Practical Photoshop February 2021

The new Sky Replacement feature in Photoshop is sure to delight and infuriate in equal measures. Employing Sensei – Adobe’s artificial intelligence technology – Photoshop will analyze the image, figure out where the sky is, and replace it for you. Like any automated tool in Photoshop, Sky Replacement works brilliantly on some photos, but less so on others. The real question is not how well it works, though, but whether you think it’s right that a landscape photo should be enhanced in this way. We’ve already seen a similar automated sky replacement feature in Skylum’s Luminar 4, and the newly released Luminar AI goes one further by letting you drop distant scenery like mountains in the background of your photos. So whether we agree with it or not, AI is the new…

01 SELECT SUBJECT This is without doubt our favorite of the AI tools in Photoshop. Simply go to Select > Subject (or click the button displayed at the top while using any selection tool): Photoshop will analyze your image and determine what the subject is, then make a selection for you. It’s especially brilliant with portraits. In this video we’ll make use of Select Subject to quickly isolate the model, so we can fix the color temperature difference between the subject and the background. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3iwAct2 02 OBJECT SELECTION Similar to Select Subject, Object Selection allows you to draw a box over part of your image, then Photoshop will analyze the contents and select the object within the box. It’s useful if your photo has more than one subject, or if you want…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/2NlwSWq Available in both Lightroom and Photoshop’s Camera Raw filter, the Hue, Saturation and Luminosity tools within the Color Mixer box give you a fine degree of control over colors and tones in your images, giving you creative options whether you want to subtly alter a color or change it completely. Here we’ve made use of the Color Mixer tools to re-color the backdrop without affecting the subject. This task takes mere seconds with a targeted Hue adjustment, and doesn’t require any complicated selections or cut-outs. You simply enable the Hue sampler, then drag over the backdrop to alter the color. If you want to delve deeper into controlling the hue, saturation and luminosity of colors in the image, you can experiment with Camera Raw and Lightroom’s local adjustment tools,…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3o1D56g One of the main challenges with landscapes is in balancing out bright skies with darker landscapes, especially if – like here – the foreground is in deep evening shade. Editing a landscape like this, where the contrast between land and sky is too great, many of us might simply lift the Shadows and drop the Highlights. It’s a quick fix that may help to pull detail out of the lightest and darkest portions of the frame, but can also lead to an image looking overprocessed, almost HDR-like. Sometimes it’s better to take a targeted approach. By making local adjustments that are tailored to specific areas of the shot, the results can look more natural. Here, we’ll look at how to make a series of powerful local edits using…

In 17th century Holland, a trend emerged for larger-thanlife still-life paintings of flowers. Galvanized by the fledgling disciplines of botany and horticulture at the time, Dutch artists like Jan Brueghel the Elder, Ambrosius Bosschaert and Roelandt Savery painted bulging bouquets brimming with allegory. Impossibly overblown arrangements full of tangling stems and masses of overlapping blooms were typical pieces of work for the time. These collections of luscious art would go on to influence both painting and flower arrangement for centuries to come. We’ll take inspiration from the Dutch Masters in this project to craft our own impossible flower arrangement. By holding our flowers in various positions over a series of frames, we can elevate the bouquet to a height that defies the laws of physics. Of course, this also means we can…

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…