Metavo Photo

A member of the Australian Digital Photography forum suggested I write a post about layer blending modes in Photoshop, so I decided to one-up him. This is the first part of a three part series on blending modes. By the end of this set of tutorials, you’ll be able to:

• Name the three most basic and useful blending modes, and know how they work behind the scenes (which aids you in figuring all the others out).
• Use the Screen and Multiply modes to control the exposure of parts of a photograph much the same way curves or levels are used.
• Effectively implement layer opacity, layer masks, and the gradient tool to selectively apply the strength and area of the effects to your pictures.
• Intelligently experiment with blending modes to create new effects.
• Blend textures & other images into a photograph to give it a different feel.
• Combine Photoshop’s powerful filters with blending modes to achieve a multitude of looks.
• Use keyboard shortcuts to access blending modes.
• And [Read the rest of this entry...]

Have you ever taken pictures where the background was much brighter than your subject, or seen shots where the subject just leaped out of the image?  Or have you ever spent hours fiddling with multiple contrast, brightness, levels and other adjustment layers to achieve a look that you want?  The curves tool in Photoshop will allow you to do all of that, plus much more.

The curves tool is basically an enhanced version of the levels adjustment that allows you to make targeted brightnes, levels, and contrast adjustments to specific tonal ranged of a photo.  The dialog may seem a bit odd at first, but once you see how it is used and how easy it is to make powerful, professional edits to your shots, you’ll soon learn to love it.

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This set of video tutorials will teach you how to get that smooth, glamourous look for your model’s skin. You’ll learn how to:

• Fix minor and major blemishes using the patch, healing brush, and clone tools.
• Apply surface and gaussian blurs to help smooth the skin.
• Use layer masks to control how intensely the skin smoothing is applied.
• Implement other techniques used by pros.

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YouTube member Cbrushphoto posted a fantastic, step-by-step set of tutorials showing a complete post processing workflow called, Photoshop CS3 Workflow for Photographers.  It’s demonstrated in Photoshop CS3, but the steps are similar to this if you’re using CS4.  In the nearly two hours of these free video tutorials, he begins with an image straight from the camera, and shows you how to edit it from start to finish.  From Adobe Camera RAW to preparing it for printing, learn how a professional Photoshop teacher retouches his images.

It may be more complex than what’s needed for every photo, but he does a superb job of explaining many of the different image retouching techniques you could use.  After watching all of these videos and practicing the tips & techniques provided, you should become a professional at post processing in no time.  The set of videos is broken into 16 parts (after the introduction):

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A common task in glamour & fashion retouching is selecting a person’s hair to change its color, move the person to another image, etc.  While Photoshop offers some fairly powerful selection tools (i.e. pen tool, lasso, magic wand, etc), they often are not precise nor accurate enough to select fine strands of hair on a person’s head, coat, or an animal’s fur.  For tasks such as that (besides using an advanced selection plug-in), you’ll need to use some more advanced techniques in Photoshop such as:

• Creating masks from the channels in your image
• Employing levels adjustments to help create contrast between the hair and background
• Working with the Refine Edge tool to reduce artifacts in your selection
• Use LAB color to assist in selecting hair against complex backgrounds
• Selecting hair & people with the Extract tool

There are nearly an hour’s worth of video tutorials below that are geared towards CS3 & CS4.  What are you waiting for?  Learn how to select hair in Photoshop!

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If you’ve ever wondered how to create a black & white image in Photoshop with only a certain part of the picture in color (i.e. a subject’s lips, a bouquet of flowers, one pear out of a hundred, etc)?  This set of post processing tutorials explains just how to do that using a Photoshop tool called selective color.

You can use the selective color tool for many basic post processing tweaks such as saturating or desaturating parts of an image to bring attention to them, correct minor color casts, and more.  The following video tutorials demonstrate how to use this tool simply and easily to get you selectively coloring images in no time.

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It can be argued that amazing eyes are the cornerstone of a fantastic portrait.  If they look dull or dark, it makes it tough to connect with the subject.  On the other hand, bright, razor-sharp, saturated eyes can turn a dull portrait into one that pops.  Luckily, Photoshop makes it very easy to retouch and enhance eyes.  For example, you can:

• Change the color of someone’s eyes
• Enhance the depth of the eyes (by burning & dodging)
• Make eyes more colorful & vibrant
• Whiten eyes
• Remove red eye
• Remove or add catchlights

Plus much more.  Below is a sample of some of the good videos that very simply show you how to enhance and make your eyes look awesome in Photoshop.  The tutorials use several different versions of Photoshop, but primarily CS4.  In reality, it doesn’t make that much difference which version you are using.

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