Teach Yourself Photoshop

P hotoshop users now have a choice of image organisational tools. Traditionally, Photoshop has been twinned with Adobe Bridge – Bridge does the organising and Photoshop does the editing. But the introduction of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has widened the choice. At the time of writing, Lightroom is available both as a standalone program with a regular ‘perpetual’ licence (Lightroom 6)’ or as part of Adobe’s subscription-based Photography Plan. The fact is, if you are using Photoshop CC then you almost certainly have access to Lightroom CC as part of your subscription package at no extra cost, and it can prove an extremely useful tool both for managing a large collection of photographs, editing them directly or ‘pre-editing’ images, including raw files, before passing them over to Photoshop for more detailed…

1 Library This is where you import your photos into the Lightroom catalogue, organise them into Folders and Collections, add ratings, labels, keywords and more. 2 Develop This is where you’ll find Lightroom’s editing tools. They’re the same as those in Adobe Camera Raw, but arranged in a smart new interface. 3 Map Lightroom can automatically place geotagged images on a map, and you can add location information manually to images that don’t have it. 4 Book It’s possible to design and order printed photo books entirely within Lightroom, which could prove a very useful feature for commercial photographers who want to offer their clients a range of photographic products and services. 5 Slideshow This is a great way to package up a set of photographs into a multimedia presentation…

1 Folders Lightroom does not need to move your photos when it imports them – it can simply add them to the library in their existing location. You can see the folders they’re stored in using this Folders panel and you can also rename and move photos. 2 Collections These are ‘virtual’ collections of images, just like the ‘albums’ in other photo organising programs. When you add a photo to a collection, you’re not moving it physically, and a single photo can be in more than one collection. 3 Smart Collections Smart collections are like ‘saved searches’. You don’t add photos to a smart collection manually; instead, you set up the smart collection with properties you want to search for, such as photos with specific keywords, ratings or shooting information.…

Lightroom and Photoshop make a great team. You can use Lightroom to organise all your images and make basic enhancements before handing off your photos to Photoshop for more advanced work. In fact, though, as you start exploring Lightroom’s sophisticated editing tools, you might discover you don’t need Photoshop as much as you thought. You might imagine that having two sets of editing tools in two different programs would make things confusing, but it doesn’t. The thing to remember about Lightroom’s adjustments is that they are ‘non-destructive’, just like those in Adobe Camera Raw. Whatever changes you make to your photos in Lightroom you can undo at any time. And you soon get to realise that Lightroom is especially good at some jobs, like basic tone and colour corrections,…

One of the biggest problems we face as digital photographers is our ever-growing collections of images. We may have thousands of photos scattered across hundreds of folders on our computers. These folders tend to display images according to when they were captured, so we have to rely on our memory of what was shot when as we search for a particular photo. All versions of Photoshop attempt to deal with this asset management problem using similar tools. The Photoshop Elements Organizer allows you to add star ratings and keywords. Lightroom’s Library module does a similar job. Photoshop CC and CS use a companion application called Bridge to help you sort the wheat from the chaff. If you access the full version of Photoshop as a download via the Creative Cloud…

1 FOLDERS Click the Folders tab to browse to any folder of images stored on your PC. Drag your most commonly used folders into the Favorites panel. 2 THUMBNAILS Bridge displays your images as thumbnails. You can use the slider at the bottom of the workspace to increase the thumbnail size. 3 WORKSPACES These links enable you to change the way panels and images are displayed in Bridge. For example, the Filmstrip option gives you larger previews. 4 METADATA This panel emulates the display on your digital SLR. It reads the metadata stored in the currently active thumbnail so that you can discover what shutter speed, ISO and aperture settings where used to capture the image. It also shows the metering modes. 5 FILTERS This panel enables you to present…