Digital Camera World » Photoshop layers

Photoshop Layers De-mystified: a beginner’s guide to smarter photo editing

jmeyer — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 01:00:47 +0000

Yesterday we took a look at how Photoshop’s Blend Modes work and the 10 best blends for photographers. Today we want to go even further back to basics with photo editing and look at the types of Photoshop layers and how to use them to get the effect you want.

It’s a given that layers are key to successful image editing in Photoshop but, for novices, layer lore can still seem like a black art. In this post we’re going to demonstrate how user-friendly and essential Photoshop layers are to you.

In a nutshell, layers enable you to work on one part of an image without affecting others. You can change the opacity of layers, so they’re opaque or barely visible. You can move layers, mask and subtly blend them.

You need to think of your Photoshop layers as sheets of acetate stacked on your background image. A layer can be filled with image pixels, or just have a small area of an image with other areas transparent.

You can also blend layers and hide parts via Layer Masks. On the third page of this post you’ll see a deconstruction of our featured image image, and how we used layers to achieve the result.

PAGE 1: What are layers?
PAGE 2: The Photoshop Layers palette
PAGE 3: Photoshop layers in effect
PAGE 4: The only 3 tips you need to know about using layers

Blend Modes: the 10 best blends for photographers (and how to use them)

jmeyer — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 01:00:05 +0000

When it comes to digital photography and combining or enhancing images, there are two essential components – your layers and the Blend Mode you choose to work with. We’ll talk about layers in a later post; today we want to focus on the Photoshop Blend Modes and identify some of the best blends for photographers. In this post we’ll first look at some of the ways you can blend your layers together, and then we’ll list the 10 best Blend Modes you can use to enhance your photos

Essentially, a Blend Mode is based on complicated mathematics performed by Photoshop, in which the software calculates the differences or similarities between image information on the target layer (Blend) and the one below it (Base). Then, depending on the chosen type of Blend Mode, it blends these two layers in a particular way.

As you’ll see further on in this post, there are many flavours of Blend Modes, useful for distinctly different image-editing scenarios. Some modes use the tones and colours from one layer to darken the other, while different modes do the exact opposite.

There are some Blending Modes that will have a striking effect on contrast, while there are others that affect only colour information.

On the next page we’ll look at how you can use these various Blending Modes to their best advantage. We’ll show you what each one does, and how they can be used to great effect in your digital photography workflow.

PAGE 1: What is a Blend Mode?
PAGE 2: Start using your Blend Modes
PAGE 3: Get to know the Blend Mode menu
PAGE 4: The 10 best blends for photographers 1-5
PAGE 5: The 10 best blends for photographers 6-10

Hazy Photos: the easy way to rescue detail and colour

jmeyer — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:00:04 +0000

When you take photographs on a hazy day, moisture particles in the air diffuse the light, causing distant objects to display a more subtle range of tones. This is a great way of evoking a sense of depth, due to the gradual change in contrast between objects in the foreground and those in the background.

The downside of shooting in such hazy conditions is that those more distant objects can be somewhat lacking in detail and definition. The haze can bleach distant colour, too, especially when shooting into the sun.

Our original shot

As you can see, our original high-contrast scene has a range of tonal and colour problems to fix. Much of our landscape is backlit, so the foreground shadows are under-exposed and lack texture and detail.

As the haze has robbed the distant mountains of detail and colour too, there’s lots of selective tones to tweak before you can recover hidden detail.

Here, we’ll show you how to combine the tools of the Camera Raw editor with the standard Photoshop editor’s powerful Adjustment Layers to restore the textures in the under-exposed foreground, while recovering detail and colour from the washed-out, hazy background.

01 Open your source file
Open your start image. If the file is a digital negative it will open in Photoshop Elements’ Adobe Camera Raw editor. By starting your image editing in the uncompressed RAW format you will have much more tonal information to work with, enabling you to keep artefacts such as picture noise to a minimum.

02 Fake fill-in flash
The rocky foreground shadows are under-exposed. If you boosted the strength of the Exposure slider you’d blow out the hazy background highlights. However, by dragging the Fill Light slider to 42 you can lighten the backlit shadows without adjusting the highlights. This has the same effect as using a large blast of fill-flash on location.

03 Improve the Clarity
The washed-out tones in the hazy background vary in subtle ways, making the distant hills blend together. By increasing the Clarity slider to 54 you can gently enhance the contrast in these delicate areas, at the same time bringing out some of the landscape’s features that were initially hidden by the haze.

04 Boost the Vibrance
By boosting the strength of colour in the scene you can bring out more texture and detail. Drag Vibrance up to +23. This slider boosts typical landscape colours, such as blues and greens. When enhancing weaker colours it leaves strongly saturated colours untouched to avoid over-saturating parts of the picture.

05 Crop and straighten
The shot’s horizon is a little wonky. To fix this, grab the Straighten tool and draw a line that follows the tilted horizon. The Camera Raw editor will automatically rotate and crop the shot to make the horizon horizontal. To see the cropped and rotated shot, click on Open Image. The edited photo will now appear in Photoshop’s standard interface.

06 Spot removal
Use the Zoom tool to take a closer look at the nasty sensor spot on the horizon. To remove it, grab the Spot Healing Brush from the Tools palette. In the Options bar, set a Size of 40 pixels, and then carefully spray over the spot. Photoshop will replace it with a clear patch of adjacent sky.

07 Getting warmer
The shot’s colours are a little cold. To quickly warm up the whole image, go to Window>Layers to open the Layers palette. Click the Create New Adjustment Layer icon and choose Levels from the drop-down menu. Grab the Set Grey Point eyedropper, then click on a patch of hazy light blue sky.

08 Shades of grey
The shot now looks too warm. For a less dramatic adjustment, click on the Levels 1 Adjustment Layer’s white mask to target it. Next, choose Edit>FillLayer. In the Fill Layer window, set Contents to 50% Grey and click OK. This reduces the strength of the Levels adjustment by 50%.

09 Select the sky
Click on the Background layer in the Layers palette to target it. To add more colour and texture to the hazy washed-out sky, grab the Quick Selection tool from the Tools palette. Spray the tool over the sky to create a selection marquee. Next, create a new Levels Adjustment Layer. This layer will feature a black-and-white mask.

10 Adjust shadow levels
Click on the Levels 2 Adjustment Layer. In the Adjustments palette, drag the black Shadow input level slider to the right, to a value of around 136. This adjustment will darken the sky and reveal more colour and texture. The black section of the mask protects the foreground’s tones from being altered.

11 Remove unwanted artefacts
You’ll see that there’s now a sharp line where the sea meets the sky. There’s also a dark fringe around the edge of the distant hills. To remove these lines, grab the Brush tool from the Tools palette. Choose a soft round brush with a diameter of 300 pixels, then set the foreground colour to black. Set Opacity to 50%.

12 Blend the sky and sea
Click on the Levels 2 mask in the Layer’s palette, then spray the brush over the horizon to lighten it and blend the sky with the sea. The semi-transparent brush adds grey strokes to the mask, causing the Levels adjustment to be weaker in the painted areas. Lighten the lower sky to remove the fringe around the hills.

13 Protect the sky
To increase the foreground contrast without altering the sky, Ctrl-click on the Levels 2 mask to create an instant selection. Choose Select>Inverse, then create a new Levels Adjustment Layer. The black-and-white mask will be the opposite of the Levels 2 mask, so this time only the foreground will be adjusted.

14 Adjust foreground contrast
Set the Levels 3 Adjustment Layer’s white Highlight input level slider to 221 to brighten the highlights. Set the Shadow slider to 20 to darken them. Lighten the midtones by dragging the grey input slider to 1.27. Spray a black brush on the mask to prevent the background hills being lightened.

15 Make the grass greener
The grass in the foreground is too yellow. To make it a more natural green colour, create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer. Set the Colour drop-down menu to Yellows, then drag the Hue slider right to +13 to turn the yellows into a more vibrant green and bring out the texture of the grass.

16 Restore some detail
To recover more tonal variation in the distant hazy hills, grab the Brush tool from the Tools palette. Reduce the Opacity to 7%, then click on the Levels 2 Adjustment Layer’s mask. This is currently set to darken the sky. Set the foreground colour to white, then spray the brush to gently darken (burn) detail in the washed-out hills.

Expert tip
Once you darken the sky in step 10 you’ll reveal hidden textures and colours and hidden artefacts, such as sensor spots. When you’ve finished editing the image, choose Layer>FlattenImage. You can then use the Spot Healing Brush to polish off any remaining dust.

Focus stacking: how to fake perfect focus in Photoshop

jmeyer — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:15:48 +0000

Sometimes it’s just not possible to get everything sharp at once.

You may feel like you don’t know how to focus, but the reality is when you’re zoomed in tight on a subject, there might never be enough depth to get everything sharp, even at the lens’s minimum aperture.

The answer is to shoot a series of images with the focus set slightly further away each time, and then use a technique called ‘focus stacking’ to merge the separate photos into a finished picture that’s sharp from front to back.

This can be amazingly effective, and in this example you can’t see the joins! You can quite easily carry out focus stacking in Photoshop.

Step 1
In Photoshop CS4 or CS5, combine all your separate shots as layers in a single image (make sure you get them in the right order before you start).

Step 2
Now you can use the Edit menu to auto-align and then merge the layers. Note that Photoshop will automatically combine the sharpest areas from each image in the final result.

Focus stacking software
The alternative is to use a dedicated focus stacking program such as Helicon Focus 4.2 Lite. You shoot your sequence, load the images you’ve taken, hit the Render button and let the software do the rest. It costs £19 ($30) for a one-year licence.

Photoshop: how to use free photo frames

jmeyer — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:49:25 +0000

So did you download free photo frames and borders but are confused how to actually get your images to appear inside them? Perhaps you even downloaded our 50 free photo frames.

If so, this quick Photoshop tutorial will show you how to add a frame to your pictures in Photoshop. It’s actually dead easy.

First, open up one of the borders in Photoshop or Elements and the photo you want to add it to. (All the borders we’ve supplied are in a portrait format – to make them landscape format, use Image > Rotate Canvas.)

How to use free photo frames in Photoshop

Step 1: Copy the image

With the Move tool selected, hold down Shift and click on the photo, then drag the image onto the border. (Holding down Shift as you drag the picture across centres the image in the frame.)

Step 2: Change the blend mode

In the Layers palette, click on the picture layer then change the blending mode in the drop-down box at the top to ‘Darken’, to reveal the dark border. If the border is a white one, use ‘Screen’ blending mode instead.

Step 3: Resize the photo

With the image layer still selected, click on the main image and select Edit > Free Transform. Resize your image to fit by dragging the corners – holding down Shift as you move the corner points to maintain the proportions.

Now try this:

• Rotate the border and try Inverting it (Image > Adjustments > Invert) for a different effect.
• Duplicate the border, rotate that and use it to create a whole new style.
• Duplicate the border, drag that layer above the image in the Layers palette and use Free Transform on that in Step 3, to adjust the size of the border to fit the image.
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Create a contact sheet in Photoshop CS5

dcworld — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:23:08 +0000

Create contact sheets to send to clients quickly and easily in Photoshop CS5

Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this tutorial you’ll find out how to use the Contact Sheet plugin in CS5. Creating a contact sheet to show to clients is a good way to let them look at all the photographs from a shoot without using excess paper. In CS5, the quickest way to do this is using the Contact Sheet II plugin. Watch this video to find out how to install the plugin and use it to create your own contact sheet from a selection of photos. Click the links to the right and build up the complete collection with each new issue of Digital Camera.

How to use layers in Photoshop CS5

dcworld — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:26:43 +0000

Get to grips with layers in Photoshop, discovering how to improve your landscape photos in CS5

Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this video, discover how Layers works in Photoshop CS5. Most of the Layer tutorials from this edition of Teach Yourself can be used in CS, here we look at how you can use Layers to create a fantastic landscape images by combining two photographs and converting to black and white. Click the links to the right and build up the complete collection with each new issue of Digital Camera.

Improve landscape photography with tone and colour

dcworld — Thu, 05 May 2011 12:25:22 +0000

Give your landscape photographs an overhaul using adjustment layers

Use Layer Blending to enhance portraits

dcworld — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 15:27:08 +0000

Give your portrait photographs more impact using Blending Modes in Photoshop Elements

Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this tutorial video you’ll find out how to use Layers to create a desaturated, high-contrast fashion shot. Discover how to use Layers, Shadow/Highlights, Levels, Blending Modes and more. Click the links to the right and build up the complete collection with each new issue of Digital Camera.

Adjust mono tones in Photoshop Elements

dcworld — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:42:53 +0000

Learn how to use the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to create a monochrome image