Most people confronted with Photoshop for the first time feel bewildered. This program is very powerful, very versatile, it's possibilities seemingly endless but, as a professional photographer, one thing I know is true, most people will only use about 20% of it's capabilities. You will never need to know the full range of tricks it can perform as they are mostly specialist applications so it's not as daunting as you think.
Like playing the Piano - one does not have to read Music to learn a few notes and chords and bash out a tune.
The basics are all you need until you begin to specialise and these are the basics.
First, having spent lots of Dollars and willing to spend some time, it is assumed that you want Photoshop to manipulate images accurately and to a high degree of quality, all this will be wasted unless your Computer Monitor is colour calibrated correctly.
There are various ways to do this. One can download certain programs, some for free, like Adobe Gamma Loader that can guide you through the calibration setup sequence. This will require you to alter the Monitor Contrast but some Monitors don't have this facility. Or you could use the internal system integral to Windows: go to Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced where you should be able to adjust Gamma, that is Colour, Brightness and Contrast levels. Most people find this difficult as no two people can agree on what is the correct balance.
A third way is like rule of thumb. After opening an image in Photoshop(see below) look at the default screen setup (as the screen shot left).The workspace should be as neutral a Grey as possible (as the backround to this page you are reading should be) The Grey Scale on the left may help you with Brightness and Contrast. You should see a full range of tones with slight 'banding' between them. Alter the Display property settings by trial and error until you have it right. This is better viewed in a dim lighting.
Neutral Grey Workspace
Open an Image first to see this.
The screen layout, toolbars and tools we can discuss later, let's actually do something right now.
The fundamentals are procuring an image - crop the image - alter the brightness and contrast - alter the colour balance - resize the image - sharpen the image - save it to file - print it out. We shall do all these things.
Procuring an image, or uploading a file, can be done in many ways. You may have the image in a Digital Camera which you can transfer to the Computer through Microsoft's Scanner and Camera Wizard or you may have Camera dedicated Software that will vary from Camera to Camera. Either way it must go into a file. You could download an image from the Internet and that must also go into a file.
Conversely you may want to upload an image from a connected Scanner. Follow this sequence: Click File then run the cursor over Import > (the name of the Scanner from the pop-up list) then do whatever your Scanner needs and > Scan. When it's finished close the Scanner and the image will appear in Photoshop also like this above.
The image is surrounded by a bounding box with information that we can discuss later. To open the image to the work area Click the Maximize button next to the Close button on the bounding box. Then your screen should look like this screen pic on the right with just the image surrounded by the workspace. Now you can appreciate the importance of a Grey background - any colour tint in the workspace will affect the colour of the image.
If the you think the image is too small or too large look at the toolbar options at the top: Click View > Fit on Screen.
And now we can get to work.
It's good discipline to follow the sequence of events as described above. You would not want to judge colour balance, for example, based on image areas that you will subsequently discard by cropping so cropping the image is next. Look down the left hand side toolbar, find a symbol like this and Click on it.
You may see some options on the top toolbar regarding the Crop Tool, we'll talk about those later.
The Crop Tool has become your cursor and you can place this anywhere but for now place it at the lower left corner, but just outside, the image. Click and hold down the Mouse button, drag the Crop Tool to the opposite, top right, position and let go.
You will see a dotted line on all four sides of the image moving like Ants. These are the Crop Tool guidelines. You will also see 'Handles' that appear on each corner and half way along each straight side. You can grab these handles to move the guidlines. The corner handles allow you to enlarge or reduce the whole crop area proportionately. The straight side handles are much more useful, allowing you to move that particular guideline only, relative to the other three.
You can play around with these until you get the hang of it. If, in Photoshop Elements, it dosen't happen as I describe then the options box on the top toolbar needs to be altered to 'No Restriction'. In the screen shot above I have moved the guidelines independently for a tight crop around this Lady's face. You'll see the rest of the imge slightly darkened and the Ants crawling around the selected area.
Let me just digress slightly here. Look down to the bottom left corner of the workspace. The figures here tell you the percentage size of the image you are looking at then, the actual size of the image as if you where ready to print it out and then, the resolution of the image as if you where printing it out. These are image attributes. What it does not tell you is the size of the crop area before you crop it! I wish Adobe would add this useful information somewhere to the screen because, many a time, I have to crop to a square image which is very difficult to guage visually. Only after cropping will it tell you the new size. (Hope Adobe is reading this).
When you are happy with the designed crop area you can actually crop by clicking on the Tick box either on the corner of the crop area or on the top toolbar depending which version of Photoshop you have or, just a quick double click within the crop area, has the same effect. Now you can 'Save As' your work if you want to or not but you can always undo what you've done with either the Undo Arrow on the top toolbar in Elements or the > Edit > Undo/Step Backward button in Cs. Easy isn't it! The next step is not.
I prefer to alter the Brightness and Contrast first then the Colour balance. Sometimes I have to go back to Brightness and Contrast for a final tweak. Other may do it Vice Versa but getting it right is tricky as it's all subjective.
Follow this sequence in Cs: Click Image > roll onto Adjustments > Brightness and Contrast.
Follow this sequence in Elements: Click Enhance > roll onto Adjust Lighting > Brightness and Contrast
It is not within the scope of this tutorial to go deep into the triple variables of Bightness Contrast and Colour. Many years in the Photofinishing industry during the Wet-Trade days taught me. Suffice to say here that you don't want burnt out highlights nor lost shadow detail. As for colour, choose a colour in the image that you know to be a specific colour, a colour you know well, and alter the image to that colour, all else should fall in line.
Quick rule of thumb example, a Wedding Photo, Brides white Dress must be white, with detail in the highlights (this is Brightness), Grooms Black Suit must be Black with detail in the shadows (this is Contrast) then shadow areas on white dress caused by natural curves within must be Grey, Neutral Grey, not tinted. For more about Colour Correction see the new f8 Tutorial on Image Colour Correction
When you have an acceptable image on the screen Click OK and it's done
For Colour in Cs Click Image > rollover Adjustments > Colour Balance. In Elements Click Enhance > rollover Adjust Colour > Adjust Hue and Saturation. A similar box will appear. There are some choices you can take at this point but for now we'll just keep it simple. The default setting in the Edit box is Master. This means that by altering the sliders you are altering all the colours simultaneously. Make sure Preview is engaged and have a play around. Notice that only slight movement of the sliders has quite an effect. The intricacies of this adjustment we can discuss later. If you have an acceptable image on the screen so Click OK and that's done. 'Save As' this if you wish. We shall move on.
We are now getting near the point where we can do something with this image like Print it, email it or File it in a Photo Album but first we must Resize the Image to the appropriate size for it's use. In this first part of the tutorial all we shall do is Print it while we learn how to Resize. Look again at the figures in the lower left corner. This tells you the current image size after cropping but what we want to do is print it out on an A4 sheet with the image in the centre and a border all around. The actual size of your image and, more importantly, it's proportions are irrelevant at the moment because I shall show you how to Resize that image so that the longest side becomes 7" or 17.8cm.
In Cs Clck Image > Image Size. In Elements Click Image > rollover Image Size > Resize and another Box will appear like this on the right. In this box are even more options than the last but again we'll keep it simple for now.
Having decided to Print the image we want an image resolution of sufficient qualty so reset the 'Resolution' at 300. The pixels/inch box next door relates to Dots Per Inch or DPI no need to alter this. Ignore also the Pixel Dimension sizes. While Resizing like this we don't want to distort the image by resizing only one dimension so make sure you engage 'Constrain Proportions' down below. In the Document sizes you want the longest side of your image to be 7" or 17.8cm (if you work in inches and it says inches then that's fine, if you want centimeters or millimeters then Click the Down Arrow on the right of inches and select your choice - or Vice Versa)
Whichever is the longest side of your image, width or height, reset that dimension in the appropriate box to 7 (in) or 17.8 (cm). The other dimension will automatically be corrected. At the very bottom of the Image Size box Click the options and make sure it says 'Bicubic' - more on that later. Finally, because we are Printing the image, we don't want image compression taking place as we would if transmitting on the internet so make sure you disengage 'Resample Image'. When all that's done Click OK and you'll see the image change size and in the image attributes box, lower left, the new size and resolution will be displayed.
A box will appear with separate Slider controls for Brightness and Contrast. You can play around with these till you get the hang of it. Engage the Preview button to see the effect. Cancelling will not apply the changes so nothing to fear. Very large files will involve a short time delay before the Preview image comes up. You can move the whole box by clicking on the box's Title Bar and dragging it to wherever if it's spoiling the view.
Let's suppose you have a file (create one if you wish) in My Documents called Photos and in this is the image you wish to manipulate. Follow this sequence from the blank Photoshop screen: Click File > Open > My Documents > Photos > ( the photo that you want) > Open. Wait a moment and the image will appear like this:-
This next step should always be the final step before before printing or publishing and it is Sharpening. Every time you resize an image an interpolation of pixels occurs inevitably causing image deterioration which will be improved by sharpening. The image should be sharpened only once as over-sharpening by repetitive sharpening procedures will affect edge contrast to the detriment of the image. For this reason I prefer to 'Save As' my images in a master file as an un-sharpened version. When I want to use the image I will resize accordingly then sharpen before deploying to Printer or Internet.
In the top toolbar Click Filter > roll over Sharpen and a pop up box appears with five options (four in Elements) as this screen shot. Click 'Sharpen' and this will sharpen the whole image by an approximate amount. The other options are for Sharpening by more exacting amounts and we'll discuss that later also. At last we can print it.
In Cs Click File > Print with preview or in Elements File > Print and this box will appear showing your Cropped, Colour Corrected, Brightness/Contrast Adjusted and Sharpened Image, Resized to Print with a border on A4 paper. All you need do is hit the Print button. The finer controls in this box we can discuss later. You now need to see the quality of the printed image. Does the Colour/Brightness/Contrast match your screen? Probably not but don't panic - you've just completed all the essential steps needed to process an image through Adobe Photoshop.
All the other tricks in this Digital Pandora's Box are either finer tuning of all of the above or, image manipulation with creativity, which is probably what you bought it for or, so specialized that you would not be interested in it. More soon.
