One thing people always seem to want to learn in Photoshop is how to superimpose a head onto a different body – or a Face Swap, as it is popularly known. This could be a father and son face swap as we’ve done here, or perhaps you could transform someone into a celebrity or bodybuilder.
Of course, there are more practical uses for face swapping, too. For example, if one person in a group photo has their eyes closed, you could copy a new head in from a similar image.
We’ll let you debate its merits, in the meantime, this is how it’s done…
Adobe has dropped the beta moniker and officially launched Photoshop CS6, the latest version of its benchmark photo editing software.
Launching its Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CS6 Extended software, Adobe says it has delivered photographers and digital artists “groundbreaking innovations and unparalleled performance breakthroughs” to deliver increased efficiency.
By adding a delicate tint of colour to the midtones of a black-and-white shot, you can easily change its mood. A cold wash of blue makes the image look more atmospheric, while a warm sepia tint recreates a retro romantic look. The trick to creating cyanotype or sepia-toned shots is to add a subtle tint while keeping the blacks black and the whites white. Here’s how to create these brilliant Photoshop effects using Elements.
Turning your colour photos into a black and white landscape is a great way to add impact, drama and emotion to your scenes. Landscape photographers have traditionally gravitated to mono using the traditional darkroom.
However, today it’s a lot less hassle and relatively easy to get great results quickly in the digital darkroom using photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop CS and Elements. Our Photoshop tutorial below will show you how to use the numerous sliders within the Photoshop black and white conversion palette so you can learn how to fine tune your black and white landscape when photo editing.
The Black and White tool works by enabling you to vary the luminance levels of eight individual colour ranges independently. Here’s how…
Retro is all the rage these days, and particularly the retro photo effect. Just because you shoot with a digital camera, though, doesn’t mean you can’t still get this lovely vintage film effect in your images.
In the quick Photoshop tutorial below we show you how you can get the retro photo effect in 4 easy steps.
Glyn Dewis is a Photoshop guru and artist and a member of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. He has recently taught alongside Scott Kelby at the worlds’ largest Photoshop event, Photoshop World in Washington DC. He talks to us about his career using Photoshop, what inspires his work, and his favourite Photoshop tools.
We’ve listed these essential adjustments in the order in which you should make them for the most efficient work process, or ‘workflow’. For example, it’s sensible to crop first – there’s no point spending time removing dust or adjusting exposure on areas of the picture a new crop will get rid of anyway.
You don’t necessarily need to apply every step to all of your images, either. For example, there are times the exposure is perfect, so you won’t need to adjust the Levels. Simply check whether each step is needed on each image as you go through them.
Previously we showed you how to pan the camera for more dramatic action photography. Now that you’ve had a chance to practice that panning technique we thought we’d show you how you can fake perfect panning photos.
Panning in-camera to record a sharp, moving subject against background blur is incredibly rewarding, but the panning technique can be impractical and tricky to perfect. So if you’ve tried, but failed, to get it right, all is not lost. Here we’ll show you a simple photo editing technique where you’ll learn how to get a life-like panning effect in Photoshop CS5 using a sharp image taken at 1/3200sec. We’ll isolate the car from the background with selection tools and add a layer mask to fine-tune the cut-out. We’ll then use filters to apply different types of blur.
One of the great joys of Photoshop is the ability it gives you to take a person from one scene and put them somewhere entirely different. This enables you to make fantastical composite images. But while it’s a fairly simple matter to cut someone out and drop them on a different background, it’s slightly trickier to make the scene look convincing.
Success depends on two main factors. First, photograph the images that make up your composite under similar lighting conditions. Our books were lit from the left to emphasise their shape and texture. The girl was also lit from the left and the camera was positioned above her to mimic the perspective of the book scene.
Hair is notoriously difficult to cut out when photo editing. Including all those fine strands was once a job best left to the patient professional; pro Photoshop users generally made use of a complex method using Channels or third-party knockout plug-ins like Extensis Mask Pro. Everyone else had put up with something that looked like it’d been chopped out of Cosmo with a pair of garden shears!
That was until the arrival of Photoshop CS5, which made the whole hair-masking process a doddle with the addition of the Refine Radius tool. It’s part of the Refine Edge/Refine Mask command, and it enables you to make a rough selection around hair edges and then brush out the background automatically, leaving you with nothing but the hair and its fine strands.
