Practical Photoshop

01 FIND A HANDY LIST OF LAYERS When your document contains lots of overlapping layers, it can be tricky to target a specific layer without having to trawl through the Layers Panel. Instead, grab the Move Tool and right-click over any point in the image for a list of all the layer names at that particular point. Of course, things are easier if you’ve renamed your layers so you know which is which. 02 MOVE A SELECTION When you make a selection, you can hold the Space bar (while still holding the right mouse button down) to move the entire selection around. You can also move Pen Tool anchor points by holding Space while you’re plotting the point. 03 ROTATE YOUR DOCUMENT The Rotate Tool can be very useful for temporarily rotating the document to…

WATCH THE VIDEO https://bit.ly/3pTILpX Starbursts can be a wonderful addition to landscapes and night scenes. Set a narrow aperture like f/22, then point your lens towards any small, bright highlight (such as the sun or a street lamp), and it can become a beautiful star shape. But using this technique poses a dilemma. The narrow aperture results in diffraction, where light spreads out along the aperture blades, causing the pinpoints on the star – known as ‘diffraction spikes’. So in this instance, diffraction is our friend – but more often than not, it’s also the enemy, because it results in a softening of fine detail. So do we capture the starburst and settle for a softer scene, or prioritize image sharpness? With a bit of simple image blending, we can have the best of…

1 SUNNY DAY You’ll need a sunny day for clear starbursts. Haze or clouds can make things more difficult. Don’t look directly at the sun through the lens: instead, engage Live View. Don’t worry about the sun damaging your sensor: this only tends to happen when you shoot with longer lenses and wider apertures. 2 TRIPOD We need a tripod so that we can take a series of frames in alignment. But even if you just want to capture starbursts without using our frame blending technique, a tripod is still a good idea: the narrow aperture required for creating starbursts often means a slower shutter speed is necessary. 3 STARBURST SETTINGS Start by shooting a frame for the starburst. Set your camera to Aperture Priority and ISO 100. Dial the aperture to its narrowest setting,…

Starbursts show up brilliantly at night, thanks to the darkness around the bright points of light. The main difference between shooting starbursts during the day and at night is the necessity for a long exposure. Typically, if you want to use a narrow aperture of f/22 and ISO 100, you’ll need a shutter speed of around 30 seconds, although this will depend on the strength of the lights in the scene. Your metering can struggle in the dark, so rather than using Aperture Priority, you’re usually better off with Manual mode. After shooting a frame at f/22, you can set an equivalent exposure at f/8. Simply count the number of clicks on the front dial it takes to go from f/22 to f/8, then reduce the shutter speed by counting the…

If you have an image that looks hazy – either through atmospheric haze in summer or shrouded in mist in winter – the Dehaze command does a great job of cutting through the mist, crisping up distant details and boosting hazy scenes. It’s easy to use: simply open your image in either Camera Raw or Lightroom and experiment with the slider. You’ll find that the slider goes in both directions – so not only can we use it to cut through haze, but we can also add the impression of mist to our photos. One of the challenges of landscape photography is in reducing busy scenes into simple, strong compositions. Fog, mist or low-lying cloud can help in this regard: it fades out the background details so the foreground elements stand…

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…