectly. 03 SHOW A BIT OF LEG We need this…