You’ve just spent several hours searching through your photo files for a close-up shot of a flashlight you want to use for a sales presentation. It’s perfectexcept for the color. The flashlight is yellow, and you need a green one, as shown in Figure A. What do you do? Why not try a great editing feature included with Photoshop called the Replace Color command? By using the Replace Color command, you can easily and quickly substitute one color for another, turning a yellow flashlight to green or whatever other color you desire.
Read more »
One of the most common tasks Photoshop users are asked to perform involves changing the color of a specific object or item in a photograph to a completely different color. For some reason, it’s assumed that this process is quick and easy. In reality, though, the difficulty level can range from easy to complex, depending on what you have to modify. However, Photoshop’s Color Replacement tool can aid in the color-replacement process. This tool is located on the Healing Brush tool’s flyout menu in the Toolbox, as shown in Figure A. With it, you can paint over an image to replace one color with another color of your choosing more easily than ever before. Let’s take a closer look at how this tool works.
Read more »
Whether you’re toning several images for a single layout or color correcting one image, Photoshop CS’s Match Color command can make this process quick and painless. Using this command you can make broad adjustments to multiple images based on a source image’s color makeup or adjust tonal values within an image by adjusting its luminance and color intensity. Let’s take a closer look.
Read more »
It’s no surprise that color correcting your digital images can be difficult. Trying to decide what needs to be adjusted in your image is almost as confusing as figuring out which tool you’ll need to fix it. There are automatic color fixes in many different image-editing programs, but these “one-size-fits-all” adjustments often don’t meet your needs. Photoshop has one of the most intuitive and efficient tools for making color corrections to your images. The Variations command is a quick way to adjust your images according to your own tastes, in a visual format that makes it easy to make the right choices. By using this image-editing tool, you’ll be able to see what doesn’t look quite right in your image and correct it, as we did in Figure A.
Read more »
While the Hue/Saturation command’s main purpose is to help you with color correction, it also allows you to combine grayscale imagery with color imagery in Photoshop. This technique is great for creating dramatic images with dominant focal points, similar to that shown in Figure A, where we desaturated a color image everywhere but in the one area we wanted to accent with color. We’ll show you how to create this effect quickly and easily using the Hue/Saturation command.
Read more »
No matter how good your digital camera or scanner is, you can improve or enhance nearly every image by adjusting its color balance. While Photoshop is known for reality-bending editing tools, color correction is probably the most common day-to-day task for which it’s used. The importance of color balance is clearly shown by the number of tools Photoshop has for manipulating it. While many of these seem to be different methods for accomplishing the same goal, the Curves command stands out as the most versatile.
Why use Curves instead of Levels?
Photoshop has a variety of color-correction tools, but the Levels and Curves commands are most precise. You can achieve good results with either tool, but they perform the same task in different ways.
The Levels dialog box displays a graphic, known as a histogram, of the pixels in an image or color channel. Three sliders below the histogram allow you to adjust the highlights, midtones, and shadows. This intuitive dialog box is easy to learn, but its design limits you to just three control points.
The Curves dialog box is a bit more complex, but it’s also much more precise. By plotting points on a line graph representing pixel brightness or ink density, you can modify up to 16 variables per color channel. You’ll probably never need that much power, but having it under the hood gives the Curves command more control over the tonal range of an image than other color-correction tools in Photoshop.
Read more »
If you’ve backed up your digital negatives to a CD for safekeeping, of course you’re going to want to delete shots that are terribly out of focus, etc., but beyond that, is there really a reason to keep one-star files on your computer? They just take up drive space and otherwise impede the national economy, so you might as well delete them and move on with your life. Here’s a couple of ways to do just that:
Best Option
If you burned a CD when you first inserted your memory card (and I know you did, because now you know how important it is to keep your digital negatives safely stored), then you can delete any photo from the Bridge that you don’t want. This is as easy as clicking on the offending thumbnail and pressing Command-Delete (PC: Control-Backspace). You’ll get a warning dialog telling you that if you continue this madness (by clicking OK), Photoshop will actually move this file from the folder where it resides and put it into the Trash (or Recycling Bin) until you choose to empty the Trash/Bin.
Read more »
Ah, finally, we get to the fun partsorting your photos. Adobe has been trying different sorting methods since they introduced the File Browser. Back in Photoshop 7, you had to rank each photoand even then you didn’t necessarily get them in the exact order you wanted. In CS, you could flag photos, and then just view the flagged images. Well, in Photoshop CS2, Adobe’s taking things up a notch with a new rating scheme that’s a mix of the best of the Photoshop 7 and CS versions, with some nice new bells and whistles.
Method One
Drag-and-Drop
Sorting is based on the simple premise that in every digital roll you have some good shots, some “just-okay” shots, and some completely lame shots (or “losers,” as we call them). Generally, people want the good shots to appear at the top of the Bridge’s thumbnail window, followed by the just-okay shots and the lame shots (if you keep them at all) at the bottom. You can do this manually by simply clicking-and-dragging the thumbnails into the order you want. For example, if you want a thumbnail in the second row to appear in the top row, just click on its thumbnail and drag it to that spot. A thick, vertical bar lets you know where the dragged thumbnail will land. You can drag photos around just like you would on your own personal lightbox, putting photos into the exact order you want them. Sorting this way works great when you’re working with a small number of photos (like 24 or fewer), but when you start to sort a 1-GB memory card, dragging them around gets incredibly cumbersomethat’s why now there’s an improved “rating” system.
Read more »
Rotating photos within the Adobe Bridge is as easy as clicking one button. However, when you rotate photos within the Bridge itself, you’re only really rotating the thumbnail. This is handy, because when you’re sorting photos with a portrait orientation (tall rather than wide), you want to be able to see them upright to make a sorting judgment call; but you have a separate decision to make if you want the actual photo rotatednot just the thumbnail.
Here’s how to do both:
Rotating Thumbnails
Rotating a thumbnail is a total no-brainer: Just click on the thumbnail you want to rotate, then click on one of the circular arrow rotation icons in the top-right corner of the Bridge. The left arrow icon rotates counterclockwise; the right arrow icon rotates clockwise. You can also use the shortcut Command-[ (PC: Control-[) (Left Bracket key) to rotate counterclockwise, and Command-] (PC: Control-]) (Right Bracket key) to rotate clockwise.
Rotating the Actual Photo
When you rotate a thumbnail, you’re doing just thatthe photo doesn’t get rotated until you actually open it in Photoshop (go look in the image’s folder on your hard drive, and you’ll see from the file’s thumbnail that the actual photo isn’t rotated). So if you really want to rotate the original photo, double-click on the photo in the Bridge and the image will open in Photoshop with the rotation applied. Now you can choose Save from the File menu to make the rotation permanent.
If you want to rename an individual photo, it’s fairly straightforward. Now there is also a way to actually rename every photo at once with names that make sense (to you anyway); but that, my friends, is in the next chapter. For now, here’s how to rename one thumbnail image at a time (this is a great technique to employ if you charge by the hour).
Step One
It’s hard to imagine why someone wouldn’t like such a descriptive name as DSC_1053.JPG, but if you’re one of those people who enjoys names that actually describe what’s happening in the photo, here’s how it’s done: With a thumbnail selected, click directly on the photo’s name (in the thumbnail window) and the name will highlight, ready for you to type in a more descriptive name (like “DSC_1054″…kidding).
Step Two
Once you’ve typed in your new name, press the Return (PC: Enter) key and the thumbnail updates with your new-and-improved name. (Here I changed the name of the file DSC_1053.JPG to Barcelona Daisies.JPG.)
