Editing Photos in Photoshop

One of the most important functions of Photoshop is the ability to edit photos. This takes a lot of intuitive skill with color, lighting, contrast, and skill in using the selection tools in Photoshop. Luckily, Photoshop has a lot of tools to help you edit your photos. I will go over a few and how they are used.

Selection tools that are very helpful when working with photos and color is the Color Range tool. You can select the Color Range function under the Select dropdown. The Color Range window allows the user to select sampled colors, CMYK or RGB colors, highlights, midtones, and shadows of the photo. If you are trying to select a sampled color or want to add to your selection, you hold down the shift key and click on the color section you want in the photo. To deselect, you press the alt key and click. Other good selection tools are the quick selection tool in combination with the lasso tool, the pen tool, and the marquee tool. If you want to play with the entire photo, you don’t need to make a selection at all.

Once you have targeted what you want to change in your photo, there are infinite ways you can manipulate the photo. Some of the most popular is the Brightness and Contrast effect, filters from the Filter Gallery, applying patterns and blending them with the photo, the Levels tool, and the Curves tool. Levels and Curves are the tools I’m going to talk about since they are a little complex.

The Levels tool can move and stretch brightness through the histogram of the photo using three pointers that represent blacks, midtones, and whites. You can bring out the whites in your photo by moving the white pointer on the right, that is at 255 by default, closer to the right side of the mountains in the histogram. To bring out the blacks, move the black pointer that is on the far right, at 0 by default, closer to the histogram by sliding it right. Adjust the mid-grays in the photo’s histogram with the middle pointer. This is a great tool to bring out contrast in photos that gives you almost complete control over the effectiveness.

The Curves tool is very similar to the Levels tool in that it takes input color tones and selectively stretches or compresses them (lightens or darkens). But what is different about the Curves tool is that, unlike the Levels tool where you can only select the blacks, whites, and midtones, you are now able to adjust a tonal curve using any number of anchor points. The curve in the Curves window goes from black in the bottom left to white in the top right corner of the graph. There are already preset channel curves in the dropdown at the top. In order to get a better understanding of how the curve affects the tones in the photo, look at these preset curves and how they affect the photo. Of course, playing around with it yourself gives you a better understanding of the Curves usefulness as well.

There are tons more tools and effects that can be applied to photos, like layer masks of textures and patterns and blending modes, and you can explore these in many online resources like Adobe’s own tutorials, as well as video tutorials at lynda.com. To help you better understand these concepts, look at Molly’s post on editing images in photoshop and check out our commercial photographer.

 

By: Margo Osborne