Sometimes you take a picture and you know in your mind that it could have been different or better if you had taken it on a different day or at a different time. Lighting can play a huge role in what your picture conveys. And this is where “Creative Photoshop Lighting Techniques” comes into play.
Continue Reading »

Selective coloring…you know the process of taking a B&W image and only showing something in a vibrant color in the photo. Yeah, looks really cool but how the heck do you do it?

Get ready because it’s actually very easy and one of the first photo editing (processing) tips that was passed on to me.

First find a photo that lends itself to a bit of selective coloring. Look for photos that have vibrant spot colors that do not mesh with any of the background colors. I am going to use this photo of a rose courtesy FreeFoto.com for our tutorial.

Now, open your image in PhotoShop (I am using CS3, but most of this should be backward compatible to earlier versions).

Continue Reading »

Photography forums are littered with posts from rookies asking about filters and other effects. Almost immediately someone will post “that’s easy to do in Photoshop,” without a link or any other explanation. For a Photoshop AND photography rookie like myself, that makes it doubly frustrating. Luckily, help is just one book away.

“The Photoshop Show Starring Russell Brown” is a timeless book with techniques that will help you regardless of which Photoshop version you might have. As someone who has only used Photoshop to edit images for websites, this book was a helpful glimpse into the full power of what the program offers. Brown covers such topics as Channels and Blending, Layer Masks, Filters and Patterns in a way that makes it very easy for the novice to ‘get’ the concept being illustrated. The enclosed CD offers sample files for all of the exercises, which is invaluable for retaining the skills this book teaches. Several chapters are also devoted to transforming an image to create a completely new work. Again, all samples are included on the CD so that you can get the most out of the exercises.

I still consider myself a Photoshop novice, but this book has enabled me to do much more with photos than I could before I read it. I highly recommend it for photography and Photoshop novices alike.