Practical Photoshop July 2021

Welcome to issue 124 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99? Retro photo effects are all the rage, but if you want a more refined old-school look than phone filters give you, Photoshop offers a host of tools for the job. Elsewhere this issue, selectively boost your landscapes and get creative with flower photos by focus-stacking or shooting with ultraviolet light. www.digitalcameraworld.com Editor James Paterson Art Editor Rosie Webber Production Editor Richard Hill Content Director Chris George Senior Art Editor Warren Brown 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_124 FIND US HERE… http://bit.ly/practweet http://bit.ly/pracface Also available on: http://bit.ly/pp_pocketmags http://bit.ly/pp_app_store http://bit.ly/zinio_pp…

One of the easiest ways to give your photos the look of a weathered old print is to blend in a texture on top of it. There are 26 layer Blending Modes to choose from. Depending on your choice of image and texture, any one of these 26 might do, but the most dependable tend to be Lighten, Screen, Darken, Multiply, Overlay and Soft Light. We’ve used the Screen Blending Mode here to add a scratched texture to our portrait. We’ve supplied 30 free textures amongst this issue’s project files for you to try out on your photos. Of course, you can combine more than one texture, using different Blending Modes and layer opacity settings to build up the effect over several layers. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/2TVkAam…

As well as using Blending Modes to combine textures with your images, you can also create all kinds of interesting effects by experimenting with the Blend If controls. These let you blend by luminosity or color. Double-click a layer to access the Blend If controls, then use the This Layer and Underlying Layer sliders to start blending. You can fade out the brighter parts of one layer to reveal the brighter areas on the layer below by dragging the white point This Layer slider inwards. You can also split the sliders in half by Alt-dragging one side of the triangular control point. This allows you to create a softer transition. WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3xjOjrX…

In general, we want our photos to display a complete range of tones from black to white, but when it comes to retro effects, we can give the impression of a faded old photo by cutting out the two ends of the tonal range. This is easy to do with Curves (use either the Tone Curve in Camera Raw or Lightroom, or the Curves command in Photoshop). Drag the bottom-left point of the diagonal curve line upwards slightly: this lifts our black point, so it effectively sets the darkest tone in our image. Similarly, drag the top-right point down slightly to fade out the white point. To take it further, try similar edits on the red, green and blue curve lines. For example, drag the lower red point upwards to introduce red…

Photoshop and Lightroom both offer a range of built-in one-click effects that let you add a retro color tint in seconds. One of the best tools for the job is the Profiles Browser in Camera Raw or Lightroom. This features a Vintage set of Profiles that skew colors in a pleasingly old-fashioned way. You can also find a range of retro toning presets in the Presets Panel in Camera Raw or Lightroom, which gives you old-school effects like ‘Aged Photo’. Elsewhere, you can find a selection of film stock effects within the Color Lookup Adjustment in Photoshop, and a crossprocessed treatment within the Curves presets.…

Old lenses would often be very soft around the edges of the frame, which meant that the corners of the photo would be blurred. We can replicate this with simple blur filters in Photoshop. The two best filters for this effect are both found in Photoshop’s Blur Gallery. Here you’ll find the Iris Blur and Tilt-Shift filters. Iris Blur lets you create circular fall-off, so the center of the image stays sharp while the corners go soft. Tilt-Shift works in a linear way, blurring the top and bottom of the frame. Of course, you could use both. To apply the effect, rightclick your layer and choose Convert To Smart Object (this keeps the blur editable), then go to Filter > Blur Gallery > Iris Blur. Use the circular control to set the strength,…