Practical Photoshop April 2020

Welcome to issue 109 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99? As Einstein famously said, ‘Creativity is contagious – pass it on.’ With many of us likely to be spending greater time at home, it’s more important than ever to stay positive, and stay creative. So open up your photos, see where your creativity takes you, and share your results with your friends. www.digitalcameraworld.com WATCH THE VIDEO http://tiny.cc/h9bbjy DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES To download this issue's files, type the following link into your web browser on your PC or Mac: http://bit.ly/pho_109 FIND US HERE… http://bit.ly/practweet http://bit.ly/pracface Also available on: http://tiny.cc/4dw9ky http://tiny.cc/rew9ky http://tiny.cc/8ew9ky…

1 RAW LETS YOU MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR CAMERA Raws hold the full amount of color information your camera is capable of capturing. By contrast, if you choose your camera’s JPEG quality, it will process the image to a JPEG in-camera, then throw away all the excess data. With raws we can harness this extra data to give us extra headroom when editing, greater color options and higherquality photos. So by choosing raw format over JPEG, you unleash the full potential of your camera. 2 INCREASED HIGHLIGHT DETAIL Raws hold greater detail at the tonal extremes than JPEGs can. Highlights in a JPEG are particularly fragile: if an area looks blown out at first glance, chances are the detail is lost. But with a raw, there’s a good chance we can pull…

WATCH THE VIDEO http://bit.ly/2do8vtv Sharpening tools are essential in editing, but it’s easy to get confused over which tools to use, when to sharpen, and how much to apply. But it can be helpful to think of sharpening as part of a wider workflow, as we’ll show here. We’ll perform initial sharpening and noise reduction in Lightroom, then take our image into Photoshop for a little retouching to remove the distracting leaf, before we round-trip back to Lightroom for final sharpening. Our workflow involves two distinct sharpening stages: one at the beginning and the other at the end. The first stage is called capture sharpening. This involves general sharpening to correct for inherent softness in an image, or to crisp up details. It’s best done in Lightroom’s Detail Panel (or in the same…

WATCH THE VIDEO http://bit.ly/3d9Ilap Gradients are often thought of as something for graphic designers. After all, why would photographers need a tool that creates a straightforward blend from one color to another? Used in combination with Gradient Maps, however, gradients can become a powerful tool for toning and tinting your photos. A gradient map works by mapping colors onto the tonal range of your image, from shadow tones on the left of the gradient to highlight tones on the right. You can tint shadows with one color, and highlights with another. You can use gradient maps to create all kinds of interesting tonal effects, from vintage washes to color shifts. If you’ve used other toning tools like the Split Toning controls in Camera Raw or Lightroom, you’ll be familiar with the concept…

If you’re relatively new to editing in Photoshop, or you just don’t know where to begin, then this section is the best place to get started. Over the next 10 pages, you’ll find an overview of the different versions of Photoshop available; a breakdown of the typical image-editing workflow in Photoshop; an overview of raw file editing; a guide to the six most useful layers; and a glossary of the most useful shortcuts. This guide condenses most of the tools and techniques you’ll use every time you import a new roll of pictures. CREATIVE CLOUD PLANS CHOOSE THE PLAN WITH THE COMBINATION OF TOOLS AND STORAGE YOU NEED PHOTOSHOP CC FROM £9.98/$9.99 PER MONTH WINDOWS, macOS Photoshop is the software of choice for most professional and non-professional photographers. Beyond the standard photo-editing features, it boasts…

The image-editing process begins as soon as you’ve transferred your photos from your memory card to your computer. 1 The first stage is to begin sifting through your pictures to discover which are the keepers. The image organizer that comes with Photoshop is ideal for this task. Adobe Bridge has controls for keywording, rating and filtering your images, and there are handy tools for batch renaming files, creating panoramic stitches, making contact sheets and more. Launch Adobe Bridge and navigate to a folder containing new images. Use the cursor keys to quickly flick through the images and click below a thumbnail to add a star rating, or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+1-5. You can then filter your photos by the star rating to group the ones you want to work on. 2 The…