Keyboard shortcuts are one of the fastest ways to get things done in any program but especially in Photoshop. If you aren’t using keyboard shortcuts you need to start. Download some cheat sheets and then watch my video demonstrating how to setup custom keyboard shortcuts to speed up image editing.

My friends Alex Gallivan and David Kevitch are having a free Photoshop and Lightroom class on January 13 at 6:30pm. The class will be held at the office of Chapman Richards at 1414 East Murray Holladay Boulevard (about 4700 South) Anyone interested is welcome to attend.  They will be going over what’s new in Lightroom 3 and continuing their Photoshop tips & tricks lessons. Contact Alex Gallivan at alexgphotography@aol.com if you have any questions.

Also, remember to check out the new class schedule at Pixels. Owner Ray Taggart is still teaching his popular Photoshop classes and we’re also teaching classes on Lightroom, HDR, and using off-camera flashes.

Wedding photographer Martin Whitton shared a great list of “10 Rules for Editing Digital Images” at the Digital Photography School. His rules are very similar to what I personally try and do every time I edit a photo.

Chromatic aberration is a frequent problem in digital photography. This problem occurs when the lens fails to focus all colors to the same point. Sometimes also called color fringing, you may have seen this problem in your photos before as a blue, red, or purple fringe around bright parts of the photo. Chromatic aberration is most common with backlit subjects, around bright highlights like the edges of a window, and other situations with strong or high-key lighting. Although it is more common with cheap lenses, even expensive lenses (like some Canon L series or Nikon pro lenses) can have problems with chromatic aberration.

In this short Photoshop tutorial I will demostrate one technique for removing chromatic aberration. This is especially useful when other methods won’t work.

Keyboard shortcuts are one of the fastest ways to get things done in any program but especially in Photoshop. In this video I demostrate how to setup custom keyboard shortcuts to speed up image editing.

Lightroom 2.5 and Camera Raw 5.5 are now available as final releases on Adobe.com and through the update mechanisms available in Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 2. These updates include camera support for the following models:

• Nikon D300s
• Nikon D3000
• Olympus E-P1
• Panasonic DMC-FZ35**
• Panasonic DMC-GF1

**Note that in Europe and Japan this model is marketed as the DMC-FZ38. Unfortunately, due to a metadata difference between these cameras, files from the DMC-FZ38 will *not* be supported until the next Camera Raw and Lightroom updates.

Release Notes:

• Camera Raw 5.5 and Lightroom 2.5 include a correction to the demosaic algorithms for Bayer sensor cameras with unequal green response. Olympus, Panasonic and Sony are among the more popular camera manufacturers affected by this change. But the demosaic correction provides only a subtle visual improvement to the processing of those raw files.

• Lightroom 2.5 corrects for the following problem in Lightroom 2.4. Lightroom 2.4 on Windows continued to display the import dialog when a memory card was detected regardless of the preference setting “Show import dialog when a memory card is detected.”

Introduction

I recently ran across this Russell Brown PhotoShop tutorial wherein he presents a technique to make what he calls a Faux HDR image. This doesn’t really have much to do with HDR other than taking a single image and giving it a surrealistic, over-the-top, tone-mapped HDR look. It does not take a scene and get more dynamic range out of it as is typical with HDR. It does take a scene with a compressed dynamic range and expands it to make it brighter while at the same time it boosts color brightness and saturation. You can go watch the video here or, if you’re like me and aren’t a fan of video tutorials, you can read about it below.

Best types of images

This technique works best on images that are not blown out but where the detail is tightly compressed. Typically this happens when a scene is exposed for a bright section, so it’s not over exposed, but has lots of dark areas causing important detail to be hidden in the shadows. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll be using this example image I took on a recent Photowalking Utah event.

As you can see from the histogram, this image has a large bump on the left and a smaller bump on the right indicating a lot of dark and light areas whereas the middle area does not have much going on. The dark areas are not underexposed nor are the light areas overexposed. This can be seen by the two triangles in the top left and right corners. The one on the left will change color when there are details lost in the shadows and the one on the right when the brightest areas are overexposed.

For comparison, here is a similar image that does not work well. It is exposed for the darker areas as evidenced by the wider and smoother bump on the left side. Unfortunately, this causes the highlights to be overexposed and the cloud detail to be lost as seen by the sharp spike on the very left side.

In Camera Raw

The majority of the work will be done in Camera Raw, prior to going into PhotoShop. First, open your image and verify there are no blown out details. As intimated earlier, look on the histogram for images without spikes going off either edge. If you click on the triangles at the top right and left corners of the histogram, Camera Raw will change all the overexposed sections to red and the underexposed sections to blue as a means of highlighting the areas that have lost detail.

Now to get into the main changes. We’re going to be manipulating primarily the Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Clarity and Vibrance sliders. We’ll start at the top of the list and work our way down. When we get to the bottom, we’ll evaluate the image and possibly go back to the top to make some fine tuning adjustments.

Exposure

The exposure will typically need to be adjusted. If on the histogram, the dark area is larger, such as on this example image, then typically the exposure will need to be increased. On the other hand, if the bright area is larger, then it’ll need to be decreased. On this image, if I increase it at all I’ll start blowing out details in the bright areas, so for now I’ll leave it at 0.

Recovery

Recovery pulls the brighter parts of the image down and gives us some headroom on the right side of the histogram to additional changes. This technique typically works best with this set the maximum, so that’s where I’ll put it for now.

Fill Light

Fill Light brightens the dark areas without blowing out the highlights. Again, the images that work best with this technique usually like this set to the maximum.

Now that we’re about half-way through this first part, we can see our image is quite a bit brighter, but has sort of a flat appearance to it.

We can see in the histogram the data is spread apart rather than being bunched up on the two sides. The remaining steps in this section will help give the image some more depth.

Blacks

Now to get rid of that flat look, we’re going to increase the Blacks slider. Adjust it so the dark regions are just starting to clip, as indicated by the blue highlights that Camera Raw shows us. For this image, a value around 40 works well.

Clarity and Vibrance

To get that surrealistic look characteristic of overly tone-mapped HDR images, we’re now going to slide both the Clarity and Vibrance sliders all the way to their maximum values.

Fine tune adjustments

Now that we have all the basic adjustments done, we need to evaluate where we are. At this point, this image is still pretty dark. To lighten it, I go back to the Exposure slider and find I can now push it quite a bit. In fact, I can increase the exposure by 2.5 stops without clipping. If I increase it more, then I start blowing out my sky which I don’t want to do. By leaving detail in the sky, even though it’s not too visible at this point, I’ll have something to work with later to improve it.

Now we’re done with the controls on the first panel.

The next step is to do some adjustments on individual colors. To do this we go to the HSL / Grayscale tab.

And once there, we click on the Luminance tab.

These controls allow us to change the brightness levels of various color groups. What we change and the amount we change it will vary from image to image. On this image, I find that decreasing the Blues and increasing the Purples significantly helps my sky. Based on this discovery, I go over to the Hue tab and find I can help the sky some more by sliding the Purples and Oranges over to the right to around 65. This brings out the colors in the sky and flowers even more. This is an area where experimentation on each image can yield dramatic results.

If you so desire, you can crop the image and apply a vignette. The cropping tool in the top toolbar works well to remove those parts of the image you don’t want and the vignette control on the Lens Correction tab allows you to highlight the center of the image. I choose not to do that on this particular one.

Open in Photoshop

We’re now done with our edits in Camera Raw. Just prior to opening the image, make sure the color depth is set correctly and smart objects is enabled. To do this, click on the label that is centered at the bottom of the Camera Raw screen containing information about the color mode, bit depth, image size and resolution. This will open a dialog. Make sure the Depth is set to 16 bits/channel and the checkbox for smart objects at the bottom is checked. Close the dialog and then click the Open Object button. Doing this will ensure there is no loss of color information in the transfer to Photoshop and the background will be configured as a smart object so edits will be non-destructive.

There are many things that can be done to the image at this point. One of the more common ones for this type of image is to adjust the Shadows and Highlights found on the Image / Adjustments menu. Quite often this type of image can be further enhanced by selectively adjusting contrast in different regions of the picture. I found on this particular one this didn’t help, but it has on others.

Sharpening is another thing that typically enhances most images. The use of either Smart sharpen… on the Filter / Sharpen menu or my High-pass sharpening action can be used. The Smart sharpen tool can give a very edgy look by pushing the controls to high values. My action will give a less edgy look.

After some tweaks to the sky, this is my final version of this image.

And here are a couple of other images processed with this technique.

Summary

In closing, here is an outline of the steps covered above.

Camera Raw
1. Exposure: over or under as dictated by image.
2. Recovery: typically 100%
3. Fill Light: typically 100%
4. Blacks: typically 30-50%
5. Clarity: typically 100%
6. Vibrance: typically 100%
7. HSL / Luminance: as needed for image

Photoshop
1. Image / Adjustments / Shadows and Highlights: as needed
2. Filter / Sharpen / Smart sharpen: as needed
3. Anything else: as desired

(Source: Hooked on Light)

Welcome to part two of our introductory look into Photoshop actions. Last time we covered the basics of what an action is, how to run one, and how to make one. Today we’ll start with a look at a few more features within the Actions Palette in Photoshop.

Once again, the Actions Palette is located up under the Window menu across the top of the program. If it isn’t already open, pull it up and bring up a list of some actions. You’ll notice two little check box-like things next to each action name that we didn’t discuss last time. The left box toggles a particular action on or off. Alternatively, clicking the arrow next to an action’s name shows all the steps contained within and you can toggle individual steps on or off as desired.

The right check box toggles dialogues on or off. Turning dialogues on will pop up any prompts required as Photoshop runs through an action. This will require user input to run through an action; you will have to hit okay at each dialogue window that appears. This is handy if you want to make slight deviations from an action’s default behavior or simply want to see what a particular action is doing. Leaving this box unchecked will not display dialogues and Photoshop will run the selected action on autopilot.

Also in the Actions Palette, if you expand a particular action to view its contents, you may select individual steps and delete them as needed. This is especially useful if you make a mistake while recording and want to remove the unwanted step; simply hitting undo while recording an action will result in the action recording the undo command.

One of the most exciting things about actions is the ability to download user created actions and load them into Photoshop. A simple Google search for actions will return thousands of results, some good, some bad. When you’ve found an action that you want to try, download it to a convenient place on your computer. Open Photoshop and pull up your Actions Palette once again. The upper right of the palette will have a drop down menu with the option to “Load Actions.” Simply navigate to where you saved the new action(s), select them, and they will appear in the palette ready for use.

Finally, actions can be applied to a whole group of photos by tapping into Photoshop’s batch processing capabilities. The batch feature is accessed under the File menu under the Automate heading. Select Batch and the batch processing window appears. From here you can select a desired action and specify how Photoshop should deal with saving the newly processed files. Let it go, grab a sandwich, and come back to a completed group of photos.

This concludes our look into actions in Photoshop. Hit the comments on either article with questions and start exploring the potential with these powerful tools.

Ever wish you could record a set of Photoshop commands and repeat them at a later time? Welcome to the world of Photoshop actions. So what is an action?

An action is a recorded set of image editing commands that can be performed at a later time without having to re-enter each change manually. Actions can provide a handy way for editors to speed up commonly used tasks and are compatible with the Batch function in Photoshop (allowing you to automatically apply commands to hundreds of images with only a few keystrokes).

Like most features in Photoshop, actions have their own palette within the program. Palettes are located along the right side of the Photoshop interface, but their configuration will change from user to user. Thankfully all palettes are located within the Window menu located on the top of the program. Remember, if you ever lose a palette you can ALWAYS find it in that handy Window menu.

Selecting “Action” out of the Window menu will open up the Action Palette if it is not already out.  With it you will see folders with actions grouped into them. Folders are simply a way to organize actions as you see fit. You should see a folder named Default Actions that are included in the program when you install it. An action will have a little arrow to the left of its name that when clicked will display, or hide, all the commands contained within. To run an action simply highlight its name and either double click or select the Play button from the bottom of the palette. Feel free to try to some of the default actions out and get a feel for how they work, but the real power here is the ability to make your own.

Making a new action is a straightforward process: begin by selecting the new icon from bottom of the palette (the one that looks like a little sheet of paper). A command box will immediately open allowing you to name the action, organize it into one of the folders, and optionally assign the action to a keystroke. When you’ve configured this box how you want hit the Record button and your shiny new action will be created. You’ll see your new action highlighted in the palette and the red record button active along the bottom of the palette.

Now its time to enter some commands. These can be whatever you want, contrast adjustments, color tweaks, sizing changes, etc. Since your new action is currently recording, anything you do in Photoshop is going to be logged into the action. Start with something simple, maybe only a command or two to get an idea of how this process works. When you’ve done your editing hit the stop button next to that red record button along the bottom of the Actions palette. Your action is no longer recording and you are ready to test it out. Open a new image and highlight your action and press the play button. The same commands you just recorded will be applied to this new image exactly as you performed them the first time. Cool huh?

By now you should start to see the potential for how you can tap into the power of Actions in Photoshop. Tune in next time for a look into more advanced features of actions.

Photo by Ben Kuhns

“Long long ago, Black-and-White ruled the Earth.

Frosty white highlights frolicked with rich black shadows in the Meadows of Grayscale, and it was good.

Then came Digital, whose dingy whites and muddy grays nearly drove Black-and-White to extinction.

But now, like wild-eyed scientists cloning a mammoth, we’ve found the best ways to convert digital color photos into the REALhonest-to-goodness-that-looks-like-Ansel-Adams-took-it Black-and-White. NOT the pale washwater grays and off-white whites you get with “Convert to grayscale”. And we’re going to show you how.” Continue reading Converting Digital Color Photos to Glorious Black-and-White.

via Photojojo