Photoshop

Excerpted from Creative Black and White:
Digital Photography Tips and Techniques (Wiley Publishing)

By Harold Davis

Black & White adjustment layers are probably the most effective and powerful way to create great creative monochromatic imagery in Photoshop. They’re easy, flexible, and powerful—although in many cases a single Black & White adjustment layer isn’t optimal for all areas in a photo. To resolve this problem, multiple adjustment layers can be used with different settings, each setting applied on a different layer, with the layers masked and blended to create the final results.

Even just one Black & White adjustment layer can be a powerful conversion tool. Part of what makes Black & White adjustment layers easy to use are the Presets—conversions to black and white using settings chosen from a list. These Presets mostly use the metaphor of applying filters in an old-fashioned darkroom, and are named after these filters.

Don’t get too caught up in the metaphor to film that the presets provide. As with everything digital, the analogy to old-fashioned process doesn’t always hold up. The best way to see what one of the black and white adjustment presets does is try it, and find out. If you don’t like it, you can always go back and try again.

Read further on Graphics.com

Yesterday, Getty Images announced the launch of Archive Photos from their Hulton Archive. I thought it would be interesting to see how difficult it is to restore these old images.

Before.

After. Marilyn Monroe: Photo by Baron/Getty Images

I asked Getty send me a few before and after photos. Negatives are most often very badly damaged – cracked, chipped, or otherwise in very poor condition, and the restoration process is long and involved. Restoring a single damaged image can take weeks, but the end result – a rare image in nearly-perfect condition – is worth every minute of work.

Photoshop turns 20 this year, and Adobe is celebrating with a search for the "Next Photoshop Evangelist," one among the legendary application's legion of multilayered fans. (Admit it. You have a Photoshop window open right now.) The company will select a primo proselytizer of all things Photoshop based on video submissions. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: create and upload to Vimeo a two-minute Photoshop video tutorial demonstrating why you should be the Next Photoshop Evangelist. Your video must use Photoshop CS5, a new Photoshop CS5 feature, and, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Photoshop, incorporate the concept of "20" somewhere in the final image. The winner receives a fresh copy of CS5 Design Standard, a trip to next spring's Photoshop World, and the chance to demo his or her tutorial at the conference. Plus, all finalists will be showcased on the Photoshop YouTube channel. Ready to spread the Photoshop gospel? Entries must be received by Tuesday, August 24.

Via: Liquid Treat

Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack on his blog writes Adobe added an option to the Layers panel flyout menu, making it possible to have Photoshop stop adding the word "copy" to layer names when duplicating layers. The preference is off by default to avoid breaking actions that rely on "copy."

Adapted from Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom, 2nd Edition (Peachpit Press)
By Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe

Multipass Sharpening Problems

Many Photoshop users have, at some point, tried a multipass sharpening approach. A few have made it work, but the vast majority have wound up creating grossly oversharpened images, usually by falling into one or more of four potential pitfalls:

• Relying on the computer display to judge sharpness is a practice fraught with peril, yet until we make the print, it’s all we have. The temptation is to make the image look sharp on screen, then to sharpen it again for output, often with unacceptable results.
• Failure to take image content into account in the first round of sharpening typically results in applying the wrong kind of sharpening for the image, so wanted detail may be obscured, and unwanted detail or noise may be exaggerated.
• Applying the firrst pass of sharpening globally, rather than through a mask that isolates edges, sharpens noise, flat-textured surface areas (such as skies), and the edges. When the second pass of sharpening is applied, the image becomes oversharpened.
• Applying the firrst pass of sharpening to the entire tonal range, rather than protecting the extreme highlights and shadows, almost guarantees that the second pass of sharpening will create blown highlights and plugged shadows.

The good news is that all of these problems are avoidable given sufficient attention, care, and skill. Building a multipass sharpening workflow is not a trivial undertaking, but neither is it impossible—otherwise we wouldn’t have bothered writing this book!

Read further on Graphics.com

Full press release below.

Brand-new additions to your Photoshop arsenal. Claudia McCue unveils very handy features exclusive to Photoshop CS5, such as the updated Refine Edge feature that makes selecting organic edges much easier and faster than before.

First chapter free. Get access to the Mediabistro On Demand video library for only $19 per month.

This one feature is such a time saver it is alone enough to convince many to upgrade.

Adapted from Photoshop CS4 Bible (Wiley Publishing) - By Stacy Cates, Simon Abrams, Dan Moughamian
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Making images or parts of images lighter, or brighter, is a commonly needed adjustment. There are many ways to lighten an image in Photoshop. You can use a lightening process that lightens the light and/or dark qualities of an image (the luminosity or luminance) along with the colors in an image.

But let’s say you’ve got the color the way you want it — you just want to lighten part of the image and avoid risking a shift in the color while you’re at it. In that case, you can use a lightening technique that lightens only the luminosity and does not affect the colors. There are also lightening techniques that can better preserve contrast in an image, and others that may reduce contrast. You can use certain methods to make broad changes or you can use methods that allow you to target specific areas.

Read the full article on Graphics.com

Photoshop files tend to be huge. If you want to save disk space both on your primary HD and your backup disks there is a very simple trick that can reduce files sizes by more than 50%. Before you save just switch off the visibility of all layers. With the layers switched off, Photoshop will not save layer previews resulting in smaller file sizes. At times the saving is as little as 10%, but in other cases it can be up to 90%.

Besides saving disk space you will also save time, because saving and opening smaller files takes less time as well. If you work with large files this can result in serious productivity gains.