photoshopuser_april2022 by borov665

T H E M AG A Z I N E F O R L I G H T R O O M® & P H OTO S H O P ® U S E R S

Under the Loupe

We explore options for creating prints when the cloud-based Lightroom app is the home base for your photo library

Photoshop Proving Ground



A P R I L 2022

Crop overlays don’t offer a lot of flexibility, so learn how to build your own golden spiral that can be transformed to your heart’s content

Cover Image by Hafitha Issa | Cameras for Girls

NO FOOLIN’ Removing distractions in your images will have your viewers focused on the things that really matter

recipe

FROM DON KOMARECHKA

“ THE M A D S C IEN TIST OF P H OTOG RAP H Y”

CLICK

Water droplet refraction photography is all about careful lighting and careful alignment. Every element of the photograph is like a puzzle piece that needs to fit perfectly in exactly the right place for the image to be made whole. Gooseneck arms can hold anything Lumecube lights for illumination and clamps to hold the photographic “ingredients” in place. The flower in the background needs to be in alignment with the droplets and the foreground petals, which can be easily done with subtle and accurate shifts. This macro contraption is flexible and customizable, and any camera with macro capabilities can get a similar shot. While I generally shoot with fancy mirrorless cameras and expensive lenses, this image was also intended to prove a point: the camera is the least important element to the composition. If you can check off the “macro” box, energy should be focused on the other elements of the image and how to best sculpt it; you’re a droplet sculptor first, and a photographer second. So many of the skills required to get these images to work have little to do with the camera itself, and more to do with how you stage everything. Platypod is there to make this entire process easier.

ingredients:

• Don Komarechka and his Smart Phone • 1 Gerbera Daisy and petals • Water

instruments used:

• 1 Platypod Max • 1 Platypod Ultra

• 2 Lume Cube 2.0 Waterproof LEDs • 1 Lume Cube Panel Pro • 6 Platypod Goosenecks • 3 Mini Super Clamps • 1 Benro IN00 Ball Head • 1 Square Jellyfish Smart Photo Holder

“The Mad Scientist of Macro Photography” That’s what they call Don Komarechka. Known for his ability to create art from the simple elements of nature. Tools from the Platypod Ecosystem help Don get the images he needs to portray his vision. Although the setup seems complex, it took Don no more than an hour to assemble and capture this amazing photograph. Platypod simply made the job easier.

Don’t forget to pick up a copy of Don’s new book: Macro Photography: The Universe at our Feet. It’s one of the finest and most complete books on macro photography that’s ever been written. For more information and to find the equipment listed above visit www.Platypod.com

APRIL 2022

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VOL 25

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NO 4

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[034]

[038]

DEVELOPING THE SHOT

LIGHTROOM LABORATORY

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[058]

[066]

MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

VISUAL STORYTELLING

LIGHTROOM Q&A

[068]

[072]

LIGHTROOM TIPS & TRICKS

GOING MOBILE

[076] PHOTOSHOP FOR LIGHTROOM USERS

All Souls Church: Isolating a Building

Boris FX Optics 2022

Learn to Work Faster and Smarter in Lightroom

Five Composition Tricks

Rediscovery Through Printing

Indroducing Creative Cloud Express

UNDER THE LOUPE Printing with Lightroom?

Answers to Your Lightroom Questions

Creative Sharpening

DEPARTMENTS [ 007 ]  A NOTE FROM SCOTT [ 009 ]  CONTRIBUTORS [ 010 ]  BENEFIT SPOTLIGHT [ 012 ]  KELBYONE COMMUNITY [ 022 ]  NEW ONLINE TRAINING

[082]

REMOVE & IMPROVE: CLEAN UP YOUR IMAGE QUALITY MARK HEAPS

[090]

[102]

[112]

DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS

BEGINNERS’ WORKSHOP

[118]

[124]

[130]

PHOTO EFFECTS

PHOTOSHOP PROVING GROUND

DESIGNING IN PHOTOSHOP

Custom Displacement Effects

Create Your Own Metallic Title Text Effect

Got Questions? Photoshop Has the Answers!

Creating Colored Studio Lighting

Creating Custom Crop Overlays

Let’s Do the Type Warp!

mags

[140]

[144]

[152]

PHOTOSHP Q&A

REVIEWS

PHOTOSHOP TIPS

Terry White Answers All of Your Photoshop Questions

Get the Scoop on the Latest Gear

Learn to Work Faster and Smarter in Photoshop

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KelbyOne

A NOTE FROM SCOTT

GETTING INTO GEAR

faster and easier. You just don’t know how happy that makes me. Thanks for all the great feedback in the KelbyOne forums, and a high-five to our web team for making it all happen. Before we go, I wanted to point out two courses that we recently released that I want to make sure you don’t miss. They’re both from Photoshop wizard Kirk Nelson (who also writes one of the “Down & Dirty Tricks” columns here in the magazine), and the first one is really cool because it focuses on Enhancing Backgrounds Using Photoshop’s New Neural Filters. There’s a lot more power and control in these filters than most people realize, and Kirk uncorks that genie. I think you’ll be surprised at how much you can do, and what a difference these filters can make. His other course is about Shooting and Compositing Your Own Special Effects. This really takes things up a notch, and it will open a whole new world of effects that can separate your work from the crowd. My thanks to Kirk for coming up with such unique courses for our members, and I hope you’ll give them a look. You’ll super-dig ’em. Here’s wishing you a great spring, packed with lots of creative opportunities!

☺

All my best,

Scott Kelby KelbyOne President & CEO Editor & Publisher

KELBYONE .COM

Lots of fun stuff going on right now! We just wrapped up the KelbyOne Landscape Photography Conference, and it was a huge success. Thanks to everyone who spent a few days with us learning all the new stuff (including lots of postprocessing classes, of course), and we’re very grateful for the wonderful turnout and support. If you weren’t able to attend, you can still sign up for the conference and stream all the classes on-demand for an entire year. Head over to KelbyOneLive.com, click the View Conferences link up top, and then click the Past Conferences tab. Next up is our first-ever Photography Gear Conference on May 17–18, 2022, where the entire focus of the two-day conference is to help you master your camera gear, lenses, and accessories. For the first time ever, we have separate tracks for Nikon, Canon, and Sony shooters and, of course, we have classes on photo gear that will help all photographers (like classes on flash and other lighting gear, tripods, etc.). It’s going to be something really unique and super helpful, so we’d love you to be there. You can find more info and tickets at KelbyOneLive.com. Here in the magazine, we’re sad to announce that Lightroom expert Victoria Bampton is retiring from the “Lightroom Q&A” column, and this will be her last issue. Next issue, we’re delighted to welcome a wonderful digital artist and KelbyOne instructor Victoria Pavlov, who will be taking over our “Photoshop Q&A” column. Terry White, who had previously penned that column, will be taking over our “Lightroom Q&A” column from Victoria Bampton. As excited as we are to have one of Adobe’s own Senior Evangelists taking over the reins, we’re so grateful to Victoria Bampton for the wonderful job she has done with the column with her wisdom, insights, and spot-on answers to the trickiest of Lightroom questions. She is a star, and we were honored to have her gracing our pages. Although we’ll miss her, she’ll be leaving the column in really good hands. Thank you, Victoria. In other news, I’m happy to announce that the search improvements to the KelbyOne member’s site that I wrote about last month have been a hit with our members. They’re really seeing the difference, and they’re able to find the courses and info they need

THE MAGA ZINE FOR LIGHTROOM & PHOTOSHOP USER S

EDITORIAL: Scott Kelby, Editor-in-Chief Chris Main, Managing Editor Kim Doty, Associate Editor Cover Image: Hafitha Issa/Cameras for Girls

Barbara Thompson, Copy Editor

GRAPHICS: Jessica Maldonado, Art Director Margie Rosenstein, Senior Graphic Designer Angela Naymick, Senior Web/Graphic Designer

MARKETING: Adam Frick Ashley Fosse

Each issue we feature cover art by a KelbyOne Member

Kleber Stephenson

This issue’s cover is by Hafitha Issa, a 26-year-old graduate of the Journalism and Communication program from

WEB:

Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Hafitha is cur-

Adam Frick

rently working as a freelance news anchor at Foundation for

Curt Husting

Africa, a news agency in Kampala. She reports on different issues with a bias on business and politics. Hafitha also

Yojance Rabelo

attended Cameras for Girls in 2018, founded by Amina

Aaron Westgate

Mohamed. Amina’s goal is not only to teach girl’s how to use a camera but to also provide each student with their

PUBLISHING:

own camera so they can actually get paid as journalists.

Scott Kelby, Publisher

To learn more about Amina and Cameras for Girls, turn

Kalebra Kelby, Executive V.P.

to page 17.

ADVERTISING: Kleber Stephenson, Vice President of Business Development & Enterprise: kleber@kelbyone.com

HOW TO CONTACT KELBYONE:

of the publisher is strictly prohibited. Photoshop User is an independent journal, not affiliated in any way with Adobe Systems, Inc. Adobe, the Adobe logo, Acrobat, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, and Photoshop are registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks mentioned

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belong to their respective owners. Some of the views expressed by

Voice: 813-433-5000

ISSN 2470-7031 (online)

Fax: 813-433-5015

contributors may not be the representative views of the publisher.

Customer Service: info@kelbyone.com Letters to the Editor: letters@photoshopuser.com

COLOPHON:

Photoshop User Magazine is produced using Adobe Photoshop CC 2022 and Adobe InDesign CC 2022. Korolev, Factoria, and Priori Sans are used for headlines and subheads. Acumin Pro and Korolev are used for body copy.

An official publication of KelbyOne This seal indicates that all content provided herein is produced by KelbyOne, LLC and follows the most stringent standards for educational resources. KelbyOne is the premier source for instructional books, online classes, and live seminars for creative professionals.

APRIL 2022

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VOL 25

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NO 4

COREY BARKER

BRYAN O’NEIL HUGHES

COLIN SMITH

is a digital artist and Photoshop instructor. He is the author of Photoshop Down & Dirty Tricks for Designers Vol 1 and 2, as well as numerous courses here at KelbyOne. He has also been a featured instructor at live events such as Photoshop World and Adobe MAX.

is Director of Product Management & Partner Outreach at Adobe, overseeing a portfolio of Creative Cloud applications and services. He’s one of Adobe’s primary spokespeople, representing them across creative segments and platforms.

is an award-winning digital artist, photographer, and lecturer who has authored 20 books and a library of training videos. He’s the founder of the online resource PhotoshopCAFE.com, president of Software-Cinema .com, and runs a popular YouTube channel.

VICTORIA BAMPTON

SEAN McCORMACK

runs the popular Lightroom Queen website and forums. She is an Adobe Community Professional based in England, and the author of the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic: The Missing FAQ and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: Edit Like a Pro series of books.

is a commercial photographer based in Galway, Ireland. His work covers everything from fashion and portraiture to products and interiors. He fell into writing from his love of Lightroom, and appreciates the opportunity to pass on his knowledge. He also loves playing with plug-ins.

LESA SNIDER

PETER BAUER

KIRK NELSON

ROB SYLVAN

is an award-winning photographer and author, and does photo and video verification for a limited clientele. His latest book is Photoshop CC for Dummies. He was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame in 2010 and received the Pioneer of Photoshop Award in 2005.

is a professional graphic designer and photographer in the D.C. area. With 25 years of experience, he refers to himself as “Your Friendly Neighborhood Graphics Geek.” You can find more of Kirk’s tutorials and Photoshop resources at The Pixel Pro.

is a photographer, educator, and aspiring beekeeper. He’s the author of many Lightroom and photography books, eBooks, and videos, including Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic for Dummies. Rob can often be found in the KelbyOne Community helping members with PS and LR.

DAVE CLAYTON

IBARIONEX PERELLO

SCOTT VALENTINE

is the author of Adobe Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC for Photographers: Classroom in a Book (2016), Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, TheSkinnyBooks, and more than 40 video courses. She’s also the technical author and eLearning specialist for TAITTowers.

is a UK-based graphic designer with over 30 years experience; author of How Do I Do That In InDesign; host of the successful He Shoots, He Draws podcast; and a KelbyOne, Photoshop World, and Adobe MAX instructor.

is an LA-based photographer, writer, and educator with over 30 years of experience. He’s the host of The Candid Frame podcast, and has written many magazine articles and books, including Making Photographs: Developing a Personal Visual Workflow.

blends his education in physics with his love for art, bringing a unique voice to teaching through experimentation. His Hidden Power books (Adobe Press) are used in colleges across the US. He wants you to never let your tools get in the way of your art.

SEÁN DUGGAN

SERGE RAMELLI

DAVE WILLIAMS

is a fine-art photographer, author of several books on Photoshop and digital imaging, and creates educational content for companies such as Adobe and LinkedIn Learning, where he has over 20 courses on photography, Photoshop, and mobile image making.

is a landscape and urban photographer based in the US and Paris. His work has been shown in more than 90 galleries worldwide, and he has 7 fine-art books. Serge teaches photography, Photoshop, and Lightroom to students all around the world.

is a well-seasoned, UK-based travel photographer, educator, and blogger with internationally published work and a passion for sharing his knowledge of Adobe software. Dave lives by the mantra, “Lend me your eyes and I’ll show you what I see.”

MARTIN EVENING

RICK SAMMON

TERRY WHITE

is a photographer with a background in commercial studio photography. He’s also an experienced technical reviewer, who has over the last two decades authored 25 books on Photoshop and Lightroom. He was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame in 2008.

is a Canon Explorer of Light and a longtime friend of KelbyOne. He has written dozens of articles for us and has more than 30 classes (including two on bird photography and one on safari photography) for KelbyOne. Visit with Rick at ricksammon.com.

is a Worldwide Creative Cloud Design Evangelist for Adobe Systems, Inc., an Adobe Certified Expert, author of Secrets of Adobe Bridge, co-author of InDesign CS/CS2 Killer Tips, runs Terry White’s Tech Blog, and presents at conferences around the world.

REMOVE & IMPROVE: CLEAN UP YOUR IMAGE QUALITY Mark Heaps Mark Heaps is an Adobe Community Professional, instructor, author, photographer, and Executive Creative Director. He’s been a featured speaker at Adobe MAX, SXSW, and many other events. His clients include Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Dell, and many others.

KelbyOne

BENEFIT SPOTLIGHT

ARE YOU GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR KELBYONE PRO MEMBERSHIP?

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You can also get Photoshop, Lightroom, and

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monthly along with access to more than 150

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member so you can take advantage of them all!

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library (800+ courses), including a new course

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COMMUNITY Member Challenge 49 | Winner

Light and color are two of the most essential elements of any photograph so, for this challenge, we asked KelbyOne members to show us unique and creative ways to incorporate both. We revealed the winner, runner up, and top finalist photos on the Insider on March 24. Sherry Brooks blew us away with this starry night display. Congratulations, Sherry! Your incredible talents and abilities are truly dazzling, making you the winner of the Light and Color Challenge.

CHRIS MAIN | ASHLEY FOSSE | DAVE CL AY TON

all the amazing entries for this challenge, head on over to the Community. Congratulations again to our finalists, runner up, and our winner, Sherry Brooks! We had a ton of images from which to choose, and we wished they could all be winners. Be sure to look back at all our past Member Challenges for more examples of community awesomeness!

Member Challenge 50 | Outdoor Scenes

Sherry Brooks

Whether it’s a warm ocean breeze, crisp air in the mountains, or the sound of birds in your backyard trees, there’s something for everyone to love about the outdoors. For this challenge, we want you to scout out your favorite natural wonders, city skylines, local parks, or beach fronts, and capture their essence in a photo. Take your time and compose a stunning image that tells the story of your favorite outdoor scene. Here’s how the Member Challenge works: • E ntrant must be a KelbyOne Pro member to submit their work into the contest.

Patrick Seiler

• Work must be original to the entrant. • Only one image can be submitted per entrant. • W ork must be created within the challenge dates (March 25, 2022–May 15, 2022). • I mages must be submitted by May 15, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. EST. • T he winner of this Member Challenge will be announced by May 26, 2022, on the Insider. The winner will receive a Member Challenge feature and bragging rights! • A fter you’ve created your image, head on over to Member Challenge 50 | Outdoor Scenes on the Community and submit your work in a comment. Details, rules, terms and conditions, and prize information can be found there as well.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and create and submit an amazing image for your chance to win a feature, bragging rights, and exposure on our social channels.

Another incredibly composed night photo was submitted by Patrick Seiler. The glow on the snow and the lighting on the trees—wowza! We selected this image above as the runner up. Rounding out this challenge, we also featured three finalists: Paul Shilling, Cathy Allen-Shinn, and Tahir Rafique. They also had some stunning displays of light and color to share. To take in those explosions of light, click here to visit the Insider. If you’d like to look through

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Artist Spotlight

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Elise Theriault / member since 2017 / rimrockshadows.com

KELBYONE COMMUNITY

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY

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Artist Spotlight

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Bruce Weinberg / member since 2019 / bruce-weinberg.com

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Artist Spotlight

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David Enzel / member since 2020 / enzelphoto.net

KELBYONE COMMUNITY

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY

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Who’s Who in the KelbyOne Community

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Hafitha Issa / Cameras for Girls / member since 2018 / camerasforgirls.org

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY

WHO’S WHO IN THE KELBYONE COMMUNITY AMINA MOHAMED

Amina Mohamed is a Canadian-based photographer who started the Cameras for Girls program in Uganda in 2018. The program not only provides cameras to each student, but Amina also provides hands-on training, as well as partnering with companies such as KelbyOne to help with their continued education. The photo on the cover of this issue is by one of her students, Hafitha Issa. We interviewed Amina to learn more about her and the Cameras for Girls program.

Yes, we came to Canada from Uganda in 1972 as refugees, and I was raised in a strict Muslim household, so the arts were not encouraged. However, my dad gave me a camera at the age of 10, and my love for the medium started, but I never thought I could make it a career. After graduating from college and taking fashion design, I found myself working in the Toronto film and TV industry, and from there, my love and passion for photography grew. In 2006, I moved from producing short films into documentaries, and I pitched a documentary about the Indians coming back to Uganda to reclaim their lost properties. It would be my first time back to Uganda in 2007 but certainly not the last, as I realized that Uganda was now where I belonged—at least in my heart!

will go into a marginalized community and teach photography to kids or adults; in my research, very few offer skills-based training that moves the needle forward for these communities, other than learning a new skill. However, without having a camera, they cannot keep learning. But it gives these organizations amazing stories to tell on social media. I did not want that to be me. So we set out to build a fully immersive program and provide a camera for each girl to keep so they could get meaningful employment, climb out of poverty, and support themselves and their families. Over the three days together, the students learn how to operate the dials and functions of the camera. Sadly, even in the university program with 600 students, there are only 100 cameras to be shared, which means they hardly get enough practice to prepare for a job. They learn the exposure triangle, composition, how to tell stories photographically speaking and more. We also do daily photo walks in the slums, where we work with daily reviews to see how they’re improving day after day, which boosts their confidence.

After you reconnected with Uganda, why did you decide to start the Cameras for Girls program and what is the goal of the program? What skills do the girls learn in the program?

What challenges have you encountered making Camera for Girls a reality?

Society plays a huge role in how females fare in the developing world, and the churches preach that females should be home, having babies and/or taking care of the younger children in the house. Still, they never mention that females should be educated. When I went back to Uganda, I saw immense poverty, a difference in the wealth of the Indians and the Africans (which led to the expulsion of the Indians in 1972), and a difference in how males and females were treated. Males had opportunities whereas females did not. It was also clear to me that I had grown up in Canada with so many options, and sadly they did not have any, or very few, of the same opportunities, and I wanted to even the playing field in my way. The goal of Cameras for Girls is job creation. There are many unique programs out there where an organization

When I first came up with the idea, I hoped to go into the northern part of Uganda, where Joseph Kony had ruled the area, turning children into child soldiers. I wanted to provide an outlet for girls seeking to recover from this tragedy. However, when I started to do my research and speak to the schools and NGOs on the ground, I was told it would not be feasible, for a few reasons. For one, there was hardly any electricity, and they lacked Internet access. Girls attended school infrequently because their parents didn’t believe in providing their daughters’ education, or lacked the fees. If a girl got her menses, she wouldn’t come to school because she lacked the necessary resources. If I were to provide a camera, it would be sold for food. My friend Venex in Uganda, an environmental journalist at the time, suggested I teach photography to girls who

KELBYONE .COM

First, we’d like to learn a little about your background. You and your family were exiled from Uganda when you were three years old and you moved to Canada. How did your career evolve as a photographer, and how did that lead you back to Uganda?

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY

WHO’S WHO IN THE KELBYONE COMMUNITY AMINA MOHAMED

were endeavoring to become journalists. To get a job in journalism, they were required to have a camera and know how to use it. We fill that gap with the camera and the training. Up until we received charity status last year, it was challenging to build viable partnerships in Uganda, but after that happened, we were able to sign contracts with Makerere University and Uganda Christian University to recruit students directly instead of doing our recruitment campaign, which as you can imagine was challenging by itself being in Canada.

Are there other photographers or educators involved in the program? In Uganda, I have partnered with Kenny Mulinde, a filmmaker with Youth Arts Movement, and Daniel Moxie, a photographer who has been volunteering for us from day one. Kenny provides a one-week filmmaking camp for interested students, and we pay for that opportunity so they can get exposure to videography and photography. In South Africa, I partnered with Khwela Womxn, who helped us with the logistics to operate the photo walk for 10 students, while I did the online training. As we grow this program outside Uganda, I’ll be recruiting other photographers who wish to help us with the training, as I cannot be everywhere, but the program can. We hope that some of our graduating students will become trainers and mentors to those who follow.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

How did you overcome the challenges of COVID to keep Cameras for Girls going? When will you be able to return to teaching the girls in person?

When COVID hit, we were a week away from booking our tickets for the third in-person training. When that came to a halt, I went to work building a platform with 40 videos, ranging from beginner to advanced skills. We didn’t want to lose momentum, so this allowed the girls who were already enrolled and also future students to learn at their convenience, keeping in mind the time difference and, in some cases, the challenge to get online. The platform houses photography videos from basic to advanced skills, interviews that I’ve conducted with journalists and photojournalists worldwide, and PDF documents that are downloadable for quick-and-handy guides on everything from camera basics to lighting. It also houses business skills training, such as building a resume, cover letter, and Linkedin profile;

business plan samples; contracts; etc., for those who wish to start their own business. The idea is to provide a comprehensive training platform where none exists for them through school or work experience. We are so thrilled to finally be returning to Uganda in June of this year to resume the third in-person training and are well on our way in our recruitment.

How many students has the program trained since its inception, and how has it impacted their lives? We have taught 32 girls in Uganda and 10 girls online in South Africa. In addition to the three-day, in-person workshop held in the country (or online in the case of South Africa), I also do a full year-long curriculum that encompasses the already mentioned portal. We follow that with biweekly zoom meetings to review their photos and talk about their challenges and monthly assignments. Half of our students in Uganda now have full-time work and, had it not been for COVID, I’m positive our numbers would be higher. We continue to work with those who need it to help them improve their cover letters, resumes, and Linkedin profiles to obtain work.

Can you tell us more about the biweekly photo reviews, and what your students learn through that process? The idea is for my students to send their photos for review on a biweekly or monthly process. Sadly, after January 2021, the Internet in Uganda was sequestered due to political upheaval in the country so they send photos when they can. Both groups of girls in Uganda have graduated, and thus they’re not required to send me photos for review, but I highly encourage them to keep learning to improve their work opportunities. The girls in South Africa are frequently sending photos for consideration. I do a recorded review for them that they can watch at their leisure over and over. I comment on exposure, compensation, etc. and provide feedback on the photos related to the assignment given. I did this training in November last year, and two of the girls have already landed full-time jobs with an agency.

KelbyOne has partnered with Cameras for Girls to help with their photography education beyond the hands-on training that you provide. How has KelbyOne helped your students in their continued education? A considerable part of our training is learning how to take photos, correctly caption the images (for a journalism

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Who’s Who in the KelbyOne Community

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY

Elizabeth Nabacwa / Cameras for Girls / member since 2018 / camerasforgirls.org

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY

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Who’s Who in the KelbyOne Community

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Patricia Oyella / Cameras for Girls / member since 2018 / camerasforgirls.org

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY

WHO’S WHO IN THE KELBYONE COMMUNITY AMINA MOHAMED

You started Triple F Photo Tours to help fund Cameras for Girls. Can you tell us about your tour company and how it helps Cameras for Girls? Yes, I also run a photo tourism company called Triple F Photo Tours. We offer non-touristy photo tours to various destinations. We help our travelers improve their photography on every excursion. We also do a lot of culturally immersive activities, as it’s my firm belief that, when you travel, you should get to know the people and the country. It’s the best way to break down borders and stereotypes of people outside our home countries. When our guests travel with us to Uganda, they also get to sit in on the three-day workshop we do with Cameras for Girls. They get to see the impact of their travel dollars at work while meeting these young women and getting a view of their world and the hardships they suffer. For all the other tours we offer, 10% of revenues go toward Cameras for Girls. As we grow the company and expand our offerings, we’ll bring a separate source of funds to Cameras for Girls aside from the regular fundraising activities we do.

Besides your Triple F Photo Tours, how else do you raise money for the program and acquire cameras for your students? When I started the initiative, I started a GoFundMe campaign, which helped us raise funds to purchase cameras for our second training. For our first training,

I put out a call on Facebook, and people sent me small point-and-shoots, which was fine because I had no idea if this was going to be successful or not. Then last March, we received media exposure through the Toronto Star and CTV National News, and we were sent all types of cameras from across the country, and donations toward our GoFundMe campaign, which has helped me get ready for this year’s training. Now that we’re a charity, we fundraise via our donor database, running year-end campaigns, Giving Tuesday campaigns, and our upcoming Change Your Lens, Change Her Story Campaign, which will run the month of April. We hope to raise $10,000 to do a live, three-day workshop in South Africa later this year.

You’ve mentioned charity status a couple of times now, which Cameras for Girls received back in September of 2021. What other benefits does charity status provide? Charity status means that we can now offer tax receipts, where we couldn’t before. It also gives our charity legitimacy, as I now have a board that I’m accountable to, and allows us to seek previously unavailable funds because we lacked charity status.

How can people continue to follow your story, or even better, how can they become involved by donating cameras, money, or their time? We’re so grateful to our supporters who have helped us grow our brand and reach. For monetary donations in Canada, we use CanadaHelps.org; for US donations we use PayPal.com. As for camera donations, we’ll take any camera—used or new, film, digital, etc. We’re lucky because we have a local store that helps us sell what we can’t use, and purchase what we use for our training: the Canon G1 X. We chose this camera because it’s robust for training in photography and video and small enough to keep on your person without being stolen. Please reach out to me at amina@camerasforgirls.org if you’d like to donate. You can follow us on CamerasForGirls.com, Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin. And finally, for anyone interested in teaching, please reach out to me at amina@camerasforgirls.org and we can chat further. n

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setting), and edit them so they’re ready to be printed along with the articles they pitch to their editors. When I started this, I reached out to KelbyOne, as I had been learning and improving my own photography skills on the KelbyOne platform years before I started this initiative, and I could see how the training might benefit or supersede the work we were providing. I reached out to Jean Kendra on your team and explained what we were trying to accomplish, and she jumped in wholeheartedly. She offered two licenses so the girls could learn how to edit. We have two computers in Uganda, one on each end of the city, that the girls can access twice per month. The KelbyOne licenses help them improve their skills and, for those who are interested, expand their learning beyond what we provide.

Here Are Your Latest Online Courses

Lighting for Beverage & Splash Photography Join Aaron Van for a complete behind-the-scenes look at everything you need to know to create pro-level photos of beverages. To begin, Aaron takes you through the tools, props, glassware, and light-shaping tools he uses every day. From there you’ll join Aaron in the studio for a series of shoots where changing up the lighting allows for a variety of creative looks that help tell a story. Through each lesson, Aaron shares tips and techniques for elevating your beverage photography higher and higher.

Photographing Winter Landscapes Join Ian Plant on location in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as he shares his favorite tips and techniques for creating dynamic winter landscape compositions that draw the viewer deeper into your photographs. Along the way, Ian teaches you how to keep your gear and yourself safe and warm while shooting, how to find the best subjects and light, and then puts it all into practice through a series of on-location shoots in lakeside ice caves.

Every week, we publish at least one new training course. Check out these brand-new courses below:

Getting Super Organized in Lightroom Cloud If you’re using the cloud-based Lightroom (or considering it in the future), then this is the class for you! Scott has adapted his SLIM organizational system from Lightroom Classic to work with the newer cloud-based Lightroom with the same focus on keeping it simple. There are five key steps to this process, and Scott breaks down each one, teaching you the tools you need to know and providing a common-sense framework that you can adapt to the subjects you photograph.

Shooting and Compositing Your Own Special Effects Join Kirk Nelson for a truly fun and practical class on shooting and composting special effects that you can create in your own home or backyard. With lessons on capturing water splashes, smoke, steam, and fireballs using props, materials, and equipment you may already have or can acquire at a local store, you’ll be ready to get started right away. After walking through how to create and capture the effects, Kirk takes you through his postprocessing workflow and demonstrates how to composite these effects into photographs.

MARTIN EVENING

DEVELOPING THE SHOT

ALL SOULS CHURCH: ISOLATING A BUILDING All Souls Church is a prominent building at the top of London’s Regent Street, which is part of architect John Nash’s coordinated Regency design that connects The Mall (leading to Buckingham Palace) with The Regent’s Park. The church today is a well-known landmark building, mainly because it’s in front of the BBC headquarters, otherwise known as Broadcasting House. ALL IMAGES BY MARTIN EVENING

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Before

The best way to create the cutout is to do what I did here and use the Pen tool in Photoshop to define the outline of the building. Using this method, I was able to add a black Solid Fill layer, converting the Pen path to a vector mask. Now, if all the above sounds very complex, bear with me as I do explain at the end of this article how there’s also now an easier way to cut out buildings. (KelbyOne members can click here to download a smaller DNG version of this image for practice purposes only.)

THE STEPS STEP ONE: The first step is to edit the Basic panel settings to lighten the image and bring out a little more detail in the shadows. I did this by increasing the Exposure as well as lightening the Shadows. I also boosted the Clarity and Vibrance.

STEP TWO: Next, go to the Detail panel, and increase the Sharpening Amount to 55 and set the Radius to 0.9, which is a more suitable setting for this architectural subject. Because the photo had been shot at a low ISO setting, I was also able to increase the Detail amount. In the Noise Reduction section below, set the Luminance slider to 15 to help reduce the noise in the lightened shadow areas.

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I took this photograph using a Sony RX100 camera that I’ve owned for a number of years now. When I first bought the camera, I thought it was a great alternative to carrying around my much bigger digital SLR cameras. These days, it mostly collects dust in my equipment cupboard, as I’m more inclined to use my iPhone for taking snapshot photos, especially when I can now capture good-quality RAW DNG photos using the Lightroom for mobile app camera. The finished image shown here is an interesting exercise in how to create a cutout to isolate a building from its surroundings and place it against a black background. This is a technique I’ve seen other photographers use successfully with urban architectural subjects; however, I’d describe the result as being more like an architectural illustration than a photograph. It’s a technique you could apply to almost any notable city location. The tricky bit is to remove people from the scene and create the perfect cutout. With a handheld shot like this, the only option was for me to use the Spot Healing Brush in Photoshop to remove the people. On the other hand, if you can mount your camera on a tripod, you can always take multiple exposures and use these to apply a multi-layered smart object Stack Mode processing technique to remove the people automatically (I showed how to do this in the February 2021 issue of Photoshop User).

DEVELOPING THE SHOT

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HOW TO

STEP THREE: With the camera tilted upward from street level, this caused some convergence of the verticals. To correct for this, manually adjust the Vertical slider in the Transform panel to straighten the verticals a little more.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

STEP FOUR: The previous Transform panel adjustment also affected the shape of the image, which now requires cropping. Select the Crop Overlay tool (R) and drag the corner handles to apply a tighter crop. Then, click to select the Straighten tool (it looks like a level) in the Crop Overlay panel and drag from the top of the spire downward, following the angle of the spire, to apply an Angle adjustment to level the church within the frame. Press Enter to commit the crop.

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DEVELOPING THE SHOT

STEP SIX: With the people removed, open the Paths panel (Window> Paths), and select the Pen tool (P). Up in the Options Bar, set the Tool Mode to Path, click on the Path Operations icon (two overlapping squares), and select the Subtract Front Shape mode. Start by drawing an outline of the outer part of the church building. Continue drawing the path completely around the sky area, and then click on the starting point to close the path. This creates an outline of the area that we want to hide. [For tips on using the Pen tool, check out the December 2018 issue of Photoshop User.—Ed.] Complete the outline by choosing the Combine Shapes mode in the Path Operations menu and then drawing to define the remaining areas that need to be hidden, such as the gaps between the pillars. Again, be sure to click the starting point of each path to close it. Double-click the Work Path’s name in the Paths panel, and click OK in the Save Path dialog to save the path.

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STEP FIVE: We’re now ready to carry out the main Photoshop retouching work. To do this, select Photo > Edit In >Edit in Adobe Photoshop. This step creates a rasterized version of the original RAW image opened in Photoshop with all the Lightroom settings applied so far. Add a new empty layer above the Background layer, select the Spot Healing Brush tool (J), ensure Sample All Layers is enabled in the tool Options Bar, and paint carefully to remove the people from the bottom of the photo. You can use the Bracket keys ( [ ] ) on your keyboard, as needed, to change the size of the brush.

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HOW TO

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

STEP SEVEN: Once you’ve completed drawing the outline, make sure the path is active in the Paths panel, then click the Create New Fill or Adjustment Layer icon (half-black, halfwhite circle) at the bottom of the Layers panel, and select Solid Color. This will open the Color Picker dialog, where you can select black as the fill color. This will add a black background to the photo masked by the selected path. If you need to edit the path, you can do so by using the Pen tool or one of the Pen modifier tools nested with it in the Toolbar. You can also use the Direct Selection tool nested with the Path Selection tool (A) in the Toolbar.

STEP EIGHT: Press Command-S (PC: Ctrl-S) to save the edited, layered Photoshop image, which will automatically add the photo to the Lightroom catalog, alongside the RAW original in the same Lightroom folder location. In the Lightroom Develop module, click on the Black &White button at the top right of the Basic panel to convert the photo to black and white. Upon seeing the image in its near-completion state, I made a fine-tuning adjustment to the Highlights slider and also added a little more Clarity to add definition to the building.

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DEVELOPING THE SHOT

STEP NINE: Go to the B&W panel and adjust the individual sliders to fine-tune the appearance of the church in black and white. Mainly, drag the Red and Yellow sliders to the left to darken the stone work and add more depth to the image contrast.

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STEP 10: Finally, go to the Color Grading panel, and edit the Shadows and Highlights to add a sepia coloring effect to the photograph, as shown here. Set the Blending slider all the way to the right to 100 and the Balance slider to +3.

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HOW TO

TWO WAYS TO ISOLATE A BUILDING

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

To achieve a precise cutout like the one I showed here with the All Souls Church image, I suggest drawing a Pen path. For architectural subjects, this is the most precise way to define your subject. But I know not everyone will have the skills and experience to work with the Pen tool in Photoshop, or have the patience required to draw complex outlines. Well, this might be a good opportunity to learn! There are plenty of tutorials out there that will teach you how to work with Pen paths. Why not try this method on the supplied demo image, or even on one of your own shots? The main thing to remember is that the Pen tool Options Bar must be set to Path

mode (not Shape or Pixels). Next, you need to understand the Path Operations options. In Combine Shapes mode, the path you draw defines the subject you wish to select; however, with the All Souls Church image, I wanted to define the outline of the church so that I could edit the background (filling with black). Therefore, in this instance, I mainly used the Subtract Front Shape option. It’s also important to convert the default Work Path to a saved path as soon as possible. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to select another tool, return to working with the Pen tool, and accidentally delete the current Work Path. Now, I promised in the opening section I’d show you an easier method for creating this type of effect. Working with a RAW original in Lightroom or Camera Raw, you can now click on the Masking icon (sandwiched between the Histogram

DEVELOPING THE SHOT

and Basic panels) to reveal the new masking options. To isolate the clock tower in the image shown here, I chose Select Subject from the Masking menu options. I then clicked on Mask 1 in the Masks panel to reveal the Subject 1 mask icon, which I Right-clicked and then selected Invert to invert the selection. I could then simply darken the Exposure and apply a negative Blacks adjustment to darken the sky to black. The success of this technique will depend on the accuracy of the Select Subject mask. I find the Select Subject masking generally does a pretty good job; but nearly always you’ll have to make some minor edits to the mask if you want to achieve a perfect outline. For example, you can click on the Add or Subtract buttons and select, say, the Brush tool to fine-tune a mask outline. n

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SERGE RAMELLI

LIGHTROOM LABORATORY

FIVE COMPOSITION TRICKS Composition is key when it comes to photography. If you’re at the right place at the right time but don’t know how to compose your shot, you might miss a chance to create a beautiful piece of art. ALL IMAGES BY SERGE RAMELLI

Rule of Thirds

So what is composition? It’s the arrangement of elements

Guide Overlay. You can also tap the letter O to cycle

within a work of art to convey a message. With that in

through all the various crop overlays.

mind, let’s get to the first type of composition.

In this example above, the sky is more interesting so I wanted to have the top 2/3 of the image filled with the

1. THE RULE OF THIRDS

sky and the lower third with the land, with the horizon

The concept behind the rule of thirds is that if you were

close to the second horizontal line.

to draw two lines horizontally and two lines vertically over your photo to create a grid of nine equal squares,

2. LEADING LINES

it will form four key points where the lines intersect.

To add depth to your photos, you can use natural leading

The idea is that you want to position your subject near

lines to guide the eyes of the viewer into your photo.

one of those points. You often see this in movies, where

This can be very effective when you can find a line that

characters on the screen are more to the right or to the

starts from the point of view of the viewer and heads

left of the shot. Placing key elements near these points

straight into the photo, like in the image shown at the

will make a photo more dynamic.

top of the next page. The other lines converge in the

When capturing an image, these lines can be viewed

distance, leading viewers’ eyes to the yellow building.

in your camera, or you can mentally visualize them. In

postproduction, you can use it as an overlay on your

3. FRAME IN THE FRAME

image when using the Crop Overlay tool (R) to help make

Using natural elements in a scene to create a frame around

a photo more pleasing to the eyes. In Lightroom Classic,

your main subject will focus the viewer’s attention (see

you can find the Thirds overlay option under Tools>Crop

bottom of next page). This is a cool trick to make your

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L I G H T R O O M L A B O R AT O R Y

Frame in the Frame

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Leading Lines

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HOW TO

subject really stand out. It’s fun to play with this concept

the reality was that there were 50 photographers behind

in nature, and it can really embellish your main subject.

me taking photos. So if I wanted to show photographers taking a photo, I’d have included them, but instead,

4. F OREGROUND, MIDDLE GROUND, AND BACKGROUND

I simply got closer and zoomed in on the key elements and the beauty of the moment. That’s very important!

This is definitely the hardest compositional trick. The idea is to have a foreground element that contributes to your

So there you have it, the five key elements of composition.

message, gives it a sense of where the photo was taken,

You can practice each of them and work at improving the

and adds depth to your photo. It’s easy to take a pretty photo of the beach or a city view, but if you have a great foreground element, it will take your photo to the next level. Make sure that you find a nice, aesthetic element, not something distracting or that’s a high-frequency texture like dirt or messy grass. It has to be an element

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

that’s related to your subject and adds that extra value

to your message.

5. A STRONG STORY Last, but not least is telling a strong story. All of those tricks are useless if your message is confusing. The idea is to communicate simple things: include elements that will contribute to your message and exclude elements that are just distracting. The photo at the bottom right simply

composition in your images using these tricks. You’ll see

communicates a beautiful sunset on a beach in Iceland, but

it really is more fun than work. Enjoy! n

ROB SYLVAN

UNDER THE LOUPE

PRINTING WITH LIGHTROOM? Historically when it comes to printing, Lightroom Classic or Photoshop are the go-to apps for most Adobe customers, but what about folks who subscribe to the Lightroom (only) plan that doesn’t include those options? In this article, we’ll explore the routes that are available for creating prints of all kinds (local printer and online) when the cloud-based Lightroom app is the home base for your photo library. ALL IMAGES BY ROB SYLVAN

It has long been a criticism of the Lightroom app that it doesn’t have a print function (let alone a dedicated Print module like Lightroom Classic) and, while that’s technically true, it doesn’t mean photos managed by Lightroom can’t 38

be printed somehow. I’m not in any way advocating that printing through Lightroom is superior to printing from Lightroom Classic or Photoshop; I’m simply discussing the possibilities.

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UNDER THE LOUPE

KELBYONE .COM

BASIC PRE-PRINTING WORKFLOW Just as in Lightroom Classic, there are a few considerations to make before you reach the stage of sending copies to be printed. The key difference is that in the absence of a dedicated Print module, we have to rely on some other app or online service to complete the printing process; but that doesn’t come until we have the photo looking the way we want and cropped to the desired aspect ratio for the print, and those are things we can do in Lightroom. Last issue, I compared the editing capabilities of Lightroom Classic and Lightroom, so I won’t cover the process of editing to make a photo look great, but I do want to talk about cropping. In Lightroom Classic, we may not pay as much attention to cropping the photo first, because we can use the Zoom to Fill function in the Print module to make a photo fit within the dimensions of a photo cell we define in a print layout, which effectively crops the photo to the aspect ratio of the print. In Lightroom, it’s probably in your best interest to crop the photo to a desired aspect ratio before exporting it for either online printing or passing along to another local app for printing at home. In Lightroom, the shortcut to the Crop tool is the letter C (which makes much more sense than R in Lightroom Classic), or click the Crop & Rotate icon along the right edge of the interface. Once you enter the Crop tool, you can select a preset aspect ratio from the Aspect Ratio drop-down menu, or choose Enter Custom if none of the presets meet your needs. Remember, the aspect ratio defines the relationship between the long side and the short side, so those numbers aren’t necessarily a size in inches. For example, let’s say your goal is to create a print that’s 8x10". If you look at the list of preset aspect ratios you won’t see one named 10x8 (or 8x10 for that matter). So, you might think you need to select Enter Custom, and when you do, you’re presented with the Enter Custom Aspect Ratio dialog where you enter the values 8 and 10, and click OK.

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HOW TO

After clicking OK, you’ll find the crop rectangle changes accordingly, but if you look at the Aspect Ratio drop-down menu, you’ll find it says 4x5 because that’s the same aspect ratio as 10x8, just expressed differently. Now there’s nothing wrong with entering in values that match the size print you want to make, as that will result in the correct aspect ratio being defined for cropping purposes, but don’t panic if you enter 12x18 and see the Aspect Ratio display as 2x3. Print size is a function of how many pixels exist in the photo and the print resolution applied on export. Once the photo looks the way you want it to look, and you’ve cropped it to the desired aspect ratio, you’re ready to move on to making the print. Let’s first look at how that can be done using a local printer at home, and then how you can use Lightroom to send that photo off to an online print service.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

PRINTING TO A LOCAL PHOTO PRINTER

For a person subscribing to the Lightroom plan, they’re able to install the Lightroom app on all of their devices, which could be any combination of Windows and Mac computers, iOS and Android mobile devices, or even a Chromebook. As there isn’t a function within any of the Lightroom apps to print directly to a locally connected photo printer, we have to rely on some other software to take the photo from Lightroom to the printer. When you consider the variety of operating systems at play and the variety of inkjet and dye-based printers on the market, there are too many possible configurations for me to cover all of them. These days, however, it’s very likely that

the manufacturer of your photo printer provides software for creating and sending print layouts to your printer. I know Epson and Canon do this. Heck, even Brother does it for my cheap office printer. Consult your printer manual or the manufacturer’s website to see what’s possible. I’m printing to a Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 these days, but years ago I used Epson’s software to print to my ancient Epson Stylus Pro 3800. As far as the Lightroom side of the equation goes, the process is the same no matter what software you’re using to send the photo to the printer. Previously, we cropped to our desired aspect ratio, so now we’re ready to export to a location of our choosing (wherever it makes sense in your workflow) and set the photo to the desired print size, resolution, color space, and even decide about output sharpening. Click the Share icon in the upper-right corner and choose Custom Settings. Here’s where you tell Lightroom what size print you want to make and, as long as you cropped it to the correct aspect ratio, it will be sized accordingly.

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With the Settings panel open, choose your file type first. I suggest JPG to keep it simple, though your chosen printing software may also support TIFF. Likewise, for simplicity sake, expand the More Options section, and set the color space to sRGB down at the bottom. For Dimensions, choose Custom, and then choose Long Side and enter the desired

print size value for the longest side of the print. In my case 10 inches. Lightroom will automatically size the short side to the correct proportion, which is why it was so important to crop to the correct aspect ratio first. By choosing inches (or centimeters if you live in a metric part of the world), you’ll get the option for setting the desired resolution as well. The safest value to enter is 300 ppi for most prints but, if you prefer a different value for your prints, by all means use that number. If you choose JPG as file type you can choose the Quality level (amount of JPEG compression applied to the exported copy), and I suggest a high value like 90%. The final decision that will impact your print is whether to apply Output Sharpening or not. This is the same output sharpening found in Lightroom Classic’s Print module and Export dialog. You can choose either Glossy Paper, Matte Paper, Screen, or None. I’m printing to a glossy paper, so I choose accordingly, and then set the amount to Standard (as opposed to Low or High). Once configured, click the Export button to send the copy to your chosen location. From there, just open the image in your printer manufacturer’s software to handle passing the photo on to your printer. My experience with the Canon software for my printer has been very positive, and I’ve gotten great results when sending the photo from the app on my Mac or on my phone.

PRINTING TO AN ONLINE LAB If you don’t own a photo printer or if you want to choose from a wider array of media types than you

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An important caveat: I’m working under the assumption that your source photo has enough pixels in it to create the print at your desired print size and resolution. There are a number of online calculators you can find, but here’s one to get you started. In the calculator, I entered my desired print size (8 x10 in) and resolution (300 ppi), and it showed me that the required pixel dimensions are 2,400 x 3,000 pixels. The source photo in question is 5,504 x 8,256 pixels, so even with my crop to the new aspect ratio, I know I have more than enough pixels to print this photo at the desired size and resolution. It’s true that this is easier to figure out in Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, but with a free online calculator it isn’t that hard.

UNDER THE LOUPE

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

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HOW TO

might have at home (like printing on wood), then it’s possible to send photos to a few online print labs directly from within the Lightroom app for Mac/Windows (unhelpfully referred to as Lightroom for desktop by Adobe). As all of the photos imported into Lightroom are accessible at full resolution in the cloud, it facilitates the process of sending photos to print services that are connected to your Lightroom account. Here I have a photo that my wife loved of my son from a winter camping trip, so I thought it would be cool to print it on wood and give it to her as a gift. I can’t print to wood at home, but I knew that I could send photos directly to WHCC (White House Custom Colour) from Lightroom. Here’s how: First, crop your image to the correct aspect ratio. I wanted to make a 10x10" print, so I cropped the photo to a 1x1 aspect ratio. Then, press P to open the Photos panel on the left. This is where you’ll find Connections along with your albums and folders. Before setting up the connection, I suggest placing the photo(s) you want to send to the print service in an album of their own to make it easier to find them after the connection is made. Click the + sign next to Connections (or the Add Connection button within the panel if you haven’t made any connections yet) to see all of the possible connections from which you can choose. When it comes to printing, WHCC and Printique are the two options at the time of this writing. I’ve had good results from both services so far, but I hope more options appear

in the future. For this project, I clicked the Add Connection button next to WHCC and exited the dialog. While not required, I recommend visiting the website for the service you intend to use and creating an account there before creating the connection in Lightroom. I think it just speeds up the process. Once you exit the Connections dialog, you’ll see a screen for the service you selected and a Get Started button. Clicking that button walks you through the process of selecting a photo and then clicking the Share icon to access the chosen connection at the bottom of the Share options. In my case I selected WHCC.

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UNDER THE LOUPE

The process is pretty straight forward, and I like having a much wider range of materials to print onto as well as larger print sizes than my home printer can support. The final product took a few days to be printed from the time I ordered and a few more days to arrive, boxed up safely, at my door. The print now hangs by my wife’s workstation, and I was pleased with the process and the result. Printing from Lightroom may be different, but it’s definitely possible. n

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You’ll then be prompted to give the project a name, and after clicking Continue, you’ll be taken to a webpage to make choices about your project. This step may vary between print services and may even evolve over time. It was here that I made my print choices and adjusted the layout using the online tool.

SEAN MCCORMACK

MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

BORIS FX OPTICS 2022 An email from Boris FX letting you know that there’s a new version of Optics on the way is an exciting prospect. Last year’s debut showed that the combination of Boris FX Sapphire with the old Tiffen DX/DFX plug-in was a winner for fun and creativity with photographers. What could this visual effects power house do to top that? Well, how about adding even more of their Oscar-winning movie plug-in magic for still photographers to use? Oh yes! ALL IMAGES BY SEAN MCCORMACK

Boris FX seems intent on giving users the joy of even more play by adding Particle Illusion and Beauty Studio, both from their Continuum plug-in, to Optics. Particle Illusion makes use of emitters to create fire, smoke, fluids, and a host of other cool elements to add to your photo. While it may sound like a compositor’s dream, there are other new additions that would spark the interest 44

of commercial and portrait photographers. New filters such as Pin Warp or Emboss allow the building of more creative backgrounds, while Beauty Studio allows easy skin smoothing with auto-generated mattes. You can, of course, edit these mattes further with great masking tools like EZ Mask. And speaking of masks, you can now export the mask to Photoshop to reuse there for the rest of your edits.

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• Particle Illusion: This includes 1,700+ particle-based effects, many of which have timeline-based properties for even more internal looks. Smoke, Fire, Fluids are all available to manipulate. • UltraZap: Even more zappiness, as you can have even more lightning bolts from your source point. Taper control is included, as well as secondary bolts. • E mboss: These are new tools for creating different emboss types. Speaking of type, you can easily use these on text as well as for manipulating backgrounds. • U ltraGlow: You can now add a lot more glow to your photo. It’s also included in some of the effects directly for additional internal glow. • P in Warp: Using up to 20 pins, you can push and push at your photo to your heart’s content. Unlike Puppet Warp in Photoshop, pins can overlap. • B eauty Studio: This allows you to apply skin smoothing within the plug-in for a one-stop creative portrait shop. • E xport Masks: Get those EZ Masks into Photoshop to use on other parts of your edit. • Enhanced UI: Optics has a shiny coat of paint giving a more modern look with better text visibility. • M ore, More, More: There are more than 2,000 new presets, lens flares, film stocks, and Gobo/light patterns.

WHAT DOES BORIS FX OPTICS 2022 DO THAT LIGHTROOM OR PHOTOSHOP CAN’T? While it’s true that you can do skin work directly in both Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as the correction work, you don’t have the ease of access to instant filters, such as lens flares, particles, or light leaks. And that’s not even a scratch on the surface of Optics 2022. It goes well beyond the bounds of being an image finisher, but more of an image elevator. With Optics 2022, you can make something out of almost nothing. A lot of “Maximum Workflow” is about using tools to get things done faster. Optics 2022 is about making time for creative play. Many aspects of editing can be technically proficient, but tedious; not Optics. While you delve deep, you’re always having fun doing it.

NEW COAT OF PAINT The first look at Optics reveals a fresh coat of paint. It just looks so much better. The original Optics was using the Tiffen DFX UI, and while it’s not bad by any stretch, it was looking a tad jaded compared to more recently created plug-ins. The graphical enhancements help bring Optics in line with modern plug-ins. Text is clearer, and the split of the Presets and Parameters panels is a great change, allowing access to both at once.

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WHAT’S NEW? So what is new exactly? Let’s list the new features and then have a play.

MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

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HOW TO

Reset, Cancel, and Apply now have text buttons at the bottom right, rather than icons at the top left. The Add Mask icon has moved into the Layers stack, right by the layers themselves. The Generate Mask icon is now a cog, and all the icons in that row are much larger. Even the zoom-related icons were touched up, with Fit being far more obvious now. One thing we wish they’d do here is add the industry-standard Command-+/- (PC: Ctrl-+/-) shortcuts for zoom. You can also create Workspaces, which can be imported and exported. Simply choose what panels you want, then rearrange them and save the workspace using the New command. There are some included already: Default, Edit, and View.

STEP FIVE: When you want to edit the settings again, double-click on the program name below the name of the layer in the Layers panel.

LET’S PLAY! Enough of the jibber-jabber, let’s get into using Optics. There’s not enough space to look at everything, but we can look at some of the bigger features. Beauty Studio is one of the new additions, so we’ll begin there. It’s designed as an automatic skin smoother. Even if you’re a Lightroom user, we highly recommend using Optics 2022 via Photoshop to access smart objects. This allows you to edit the Optics settings at any point in the future, so let’s first take a quick look at the smart object workflow starting from Lightroom Classic.

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STEP ONE: From Lightroom Classic, use the Photo>Edit In>Edit In Adobe Photoshop 2022 menu item or the shortcut Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E) to open your photo in Photoshop. You’re not going in directly as a smart object, so don’t use the Open As Smart Object in Photoshop command.

STEP TWO: In Photoshop, duplicate the layer using Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J), or from the Layer>New>Layer Via Copy menu. You can also drag the layer to the Create a New Layer icon (+) at the bottom of the Layers panel. STEP THREE: Right-click on the new layer and, from the contextual menu, choose Convert to Smart Object. STEP FOUR: Open the layer with the plug-in you want to use. Here it’s Optics 2022. Do your edits and apply.

BEAUTY STUDIO STEP ONE: With your smart object layer created, open Optics 2022. From the Filters panel, click the magnifying glass to start Search. Enter Beauty and choose Beauty Studio from the results. You can try out the presets to find your favorite, but we’ll use the Default preset here. We’re also using a headshot, as the results are more visible than in a 3/4- or fulllength portrait.

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MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

Step Two

Step Three

STEP THREE: To refine this matte, change the View in Parameters from Output to Matte. Expand the Matte section of the panel to access Color A and Color B.

Step Four

STEP FOUR: Click on Color A and use the eyedropper to select one of the lighter areas of skin. Currently these areas are darker and are excluded from your matte, as shown in the image in the previous step. You can see the color changing in the swatch as you move the cursor over the skin, and when you click, those areas should turn white in the matte.

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STEP TWO: Clicking the A|B icon at the top of the interface allows you to see the work that’s been done. An automatic matte (a mask) has been created in the filter to select the skin areas.

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HOW TO

STEP FIVE: To refine the effect, you can add your own mask to the layer. In the Layers panel, click on the frame with a + icon and select Paint from the mask options.

STEP SEVEN: Should you want to reduce the strength of the filter, you can either reduce the Opacity of the layer (currently at 100) in the Layers panel, or you can use the Master Amount control in the Smoothing section in the Parameters panel. Click Apply when you’re done.

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STEP SIX: Click the Invert Mask icon, which is the fourth one from the left at the top. This shows the filter, and you can then paint off where you don’t want the effect. We want to remove the effect from any areas that define the edges in the face, so here we’ll paint the lips, eyes, and eyebrows, as well as the nostrils.

Before

After

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MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

PLAYING WITH FIRE Beauty Studio is obviously more practical than creative, so it’s time for us to delve into Particle Illusion. Use the smart object workflow as described above to get a smart object layer into Optics 2022. The image here was shot by dragging the shutter. The flash fired, but the shutter speed was slow enough to register a continuous light with an orange gel on it. We make no claim to originality on this look; it’s inspired by Lindsay Adler. The orange light does allow us to play with some of Particle Illusions filters, such as Smoke and Fire. STEP ONE: To get a feel for what Particle Illusion can do, click on the Particle Illusion tab in Filters at the bottom of the screen. Click PI Complete to see the full set of available presets. This loads the Wormhole Storm Large preset.

Step One

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Before

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HOW TO

STEP TWO: While we’re not going to use this preset, it does highlight one important feature that’s in a lot of Particle Illusion: the Timeline. As Particle Illusion comes from movie visual effects, the presets have a timeline, where they change over time. Using the Time control in the Parameters panel, you can select a frame from the Timeline to use. For explosions, smoke, or fire, this could be early on or at the peak, with each frame having a different look; and that’s before you even start to manipulate the settings.

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STEP THREE: Going with the existing orange in this image, it makes sense to look at smoke and fire. You can access this by using Search in the Presets panel, or by choosing the PI Fire or PI Smoke filters at the bottom. We’re going to select PI Fire in the Filters panel, and then select the Sparky Flow 01 preset.

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MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

STEP FOUR: The effect looks great, but it’s too small. You can enlarge it by going to the Master Scale setting in the World Transform section of the Parameters panel. Here we almost doubled it to 198. Use the on-image control (the red crosshairs) to move the World Center for a better fit in the image.

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STEP FIVE: The aim for the fire is as a background element, so it’s time for a mask! We’ll click the Add Mask icon as we did for Beauty Studio, but this time we’ll choose EZ Mask. Left-click-and-drag to draw green lines in areas you want to keep, which is the background here. Don’t forget to include gaps, such as the area between her body and arm in this image. Rightclick-and-drag to draw red lines in areas that you want to mask. When you’re done, click the cog icon at the end of the toolbar to generate the mask.

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HOW TO

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

STEP SIX: You can hide the mask by clicking on the image thumbnail on the PI Fire layer. In the Parameters panel, expand the Particle Properties. The controls are aptly named, and each affects the look a lot. The Number set ting works well here, and by reducing it to 56, it removes the large central buildup of color, giving better balance. Spin revolves the particle emitters around; it ’s not quite what you’d expect either, so play around. A setting of 280 gives a nice motion in our image. Frames to Preload is worth mentioning, as this is effectively a fast forward for the Timeline. Some presets start with no particles and build up to a look. Setting a higher number of Frames to Preload skips to the good part. Zoom doesn’t zoom into the overall filter, it zooms into the particles, so you get motion as part of the effect. We’ve left it at 100 for this image.

STEP SEVEN: Next, click on the Add Layer icon at the top left of the Layers panel. In the Filters panel, we’re going to select PI Smoke this time, and then we’ll use Smoke Fill 01 in the Presets panel.

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MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

STEP EIGHT: Drag the World Center on-image control down to where you want the smoke in your image, as shown here.

STEP 10: Next, we’ll expand the Composite section, and click on the Tint Color swatch. From the color panel that opens, we selected the eyedropper, and hovered the cursor over the fire to find a point with a suitable orange color.

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STEP NINE: This time, we’ll use Zoom in the Particle Properties to enlarge the smoke. It doesn’t look balanced to the image yet , but we’ll fix that shortly. Move the World Center again, if required.

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HOW TO

Step 11

STEP 11: We clicked on that point to add the color to the smoke, and set the Tint Strength to 100.

Step 12

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STEP 12: Next, we set the layer Opacity to 50 to fade the effect and let the subject show through.

STEP 13: Now, Right-click on the PI Smoke layer and choose Duplicate Layer. Grab the mask from the PI Fire layer and drop it on this new PI Smoke layer. This gives the effect that the smoke is behind as well as in front. Set the layer Opacity to 80.

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MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

STEP 15: For the final filter, we’re going to use one of the older filters, S_NightSky, located in the Render filters.

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STEP 14: You’ve probably gathered by now that you won’t see 1,700 effects being used here! But we’ll add just a couple more filters. Let’s add a new layer, choose the PI Sci-Fi set in the Filters panel, and click on the Gamma Burst preset in the Presets panel. In the Parameters panel, we’ll set the Time to 98 and Zoom to 129. Move the filter into a place you think suits. There are tons of filters that could work here, but the matching color tones make this an easy choice for this image.

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HOW TO

Start

STEP 16: Finally, we clicked the Add Mask icon and chose Paint again, and then painted away the new stars at the bottom of the image. To get the image back into Photoshop, click the Apply button.

EZ MASKS FOR PHOTOSHOP

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To get a mask back to Photoshop, you need to do a little advance preparation. There’s also a Photoshop bug with masks and smart objects, so we’ll be doing this with a normal layer.

STEP ONE: First, we need a normal layer so, in this case, we’ve duplicated the Background layer and placed it over the Optics layer from our previous edit. At the bottom of the Layers panel, click on the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square) to add an empty mask to the layer. STEP TWO: With the new layer’s image thumbnail selected in the Layers panel, open Optics 2022 from the Filter menu in Photoshop. To make it easy to get a previously made mask, choose Yes when the dialog shows asking if you want to apply previous filters/masks.

Finish

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STEP FOUR: Click Apply to go back to Photoshop. The original empty mask will be replaced by the mask from Optics 2022. The reason for doing this is that you can create very different mask sets using EZ Mask compared to the selections available in Photoshop. The mask can be moved,

copied, or inverted, as required, on other layers without needing Optics to edit them.

OPTICAL POWER

Step Four

In the short space we have here, it’s impossible to cover everything. The Optics 2022 manual is 723 pages long, so all we can ever hope to do is touch on the basics. There’s so much more, such as HUD filters for adding screens and dials, or UltraZap for magical lightning goodness. Honestly, I’ve never had so much fun with a plug-in; and there’ll be a lot of lost time playing with it.

If you haven’t downloaded the trial version, you should really give yourself the opportunity to play with it. Optics 2022 is available now for $149 for a new license, or you can subscribe for $99/year or $9/month. If you have the previous version, you can log into your account for an upgrade offer. KelbyOne Pro members can get a generous discount via the Discounts link in the Perks section in their member dashboard. n

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STEP THREE: When Optics opens, click on one of the previously generated layer masks (or create a new one) in the Layers panel. To the right of each mask is an icon of a box with an upward arrow. Click this to engage Export Mask.

MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

IBARIONEX PERELLO

VISUAL STORYTELLING

REDISCOVERY THROUGH PRINTING I allowed the business of the past few years to put a damper on printing my photographs. The images found their home in dozens of magazine articles and presentations, but I fell behind creating fine-art prints of my work. The recent addition of a large-format inkjet printer changed that. ALL IMAGES BY IBARIONEX PERELLO

Images shared on Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, or even printed in a magazine result in a fast-and-passive consideration of a photograph. Even when images were published, multiple deadlines resulted in a postprocessing workflow that favored speed. I prided myself on producing good results in a short time. Printing, however, demanded a different approach. Holding that first print resulted in a pleasure I’d forgotten. It also led me to slow down and evaluate my images differently. Creating a print demands a slower 58

and thoughtful approach deserving the permanence of a quality print. It was a pleasure I was happy to experience again. Most of my workflow remains the same regardless of the output. Yet, when it comes to the print, I carefully consider the viewer’s experience, expecting that they’ll be looking at it for more than a few seconds. The visual draws of light and shadow, line and shape, color, and gesture influenced how I saw a scene and created a composition. Those same considerations are

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V I S UA L S T O RY T E L L I N G

Step One

THE IMAGE This image was created for an assignment for Goodwill in Southern California. The images were meant to be used primarily for social media and internal digital and print publications. I didn’t give thought to printing the work, and only considered adding selects to my website. The printer’s presence inspired me to print some of my favorite shots from the series. These were photographs that I enjoyed as photographs and not as part of the larger story that I was telling. A large part of Goodwill’s work is the collecting and sorting of varieties of items, including clothing, furniture, electronics, books, and more. They earn income from the sale of these items in their local stores. These sales and other income resources provide multiple services to local communities, including thousands of job opportunities. The facility I was assigned to was one of the larger locations where donations were made. I was amazed by the vast quantities of items throughout the facility, all of which had to be sifted and sorted through. Some bins collected particular items such as pants or shoes, while others contained various miscellaneous items. It was in one such bin that I discovered outside the warehouse where the sight of a doll of the late rapper The Notorious B.I.G. caught my attention. I was surprised at

the sight of it, never having known that such a thing even existed. I found its appearance odd and funny. I composed a shot that included a fellow sorting through the bins as it also provided an essential storytelling element. The early afternoon light was hard and harsh, making for a high-contrast scene. The composition, which emphasized the doll and its white suit, posed an exposure challenge. There was a risk of overexposure that could blow out the highlights. I made a few test shots and adjusted my exposure to retain as much highlight and shadow detail as possible. The resulting RAW file would have enough data to produce a workable image, requiring time and attention. I hadn’t considered printing the photos, but technical choices made during exposure made a big difference in printing. [KelbyOne members can click here to download a smaller DNG version of this image to follow along for practice purposes only and, even though we’re using Adobe Camera Raw in the following steps, you can just as easily follow along using Lightroom Classic (LrC).—Ed.] STEP ONE: After opening the image in Adobe Camera Raw, go to the Edit section (LrC: Develop module). Click on the Browse Profiles icon (three squares and a magnifying glass; four squares in LrC) to the far right of the Profile dropdown menu. This launches a panel that contains several sets of Adobe profiles and a representative thumbnail for each profile in each set. Expand the Adobe Raw set, and select Adobe Neutral, which is the flattest of the various profiles, an ideal choice for this high-contrast file.

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at play when making global and selective adjustments. It’s how I control the viewer’s experience of my vision.

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HOW TO

STEP TWO: A casual view of the dark image might lead you to believe that it resulted from an inadequate exposure, but nothing could be further from the truth. Though extensive processing is required, the choice of exposure, white balance, and a low ISO makes producing a quality image possible. Go to the Basics panel to apply several global adjustments to the image. Set Exposure to +1.25, Contrast to –3, Highlights to –21, Shadows to +17, Whites to –1, and Blacks to –5. These settings produce a nightand-day difference.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

STEP THREE: The proximity of the lens to the doll reduced the apparent depth of field, which was controlled using an ultra-wide -angle lens and a moderate aperture. The image has a nice snap to begin with but can be improved with slight adjustments to midtone contrast. After increasing the magnification of the image to 100%, adjust Texture to +14 and Clarity +5.

STEP FOUR: Color is an essential visual draw in this image. Along with the doll’s white suit, the teddy bears provide a source of saturation color that draws the viewer’s attention to the lower quarter of the frame. Tweak this by increasing Vibrance to +21 and Saturation to +13.

V I S UA L S T O RY T E L L I N G

STEP FIVE: The image is greatly improved yet, despite the harsh lighting, the overall image appears flat. Go to the Curve control panel (LrC: Tone Curve), choose the Parametric Curve option (the first icon to the right of the word “Adjust”), and make a few changes. Increase the Lights to +22, Darks to +20, and reduce Shadows to –10. This adjustment brightens the quarter-tone highlights and darkens the quarter-tone shadows with little impact on the extreme ends of the tonal range. STEP SIX: Every RAW file requires a modest degree of pre-sharpening. The adjustment needn’t be aggressive, as the final amount of sharpening will depend on your printing output. This choice will consider print size, paper choice, and image file size. With the image magnified to 100%, go to the Detail panel and increase the Sharpening (LrC: Amount) to 50, Noise Reduction (LrC: Luminance) to 5, and Color Noise Reduction to 20. STEP SEVEN: Reds, oranges, yellows, and blues are the dominant colors in this image, but they need to be more subtle. Go to the Color Mixer panel (LrC: HSL panel) and select the Luminance tab. Decrease Reds to –4, Oranges to –4, Yellows to –6, and Blues to –4.

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HOW TO

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

STEP EIGHT: A subtle vignette will deemphasize the edge of the composition, so go to the Effects panel and set Vignetting (LrC: Amount) to –6, Midpoint to 59, Roundness to +45, Feather to 72, and Highlights to 28.

STEP NINE: The image might be sufficient to post on social media, but it’s intended for print this time. The choice of a Luster paper will provide excellent color saturation and contrast, but it might also result in the loss of important details in the shadows of the woman’s coat. To prevent that from going too dark, click the Masking icon (gray circle with dotted outline in the tools on the right) and

click on the Brush option. Adjust the brush options to a Size of 10, Feather of 68, Flow of 26, and Density of 100. Then move down to the Light panel and set Exposure to +0.45, Shadows to +20, and Blacks to +10. Then slowly paint over the woman’s coat until more details are revealed. Though the result appears subtle onscreen, it can make a more significant difference on paper.

STEP 10: There is one problem area in the composition: The striped box immediately below the woman’s right arm is bright enough to distract. To darken this, click on the Create New Mask button at the top of the Masks panel. From the pop-out screen that appears, select the Brush tool. Leave the brush settings as is, but set Exposure to –0.25, Contrast to +13, Highlights to –4, Shadows to –8, Whites to –8, and Blacks to –8. Slowly paint the box until it’s slightly darker and less of a distraction.

V I S UA L S T O RY T E L L I N G

STEP 11: The plastic container behind the doll’s left arm is too bright. This adjustment is a challenge, as aggressive darkening of this area will render it an unnatural gray; so, it’s vital to settle on a healthy compromise. Increase the magnification of the image to 100% and then click Create New Mask again. Select the Brush tool and set its Size to 13, Feather to 79, and make sure that the Auto Mask control is checked. In the Light controls, set Exposure to –0.50, Contrast to +6, Highlights to –9, Whites to –12, and Blacks to –16. Carefully brush around those bright areas to darken them. Use these same settings to tone down the brighter area of the doll’s coat. Once done, hold down the Shift key to change the Open button to Open Object, and click it (LrC: Photo>Edit In>Open As Smart Object in Photoshop). This will open the file in Photoshop as a smart object, which will allow you to return to Camera Raw at any time for revisions.

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HOW TO

STEP 12: Assuming that you’re working with a calibrated monitor, you can see how the image will appear on paper before creating a print. In Photoshop, go to View>Proof Setup> Custom. This control opens the Customize Proof Condition window from which you can select the ICC profile for the paper you intend to use to print. Go to Device to Simulate to choose the printer, set Rendering Intent to Relative Colorimetric, and enable Black Point Compensation. Under Display Options, enable Simulate Paper Color and then click OK. The resulting change should be a close approximation of what you’ll see on paper.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

Creating these prints has been fun and rewarding. It has given me a healthier perspective of where I’ve been and how I’ve grown as a photographer. It reminds me of the importance of seeing my photographs as tangible objects that I can hold, share, and appreciate. I understand it now to be an essential part of my photographic process and journey. n

Final image

VICTORIA BAMPTON

LIGHTROOM Q&A Q. I like to shoot with my camera set to B&W so that the preview on the back of the camera and the JPEG are B&W. When I imported the images into Lightroom, I was expecting the RAW images to be in color, but they’re still in B&W. Is this normal? A. It sounds like your Lightroom defaults are currently

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

set to mimic the camera settings, but it’s very easy to change them to settings of your choice. To set the same defaults for all RAW files, go to Lightroom Classic (PC: Edit)>Preferences and click the Presets tab. Select the default of your choice in the Global pop-up menu. You have a few options: Adobe Default uses the Adobe Color profile, so your RAW photos would be in color even if you selected B&W in the camera. Camera Settings recognizes the picture style (e.g., Monochrome) that you selected in the camera and applies the matching camera profile if it’s available. Preset, of course, applies the preset of your choice, so you can choose specific camera settings that you want Lightroom to apply to new photos. If you have more than one camera, you can set a different default for each camera by checking the Override Global Setting for Specific Cameras checkbox. Select the camera from the Camera pop-up and then, using the Default pop-up, select your chosen default for this particular camera model. Click Create Default to confirm your choice. The table to the right shows all of your camera-specific defaults, and the down-facing arrow at the end of each line allows you to change or delete the custom default. These new defaults apply to any new RAW photos that you import but they won’t automatically update photos that you’ve already imported. If there are any photos that you haven’t edited yet, you can select them in the Grid view and click Reset All in the Quick Develop panel to apply your new default settings.

Q. W hen I open Lightroom on my desktop, I don’t see Library, Develop, etc. at the top. Where are they? A. If everything looks a bit different, the most likely reason is that you’ve installed Lightroom instead of Lightroom Classic. Lightroom is the cloud-based ecosystem, whereas Lightroom Classic is the traditional folder-based desktop app. It’s an easy mistake to make as the names are so similar, so just go back to the Creative Cloud app and install Lightroom Classic instead. Another possibility, if everything else still looks like Lightroom Classic, is that the Module Picker may be hidden. You can bring it back by going to Window>Panels>Show Module Picker or by clicking the black bar along the top of Lightroom Classic’s window. There’s one final possibility, although it’s less likely. If some of the module names show, you may have hidden specific modules. It’s a handy option if you never use the Web module, for example, but you probably want to keep Library and Develop showing. To bring them back, Right-click on one of the other module names in the Module Picker (or where they should be) and reselect them from the context-sensitive menu.

Q. Can you please explain to me why, when I use the Spot Removal tool, my image changes to this black-and-white outline? I need it to go back to normal. A. That black-and-white outline is called Visualize Spots and, as the name suggests, it’s designed to help you identify spots that you might want to remove; for example, dust spots in the sky are much more

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obvious than they are in the full-color photo. There’s a checkbox and a slider in the toolbar beneath the photo when you’re in Spot Healing mode. (If you can’t see the Toolbar, press T.) If you drag the slider to the right, more dust spots are revealed, and dragging it to the left hides them. To turn it off, just uncheck the box or press the A key.

LIGHTROOM Q&A

using Finder (PC: Explorer). The plug-in disappears when you restart Lightroom.

Q. I n the Metadata Filter panel, the dates used to be hierarchical, so I could select a whole year, a month, or a specific date. Now I have to select a whole range of dates which is much harder. How do I get it back to a hierarchical view? A. In the top-right corner of the Date column, there’s a hidden button that displays a context-sensitive menu, and you can select Hierarchical in that menu. It’s only available for a couple of metadata columns. The other obvious one is keywords, which allows you to filter keywords as a flat or hierarchical list.

Q. I ’m trying to remove a plug-in that I no longer use, but when I select it in the Plug-in Manager dialog, the Remove button is unavailable. How do I uninstall it? A. Only plug-ins that you’ve installed using the Plug-in Manager (found under the File menu) can be removed using the Remove button in the Plug-in Manager dialog. Many third-party software installers, however, place their plug-ins in a special Modules folder, to save you having to install them manually. You can temporarily disable them from the Plug-in Manager, but to remove them completely, click the plug-in’s Show in Finder button (PC: Show in Explorer) and then move or delete the plug-in

they’re currently collapsed so the hidden photos aren’t included in the visible photo count. You can use the Photo>Stacking>Expand All Stacks command to open all of the stacks in one go, and then you’ll be able to see the other four photos. n

If you have a Lightroom question that you’d like Terry White to answer in the pages of Photoshop User magazine, send it to letters@photoshopuser.com.

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ALL IMAGES BY VICTORIA BAMPTON

Q. In the breadcrumb bar above the Filmstrip it shows the number of photos, but I’m trying to understand why one folder is showing “700 of 704” images. The filters are turned off, so where are the other four photos? You probably have some stacks in that folder, and A.

SEÁN DUGGAN

LIGHTROOM TIPS & TRICKS Last month we looked at collections and collection sets in Lightroom Classic. This month is a continuation of that topic but the focus is on using albums and folders in the cloud-based Lightroom. We’ll begin with a basic overview and then look at sharing albums for viewing, as well as contributing new photos and allowing other users to edit your images and create new auto-saved versions.

ALBUMS VS. COLLECTIONS Let’s get started with a terminology clarification. In the cloud-centric Lightroom, albums are the equivalent of collections in Lightroom Classic. Folders, which can be used to organize the albums you create, are the equivalent of collection sets in Lightroom Classic. If you open Lightroom and don’t see the albums in the left side panel, click the Photos icon in the upper left, or tap P to show/hide that panel.

menu where you’ll find an option to add the selected photos to an existing album.

Keyboard shortcut = P

Folders

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

Albums

ORGANIZE ALBUMS WITH FOLDERS At the top of the Albums panel, click the plus icon to create either an album or a folder. If an existing folder is currently active, you have the option to nest the new album or folder inside it. Using a structure of nested folders and albums can be an effective way to organize albums. To add photos to an album, select a range of thumbnails and drag them onto the album. You can also select photos and Right-click to display a contextual

CHOOSE HOW ALBUMS AND FOLDERS ARE DISPLAYED Next to the Create Albums & Folders plus symbol is a menu icon with options for how the albums and folders are displayed in the panel: by Title, Recently Updated, or Photo Count. You can also choose whether

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to display cover images with the albums, or just the album names.

OTHER ALBUM OPTIONS Right-click on the name of an album or folder for additional options, including the ability to share an album, rename it, designate it as the Target album, or store it locally. Except for Share To, all of these options are available if you click the three-dot icon in the upper-right above the thumbnails.

LIGHTROOM TIPS & TRICKS

album. To remove a selected photo or photos when you’re viewing the Target album, press the Delete key (PC: Backspace). The images will be removed from just that album, but will still be present in All Photos, as well as any other albums of which they are a part.

Target Album

STORE ALBUMS LOCALLY Lightroom stores the full-size versions of your images on the Lightroom cloud servers. If there’s room on your device, be that a computer or a mobile device, smart previews are available when you need to apply edits to a file and, if not, these are downloaded on an as-needed basis. Of course, that does require a decent Internet connection. If you want to be able to work with full-size files independently of Internet access, you can choose to designate that a specific album is stored locally (see the earlier tip “Other Album Options”). If you choose to store an album locally, you’ll see a dialog informing you how much space will be required to download the images. Albums that are stored locally will display a green circular badge and the photo count will also be shown in green.

Bonus Tip: You can also rename an album by doubleclicking on the album name that’s shown above the thumbnails in the upper left.

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TARGET ALBUMS When you make an album the Target album using one of the methods mentioned above, you can add selected images to it by tapping T on the keyboard. The Target album will be displayed with a dark outline around it in the Albums panel. If you’re working in All Photos view or in another album that contains the image you just added, you can tap T again to remove it from the Target

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You won’t find an actual file with the album name on your system, so don’t bother looking for it. Any files that are stored locally will be placed inside a specific file for the Lightroom program. On Mac, you can find this in the Pictures folder as a Lightroom Library.lrlibrary file. On Windows it’s buried a bit deeper at [Username] \AppData\Local\Adobe\Lightroom CC. On a Mac, the only way to see the contents of this file is to Right-click on it and choose Show Package Contents. For the China Trip 2018 album shown in the previous illustration, I found the image files in a folder with a meaningless name (well, meaningless to me), which I only found by checking the Date Modified date, then in a nested folder for originals organized by the date the photos were captured. Note: Albums are the only way to store specific, user-designated groups of images locally on your computer. Storing the album locally doesn’t remove the full-size originals from the Adobe cloud storage; it just provides you with full-size copies in case you need to work with them in locations with slow or no Internet bandwidth (just make sure you choose to store the albums locally when you still have good Internet access). In the Local Storage tab of the Adobe Lightroom (PC: Edit)>Preferences, you can choose to store all smart previews on your computer, or store a copy of all full-size originals on your computer (doing this won’t remove the full-size originals from the cloud storage). When you choose either of these options, the Required Space info above these options will be updated.

right above the thumbnails. There are different ways that an album can be shared, and I’ll cover these below.

SHARE TO… This choice is only available by Right-clicking on an album name. This option is for sharing images to web-based platforms such as Adobe Portfolio, Blurb, SmugMug, and others. When you select it, you can choose Add Connection, and then you choose from a list of different web platforms and product vendors. Once you’ve added a connection, it will show up as a sharing choice in the Share To flyout menu when you Right-click on an album name, as well as in the threedot menu in the upper Right.

SHARING ALBUMS One of the advantages of the cloud-based Lightroom is that albums can be shared very easily with other people, even if they don’t have an Adobe ID, or don’t have the Lightroom program installed on their computer or mobile device. To share an album, just Right-click the album name, or you can also click the three dots or the Share & Invite icon (the pictograph of a person) at the upper

SHARE & INVITE This is probably the sharing option in which most people will be interested. It can be accessed by Right-clicking on the album name in the Albums panel, or by clicking the

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ALL IMAGES BY SEÁN DUGGAN

Share & Invite icon or the three-dot icon in the upper right above the thumbnails. In the basic Share & Invite dialog, you can get a shareable link where anyone with the link can view the album in a web browser, even if they don’t have Lightroom or an Adobe ID. In the Invite section, you can add an email address for the person with whom you want to share, as well as specify the level of access you’re extending to him or her: view only, view and contribute, or edit and contribute. To share editing privileges, the person you share with needs

Can View Can Contribute Can Edit & Contribute

to have a Creative Cloud subscription for Lightroom in order to edit an image in Lightroom for desktop, Lightroom for mobile, or Lightroom on the web.

Auto-saved Versions made by others.

created (a new version is saved when the person making the changes exits the Edit screen). A small circle with their profile photo (if they’ve added one to their Creative Cloud account) will be displayed on the thumbnail. By default, the last edited version of the image, either by you or with whomever you’ve shared the album, is displayed in the thumbnail grid, as well as the full image detail view, but you can click on any other version to make that the current view. You can also promote an auto-saved version to a named version by choosing it in the Versions panel, clicking the three-dot “more” icon, and choosing Save as Named Version. n

When you share an album and assign edit and contribute access, the person you share with can apply edits to the shared album images, as well as contribute new photos. Edits to the photo made by the person with whom you’ve shared the album are automatically saved as versions, making it easy to review the changes they’ve made, or revert to an earlier version if you so choose. To review different edit versions made by others with whom you’ve shared the album, click on the Edit icon in the upper right (or tap E on the keyboard), and then click Versions below the Edit panels. Once you see the Versions panel, select Auto to see versions that have been automatically

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SHARE & INVITE: EDIT AND CONTRIBUTE

BRYAN O’NEIL HUGHES

GOING MOBILE

ADOBE RUSH IS VIDEO EDITING FOR ALL Today’s cameras and smartphones all generate both beautiful photos and high-resolution videos. Further, social platforms allow for sharing of both still and video files. Video is a bigger piece of our lives than ever before, and Adobe’s mobile solution, Adobe Premiere Rush, solves both anywhere access and usability. While applications, such as iMovie, are incredibly powerful, they’re constrained to the Apple ecosystem and don’t consider multiplatform workflows; plus, they lack integration with other creative products or storage. ALL IMAGES BY BRYAN O’NEIL HUGHES

Adobe Rush is a friendly, nonlinear video editor that allows you to ingest and intersperse video and still images, add sound, leverage powerful motion graphics presets, and do some advanced color grading and audio work, all in a cloud-hosted file that can seamlessly integrate with Premiere Pro (should you want to take things much, much further). Rush is available on iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android, Mac, and Windows. Today we’ll look at Rush on an iPad, which is how I import, store, edit, and share my drone video files. 72

EDITING A VIDEO PROJECT Let’s work through a video project and take a look at what’s possible in Rush. STEP ONE: Ingesting video is as simple as launching Rush, tapping the + icon, and adding media. This can be any of your footage (video or still) from a connected drive, card, local storage, or Creative Cloud (Rush even supports Dropbox).

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STEP TWO: Once you have a project, you can continue adding any of these elements from the media picker at the top left and reordering them. You can select a clip and cut it where the playhead sits, move it by dragging, or delete it by tapping the trash can icon. Adding and assembling video clips into a narrative is intuitive and forgiving (undo can be found in the upper right-hand corner). STEP THREE: Here, I added a title slide, which can be animated over time. The text is editable, and the parameters (time, duration, placement, etc.) are all adjustable. STEP FOUR: Editing color of video or still content will be familiar to anyone who has used Lightroom or Photoshop: Simply select that piece of your video timeline and tap the Color button (three overlapping circles) in the toolbar on the right to make adjustments. Within the Color workspace, you’ll find a variety of powerful presets. My workflow is to select the preset I like best and then move into Edit to tweak the details. Two important things to note here are: 1. Y ou can create your own preset based upon any changes.

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2. B y default, these changes are applied to other clips.

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STEP FIVE: You can adjust the speed of any video clip by selecting the appropriate clip and then choosing the Speed button (it looks like a speedometer, located below the Color button). This will allow you to ramp the speed up or down. Remember, a high frame rate at capture will give you considerably better results (more frames equal more control of speed).

STEP SIX: Adding audio is, for the most part, simple and powerful. You select the Audio button (below the Speed button) and choose from a collection of prepackaged soundtracks, sound effects, and loops. If you want to add your own media, you can return to the media picker that we discussed earlier in the upper-left of Rush’s screen, but this is where it gets a little confusing (at least to me). To navigate to your music library files or your own audio, select Your Media in the media picker

(as opposed to Audio), and then in Locations, you go to Audio. If you see songs listed, but not available, you’ll need to purchase them or find the corresponding file. Audio in Rush took me a while to understand, but I was brand-new to the workflow when I started using the app for drone footage. STEP SEVEN: As you add multiple video clips and perhaps stills, you’ll want to consider how they transition between segments, which can be found by tapping the Transitions button (three lines with a lightning bolt located just above the Color button on the right). Unlike Color and Speed, you can choose transitions simply based on where the playhead sits, and then if you want to move it, you simply drag it to where you like in the timeline. Within these transitions, you can elect to pan and zoom and automatically reframe the content, both easy but powerful.

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That covers the basics: add stills or video clips; cut length; reorder; edit color; play with titles, graphics, and transitions; and perhaps add some sound. Pretty easy.

FILE HANDLING Now let’s dedicate a moment to file handling (part of what makes Rush special).Your Rush projects are synched to the cloud, which means that when you open Rush on your phone, desktop, or any other device you’re signed into, you can access any project you’ve made. This allows you to edit or publish from anywhere and always have access to your original. This file handling and Rush’s forward-thinking architecture also allow you to integrate with Premiere Pro

seamlessly. The workflow here is simply to launch Premiere on your Mac or Windows desktop and open your Rush project. All the pieces, colors, and edits will be maintained, and you’ll now be jumping into a much more powerful workflow. Getting back to Rush: if you want to go deeper on the basics, the learn tab (available in the home screen) will take you to some fantastic resources. For me, Rush has been a great inroad into video editing; I’ve found the basic assembly and timeline editing to be intuitive and have been impressed with the results. As with photography, the quality of capture, lighting, and stability of your camera all factor in. Then there’s audio (absent in drone footage) and the fact that video editing is time-consuming (the more you shoot, the longer it takes to edit!) but, if you’re new to video, I think you’ll enjoy Rush. To see some of my drone work with Rush, follow me on Instagram. n

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STEP EIGHT: Graphics are found alongside type in the corresponding button near the upper right. In addition to Titles and Transition Graphics, you can choose an Overlay. Overlays are like layers, only they animate over time. These are fast, powerful ways to bring a fresh and impactful change to your video clips (see opposite page).

GOING MOBILE

SCOTT KELBY

PHOTOSHOP FOR LIGHTROOM USERS

CREATIVE SHARPENING You’re probably wondering, “Can there really be more to sharpening than we’ve already learned in these past few issues?” We’ve learned the classic Unsharp Mask, we’ve learned about High Pass sharpening, and even Smart Sharpen. Can there be more? There’s always more in Photoshop, and today we’re looking at a different way of thinking about sharpening. ALL IMAGES BY SCOTT KELBY

So far, the sharpening we’ve applied is absolutely critical. It’s a part of our production workflow (every photo gets sharpened—every single one!), so the type of sharpening we’ve learned is that essential, kind-of-mandatory sharpening we do to all our images. There’s another style of sharpening, however, and this one is optional. It’s called “creative sharpening,” and it can be used as a device to lead the viewer’s eye to where you want it to go within the image, or to make certain parts of your image stand out. We do this by “spot sharpening” 76

those areas. There are a number of ways to do this, and I’ll show you a few different options so you can choose which one you like best, if you decide to do this style of optional sharpening.

OPTION 1: PAINTING SHARPENING IN CAMERA RAW This version of creative sharpening is done in of Camera Raw, so you can either do this after you’ve opened the RAW image in Camera Raw, or you can do this afterward

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(including on a JPEG, TIFF, or PSD image) by going under the Filter menu and choosing Camera Raw Filter. STEP ONE: Start by clicking on the Masking icon (gray circle with dotted outline in the toolbar on the right), and then when the menu of masking tools appears, click on Brush.

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STEP TWO: Scroll down the list of adjustment sliders for the Brush until you reach the Detail panel, where you’ll see a slider for Sharpness. Drag this slider to the right, as shown here (the further to the right you drag it, the more sharpening will be applied, so don’t go too crazy with this).

my subject’s eyes to be the thing that draws the viewer in. Here, I’ve painted over just her eye on the right (you can see my brush cursor over her eye). Of course, you’d paint over both eyes, but this is just the spot sharpening that I’m talking about, where you’re sharpening an area to draw the viewer to where you want them to look first.

OPTION 2: USING THE SHARPEN TOOL

Step One

Step Three

STEP THREE: Now you’ll use the Brush to paint over any areas that you want to stand out to the viewer. In the example shown below, I want

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Step Two

Yes, there’s actually a tool in Photo shop just for sharpening. It’s right there in the Toolbar (nested with the Blur tool), and its icon looks like a tall triangle (as shown on the next page). For a long time, the Sharpen tool was absolutely awful but, a few years back, Adobe completely updated the tool with a totally new mathematical

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algorithm, and now it works really well. You just have to be careful not to overdo it (like most things in life, right?). Here’s our original RAW image and, after doing basic sharpening, there are a few areas that I’d like to stand out more; in particular, the graphics on the jet. They’re just not as sharp and crisp as I’d like. So, I used the Sharpen tool to paint over those text and logo areas on the jet to make them really sharp and draw the viewer’s attention (I usually paint in a circular motion). Here you can see how much sharper those text areas are now, but what’s nice is that creatively sharp ening those areas makes the entire jet look sharper.

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OPTION 3: HIGH PASS MASKED SHARPENING

STEP ONE: First, duplicate the Background layer (press Command-J [PC: Ctrl-J]), and then go under Photoshop’s

Filter menu, under Other, and choose High Pass (as shown here). STEP TWO: When the High Pass dialog appears, drag the Radius slider all the way to the left so the layer is solid gray. Then, slowly drag it to the right until you see the edges in your image start to appear clearly (as shown below). Now click OK.

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Here we’re going to apply some High Pass sharpening (the same one we learned earlier in this column), and then we’re going to hide it behind an inverted layer mask and paint over just the areas we want to be sharp (it sounds complicated, but it’s super easy).

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STEP THREE: Then, to get rid of that gray, but have the sharpening effect appear on your image, go up near the top-left of the Layers panel and change the layer blend mode from Normal to Hard Light (as shown here). The only problem is this adds sharpening to the entire image, but we just want to have the sharpening appear in certain places (for example, we don’t want to sharpen the clouds), but we’ll fix that in the next step.

STEP FOUR: Hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and click on the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square) at the bottom of the Layers panel. This adds a black mask to this layer (called an inverted layer mask) that completely hides the sharpening layer from view. So now your image looks like it did before you added that High Pass sharpening.

Step Four

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on the sides of the buildings to make those areas extra sharp so they stand out to the viewer.

STEP FIVE: To add your creative sharpening, get the Brush tool (B) from the Photoshop Toolbar, press D to set white as your Foreground color, and now paint over any areas where you want that high level of sharpening. Tip: To quickly change the size of your brush, use the Bracket keys ( [ ]) on your keyboard. In this case, I painted over the grid on the bottom of the building on the left, and then I painted over the glass

Okay, that’s three different ways to apply creative sharpening, just to get you up and running on the idea. This is a really valuable creative tool for leading your viewers’ eyes to where you want them to engage first. Our Photoshop journey continues in the next issue. See you then! n

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☺

You’ve likely heard the old saying “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The lesson in this adage is extremely relevant to photographers; it’s all about how you look at the thing or moment to which you’re assigning potential. Sometimes we have complete control over the scenes that we compose but, in other cases, it’s like the wild west: how fast can you get your finger on the trigger and pull? I’ve edited so many images in my career as a retoucher and production artist that I’m always trying to see the greatest potential in an image. If you’ve ever studied successful image makers over the decades, you’ll notice they seem to have just the right amount of content in their compositions to tell the story and keep your attention where it should be.

Photo by Brian Yurasits on Unsplash

Today, we can greatly control our compositions through postprocessing and editing. Although there are hundreds of well-established techniques to focus the attention of your audience, such as contrast, saturation, composition, etc., in this article we’re going to dive into removing the elements of an image that might be considered “junk,” that distract from its potential. Before we get started, I’d like to offer a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the famous journalist, poet, aviator, and French laureate who wrote the well-known children’s story The Little Prince. I believe this is at the core of what helps us decide how much we edit and craft our work.

...perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away… – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Before we even begin discussing tools and controls, we should identify the ways to go about removing elements within an image: cover it up, or abstract the detail you want gone from the image.

CAN I COVER IT UP WITH SOMETHING ELSE? ABSTRACT VS. PATTERNED The reason the Patch tool is an appropriate choice in this instance is that the surface properties of the water are very abstract in detail: sharp, focused, but irregular. There’s no pattern or specific geometric forms coming from the water. If we had chosen to use the Clone Stamp tool (S), we could have ended up with either hard edges from the brush circles or blurry/foggy areas where the replacement occurred.

BLENDING The Patch, Healing Brush, and Spot Healing Brush tools all have auto-blending capabilities that take a lot of the hard work out of removing elements from an image. Because of this, though, you need to think about the area from which you’re borrowing pixels. In the sample image of the cup, even though there’s a lot of water in the image, the entire top half and even some parts of the water to the right of the cup are out of focus. This makes all those areas a bad choice from which to borrow pixels. In Photoshop, it’s always easier to blur pixel detail than it is to sharpen something that’s out of focus.

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The most common way of removing elements from your image is to cover it up, but it’s often dependent on having enough material within the image from which to borrow. Here’s a simple example of that in this image of floating garbage that you can find on Unsplash.com. There’s so much water available around the cup that there would be no issue using surrounding pixels to replace the cup. Don’t forget the reflections, though! So often the way a viewer quickly identifies that part of a picture was removed is because the editor forgot details such as reflections, texture shifts, differing sharpness levels, or similar items. Notice in the image above that it’s not just the reflection that could give it away, but a series of ripples coming off the cup, accentuating the fact that a solid object is there in the water. Using the Patch tool (nested below the Spot Healing Brush tool [J] in the Toolbar), we can draw a basic selection around the cup, reflection, and surrounding ripples and borrow from the neighboring water in the shot. The green area in the image above represents the selection that was made with the Patch tool; the red area represents where we dragged the selection to borrow pixels to cover up the cup.

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ABSTRACT THE JUNK!

Whenever you’ve patched or healed a larger area, there’s always something that can give away your little secret. But, if you layer in more elements from the surrounding pixels to distract from the fact that something was there in the first place, it makes it hard for the human mind to notice any minuscule shifts in detail, texture, etc. In this case, there are several bubbles floating on the surface of the water from which we can borrow to drop a detail or two where the cup originally was. This helps “sell the edit” to the viewer. To ensure you don’t copy a bubble so many times it looks fake, take advantage of the Clone Source panel (Window>Clone Source) that allows you to reduce the size of the source you’re cloning with the Clone Stamp. Reducing the larger details to smaller details and placing just a select few where the cup once was helps with successfully hiding the edit.

It does require a certain amount of skill to cut something from a picture and replace it with neighboring pixels. The textures, colors, tonality, etc. are all factors to be considered. Occasionally, though, there’s nothing offensive in the image that needs to be removed (thanks, Uncle Jim, for photobombing every wedding photo), but rather the “junk” is distracting to the focal point of the image. Simply put, it’s just “visual noise.” In these instances, you can consider using filters and other effects to help reduce their presence in the image. Here’s an example. Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

DISTRACT FROM YOUR EDITS

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In this image (that you can find on Unsplash by clicking here), all the right ingredients are present for a good image: motion, drama, leading lines, and more. But there’s so much going on in the background, the seats, signs, etc., that the viewer could easily be distracted from the key subjects of the image: the athletes. In the revised version on the next page, you can see that by using a blurring technique we accomplish two things: First, we take away the distracting level of detail 84

that was originally in the background. Blurring those lines and edges of the seating pattern helps the viewer ignore what’s going on in the background. The human mind likes to identify shapes and forms as rapidly as it can, which is known as the Gestalt theory. So reducing detail in “junk” parts of the image is a great way to modify an image without having to use compositing or retouching techniques. Secondly, the filter choice in this example helps accentuate what ’s actually happening in the scene: they’re running fast, so this filter illustrates the motion of the runners.

STEP TWO: Review the quality of the auto selection and clean up any parts of the subjects that are missing in the selection. In this case, we can use the Object Selection tool (W), which combines the legacy controls of the traditional Lasso tool (where you can hold Shift to add to or Option [PC: Alt] to subtract from the existing selection) with the same machine-learning abilities of the Select>Subject engine we used in Step One. So you can draw a loose selection around the part you want to add or subtract, and Photoshop will auto-generate a selection for that part. (If you haven’t played with these selection features, you can learn more about them from my past “The Perfect Selection” column in Photoshop User.) STEP THREE: Although this isn’t necessary for this technique, it’s a step that fits into the best-practices category in case something happens with your selection when you’re working on an image. Go to Select>Save Selection and click OK. This will produce an alpha channel, saved in your Channels panel (Window>Channels). Anytime you take extra effort to create and refine a selection, it’s a good idea to save it so you can recall it at a later stage, if needed. STEP FOUR: Right-click on the image layer in the Layers panel and choose Convert to Smart Object (or go to Layer>Smart Objects>Convert to Smart Object). This will enable you to make edits to your image using smart filters, which keeps the effect editable and nondestructive.

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SO HOW DO WE DO IT? STEP ONE: Using the menu command Select>Subject, Adobe Sensei will start by providing a basic auto-created selection of all the runners.

STEP SIX: To create the motion effect, we’ll use Path Blur, which you can find under Filter>Blur Gallery>Path Blur. You’ll see a blue arrow appear in your image. This line orients the direction of the path blur. Start by dragging the white dots at each end of the arrow to rotate and position it, as well as setting it to the length and angle that you want the path blur to follow. Before adjusting any of the Path Blur settings in the Blur Tools panel, uncheck the option labeled Centered Blur. This is important so that the blur follows the arrow and goes from right to left rather than blurring both

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STEP FIVE: Make sure your selection is still active. If it isn’t, load it from Select>Load Selection (you did save it in Step Three, right?). Inverse the selection by going to Select>Inverse because we want to apply the blur effect to everything but the runners.

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directions. This subtle difference is what allows the edit to be more realistic, because a photographer would “drag the lens” following the runners, and we want the blur to emulate that movement. Once you have this set correctly, adjust the Speed of your path blur so it’s abstracting the background detail enough that it’s no longer an issue. For a more realistic lens-drag blur effect, be sure to turn up Taper and you’ll notice the Path Blur dissolves over the length of the blue path. This may be enough for removing junk detail, but if you want a tracing contour effect mixed in, the additional settings found under the Motion Effects panel can add another dimension to this edit. Experiment with the settings for Strobe Strength and Strobe Flashes. The number of flashes creates a number of ghost/contour traces that can be mixed with the blur.

STEP SEVEN: Now, when you click OK at the top of the Blur Gallery interface, you should notice that your smart object image layer has a Smart Filter with a mask attached to it that was created using the selection of the subjects. This mask dictates where the filter is applied to the image, not to be confused with a layer mask that affects the visible pixels on a layer. Anywhere that’s white in the smart filter mask is where the Path Blur effect will be applied.

STEP EIGHT: This next step is a little bit meta. If you want to adjust and blend in the mask for the effect, click on the Smart Filters mask to make sure that it’s targeted. In the menu, go to Filter>Blur>Motion Blur. Set the Angle so that it’s parallel to the lines of the running lanes in the image. In this example, we set the Angle to 3° and the blur Distance to 70 px.

STEP ONE: First up, we’ll remove the deer on the right. So, why not just use the Spot Healing Brush? Because you’d most likely get a result as shown below. So what happened? With the Spot Healing Brush, you paint over the pixels you want to replace, and then Photoshop evaluates the image to find an area from which to sample and uses the Content-Aware engine to blend and replace those pixels. It often does a great job, but sometimes it grabs unwanted pixels, like we see in the result below.

Photo by Diana Parkhouse on Unsplash

It’s worth noting that earlier we mentioned that blurring in both directions would cause a problem. Unfortunately, Path Blur isn’t available to use on masks! Because the Motion Blur is only affecting the mask, however, we’re going to move the mask to the left using the Move tool until it blends and aligns in a way that we like. For this image, we moved the mask left approximately 35 px (with the Move tool active, tap the Left Arrow key to move it one pixel at a time, or simply drag with the Move tool), which is half the distance of the Motion Blur we applied to the mask. This offset makes up for the bidirectional blur. The end result is a convincing illustrative photo effect that reduces the background distractions without having to cut anything out or patch any pixels with compositing techniques. There are a variety of blurring techniques available through filters in Photoshop, which means you have a variety of ways to abstract details in an image, based on the context of the image. Play with Lens Blur or Field Blur for when you want to blur backgrounds or foreground elements.

Earlier in the article, we showed a simple example of removing garbage floating on water using the Healing Brush tools in Photoshop, but there are often times when those tools don’t give you the results you desire. Using the Patch tool and Clone Stamp worked in that image because there were no other elements or artifacts other than the water. But what happens when you have a few more things going on in your image? In the following image, which is also from Unsplash, you can see the photographer nailed a great moment with the deer looking straight at the lens. Perfect! But there’s also another deer running through the scene that pulls our attention away from the moment with the main figure. It’s still a great capture because all of the ingredients are there, but let’s remove any areas that are taking away the image’s greater potential.

What about the Patch or Healing Brush tools, which allow you to target the sample replacement pixels? Well, based on the scale of everything, you’d only be able to borrow pixels from the left side of the image, and that would introduce more highlight pixels from that break in the trees in the background. Those light pixels on the left are already competing with the deer in the middle, so we’re going to want to remove those as well, but we’ll do that after the deer edit.

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CONTROLLING REMOVAL WITH CONTENT-AWARE

STEP TWO: To remove the deer, let’s use Content-Aware Fill. Before we activate Content-Aware Fill, start by using the Lasso tool (L) to make a loose selection around the deer we want to remove, as shown here.

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STEP THREE: With the selection made, go to Edit>Content-Aware Fill. This will bring up an interface that gives you more control over the areas that are being sampled for replacing the selected area. This isn’t like cloning where it’s a straight copy, but rather you’re dictating which pixels Photoshop can evaluate and sample to generate the new pixels to fill the selection.

In the Content-Aware Fill workspace, you’ll see a view of the working file on the left, and a preview of what the fill replacement will look like on the right. In the Content-Aware Fill panel, set the Indicates drop-down menu to Excluded Area so that everything that has a color overlay will be ignored for sampling. Using the Sampling Brush tool (B) at the top left, paint over the main deer in the center. This mask instructs the sampling engine to ignore these pixels. That’s why the preview doesn’t give us a strange floating head like we had before. There are additional settings that you can experiment with here to get different results. For example, if you were trying

to fill content with a rotated or curved pattern, you could try the different strength settings in the Rotation Adaptation drop-down menu, or if a background was a texture or repeating pattern with perspective, you could check the Scale box so Content-Aware Fill auto-adapts to the size difference. This gives great results in our overall image. Another important setting is the Output To drop-down menu. Output to New Layer is handy for being nondestructive with your editing but, for our next step, you’ll need to merge the output and the original image layer.

THAT DISTRACTING HIGHLIGHT BREAK IN THE TREES We’re going to use the Patch tool for this edit. If you output the result of the Content-Aware Fill to a new layer, press Shift-Command-Option-E (PC: Shift-Ctrl-Alt-E) to create a stamped merged layer of all the visible layers, and then move this layer to the top of the layer stack. Otherwise, the Patch tool will try to sample the deer we removed, which is still on the Background layer.

STEP FOUR: With the stamp layer active, start by selecting the area with the bright highlights on the left. Take notice in the screenshot shown here that the selection also includes a portion of the grass. Anytime you’re using the Patch tool, it will struggle to blend pixel values directly along edges with differing contrasts. So rather than selecting up to the edge of the grass, you’ll get better results if you go past that edge.

removed. Now you’re cloning from an area that had been replaced with Content-Aware Fill! A good tip to remember is when dragging the Patch selection to a new spot, use the preview in the selection to try to line up any edges. In this case, that would be the section of grass at the bottom. STEP SIX: Now that we’ve removed all the distractions that were taking away from the frame around the deer staring at the camera, we can begin the tonal work. In the final version, we made some minimal tonal adjustments around the face to brighten it up, converted it to black-and-white, added a vignette, and slightly warmed the tones over the black-and-white effect. You can see that, by removing the break in the trees on the left, the deer now has the strongest and brightest pixels in the image, and that helps draw your eye back to the deer anytime you look away. With all the extra image area around the deer, this shot could easily be made into a square print or even cropped to a portrait image. And that’s the point of “junk removal.” It’s less about removing things (although sometimes that’s necessary with photobombing relatives) and more about increasing the signal and reducing the noise in an image. If you found this article interesting, please check out my other articles and courses for KelbyOne where I go deeper on masking, selections, tone and color editing, and much more. Happy “Photochoppin’!” n

Final image

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STEP FIVE: Now when you click-and-drag the selection with the Patch tool over to the right-hand side, you’ll borrow pixels from the area where the deer was recently

COREY BARKER

PHOTOSHOP DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS

CUSTOM DISPLACEMENT EFFECTS It’s fun to revisit effects I created years ago to see if they still hold up or if they can be enhanced in some way. Back in my early days of “Down & Dirty Tricks,” I did a water displacement effect that I want to use in this tutorial as an example to show you how you can go back and expand on something you created a long time ago and perhaps even discover something new. Here, we’ll build custom displacement maps for a stylized water-distorting effect.

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STEP ONE: First we need a subject. It’s fun to experiment with this effect on different types of images but we’ll keep things somewhat simple here as we have an Adobe Stock image of a model on a white background, which should make it easier to extract her. If you’d like to download the low-res watermarked version of this image to follow along, click this link, log in with your Adobe ID, and click the Save to Library button. Double-click the image in the Libraries panel (Window>Libraries) to open it in Photoshop. To make it easier to work with the image, increase the resolution of the practice file. (We normally don’t recommend enlarging images, but this is only for practice purposes.) Go to Image>Image Size, turn on the Resample checkbox, select Preserve Details 2.0 from the Resample drop-down menu, set the Width to 3,000 pixels, and click OK. STEP TWO: To begin the extraction process, go under the Select menu and choose Subject. After a little bit of Photoshop wizardry the selection is created. Go up to the Options Bar and click the Select and Mask button, or go under the Select menu again and choose Select and Mask. STEP THREE: Since the background is white, set the View mode in the Properties panel to On Black (A) and the Opacity to 100%. Select the Refine Edge Brush tool (R) in the toolbar on the left and use the Left and Right Bracket keys on your keyboard to quickly change the brush size as needed. You can see a few areas around her hair where the white backdrop is still showing through. Just dab those areas with the brush to clear them away. Continue to paint over any other areas of the hair or the rest of the subject where needed to remove the original white background.

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©Adobe Stock/Alexander Y

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STEP FOUR: Once you’re done painting the adjustments, go back over to the Properties panel and set Smooth to 1. Then scroll down and activate Decontaminate Colors. While the background is only white, turning on Decontaminate Colors and lowering its Amount slider to around 25% not only cleans up the edges but it also helps with blending around her hair. Finally, set the Output To drop-down menu to New Layer with Layer Mask, and click OK.

STEP FIVE: We now have the subject extracted with a layer mask, but in order to retain the layer mask and be able to edit the distortion at any time, we’ll need to convert this layer into a smart object. So just Right-click the layer in the Layers panel and choose Convert to Smart Object in the contextual menu. You should see a smart object icon at the bottom right of the layer thumbnail.

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STEP SIX: Create a new document in which to build the final image by going to the File menu and choosing New. Set the Width to 1400 pixels, Height to 2000 pixels, Resolution to 300 ppi, a n d th e B a c k g ro u n d Contents to White. Click OK or Create. STEP SEVEN: Next, go and grab the smart object layer with the Move tool (V) and drag it into this new canvas; hold down the Shift key before you drop the layer so the subject lands centered in the canvas. Press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) for Free Transform, and scale and position the subject in the composition. Press Enter to commit the transformation. Double-click the subject layer’s name in the Layers panel and rename it “Fitness Girl.” STEP EIGHT: In the Layers panel, create a new blank layer by clicking the plus icon next to the trash can at the bottom of the Layers panel, and then drag the new layer below the subject layer. Here’s where you choose a background color. Click on the Foreground color swatch near the bottom of the Toolbar to open the Color Picker. When I created the original version of this project, I used a blue background but this time I’m using green. Choose whatever color suits your subject, and click OK.

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STEP 10: Open the water image you wish to use (you can find this image from Adobe Stock by clicking here and then download the low-res version, open it in Photoshop, and then resize it as described in Step One). Again it helps if the water is on a white background as it is here. I like this stylized look not just because of the spiral effect but also because all the subtle waves in the water give Photoshop more areas that it can distort. If you’re using the Adobe Preview image, go to Image>Image Rotation>180°.

©Adobe Stock/Pineapple studio

STEP NINE: Press OptionDelete (PC: Alt-Backspace) to fill the new layer with the Foreground color. Then click on the Add a Layer Style icon ( ƒx) at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Gradient Overlay. In the Layer Style dialog, click on the Gradient preview thumbnail to open the Gradient Editor; select the Black, White gradient in the Basics folder; and click OK to close the Gradient Editor. Then use the settings shown here to create a subtle color variation. We’ll add more to the background later, but for now this base color will do for visibility sake. Click OK in the Layer Style dialog.

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STEP 11: Remove the color from the water by pressing Shift-Command-U (PC: Shift-Ctrl-U), and then press Command-I (PC: Ctrl-I) to invert the image values. Now it just looks like water on a black background. We want to extract this using a luminance-based selection but let’s first make it a little brighter with more detail.

STEP 13: Open the Channels panel (Window>Channels), hold down the Command (PC: Ctrl) key, and click on any of the individual RGB channels to create a selection of the highlights. The combined RGB channel is a tad darker than the individual channels, which means they have more detail. Here I Command-clicked (PC: Ctrl-clicked) the Blue channel. Once the selection is active go to the Layers panel, and create a new blank layer. Press D then X to set the Foreground color to white, and then press Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace) to fill the active selection with white. That’s using luminance to extract water!

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STEP 12: Press Shift-Delete (PC: Shift-Backspace) to open the Fill dialog. Set the Contents drop-down menu to White and, in the Blending section, set the Mode to Soft Light and lower the Opacity to 75%. Click OK.

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STEP 14: The next step is to drag the extracted water element to the working file using the Move tool. Use Free Transform (Command-T [PC: Ctrl-T]) to scale and position the water around the subject bearing in mind the image will be distorted where the water overlays the subject. You can see why this subject works pretty well with this water element. Press Enter when done to commit the change, and then drag this layer to the top of the layer stack in the Layers panel.

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STEP 15: Now that we’ve established where we want the water effect to appear in the image, we’ll use that to make the displacement maps. Yes, plural. You’ll see why in a minute. Start by going under the Image menu and choosing Duplicate to create a copy of this image.

STEP 16: Delete all the layers in the duplicate file except the water element and the Background layer. Click on the Background layer in the Layers panel to make it active, and press Shift-Delete (PC: Shift-Backspace) to open the Fill dialog. Set the Contents to 50% Gray, Mode to Normal, Opacity to 100%, and click OK. Rename the water layer “Main Splash.”

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STEP 17: Go under the Image menu and choose Duplicate once again to create a copy of the Main Splash image. Once created, select the water element layer, and lock its transparency in the Layers panel by clicking the first icon to the right of the word “Lock.” Press D to set the Foreground color to black, and then fill the layer with black by pressing Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace). For this one, lower the layer Opacity to around 85%.

STEP 18: Go back to the white displacement map file and select the Main Splash layer. Press Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E) to merge the water element with the gray Background layer. Go under the Filter menu, to Blur, and choose Surface Blur. Set both the Radius and Threshold to 5 pixels, which will smooth out any subtle noise in the image, and click OK. Go to File>Save As, select Photoshop for the Format, and save the image as “splash_displace_ white” to your desktop or preferred folder. Repeat this step for the black version of the splash, except name it “splash_displace_black .” Displacement works by pushing white pixels up and to the left and pushing black pixels down and to the right. By creating two maps we can control each direction separately.

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STEP 19: Back in the main image, click on the Fitness Girl smart object layer in the Layers panel. Go under the Filter menu, to Distort , and choose Displace. Normally this would take some trial and error to get the displacement just right because, sadly, it still has no preview. Because the layer is a smart object, however, Displace will be applied as a smart filter, allowing you to change settings even after they ’ve been applied.

Here we’ve set the Horizontal Scale to 100 and Vertical Scale to just 50 since most of the water movement is horizontal. Keep the other settings as is and click OK. You’ll be prompted to locate the displacement map file. Start by navigating to the white one and click Open. You’ll see the distortion created by the water image and how the pixels are being pushed to the left (temporarily hide the top water layer so you can see the distortion on the subject). Now let’s do it with the black one.

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STEP 20: Press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to make a duplicate of the Fitness Girl layer. Double-click the word “Displace” below the copied layer to open the Displace dialog. We just left the settings the same and clicked OK. You’ll be prompted to load a map again, so here’s where you’ll choose the black displacement map. Now you can see the subject is distorted in the other direction. (We should go ahead and rename the water layer to “Main Splash” while we’re here.)

STEP 21: Once again make a duplicate of the Fitness Girl layer and place it at the top of the layer stack. Grab the Displace smart filter on this duplicate and drag it to the Delete Layer icon (trash can) at the bottom of the Layers panel. Hold down the Option (PC: Alt) key as you click the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square) at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a hide all layer mask, which will completely hide the subject on this layer. Also, turn the Main Splash layer back on and make sure it’s above the two displaced layers but below the copied subject layer at the top.

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STEP 22: Select the Brush tool (B) in the Toolbar and choose a standard Soft Round brush. Click on the layer mask thumbnail on the top layer in the Layers panel to make sure the mask is active, and press D to set the Foreground color to white. Begin painting in areas where you don’t want the water effect covering the model. The idea is to make it appear as if sections of water are going behind her. We started by bringing back areas around the face but left some water because it looked like it was coming off her chin. Next, we painted the water off the upper part of her torso and arm, as well as parts of her legs. Continue painting in areas where the water would go behind the subject and any other areas that you want to blend. I revealed some parts of her shoes but only a little so they aren’t totally obscured by the splash.

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STEP 23: While both displacement layers are yielding a great result, we can mask away any parts that shouldn’t be distorted or they just don’t look right. Just add a layer mask to each displacement layer, press D then X to set the Foreground color to black, and paint away any areas you don’t want or need. You can also paint on the Smart Filters mask on each layer to help hide distorted areas. By separating the displacement into layers we can keep the best parts of each and hide the rest. Once you’re done you can see the result is a pretty convincing stylized effect. Remember the displacement images are contained in smart objects, so if you want to switch out the subject for another, just go into the smart object by double-clicking its thumbnail in the Layers panel. Add the new subject, and then save the changes and close the smart object. It will update the image with the same displacement maps. Then you’d just need to rework the masking a bit, but you’ll save a lot of time!

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STEP 24: Now let’s add some finishing effects to wrap it up. First, select the Main Splash layer in the Layers panel, click on the Add a Layer Style icon (ƒx) at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Outer Glow. For the color, we’re using a brighter green to enhance the green highlight of the background. Notice the Size is maxed out at 250 px and the Spread is set to 0%. Also, set the Blend Mode to Soft Light and lower the Opacity to around 75%. These settings can vary depending on the color of your background. Sometimes Overlay mode might work better but here Soft Light works fine! Click OK when done. STEP 25: To help blend the hair on the subject a bit more, Rightclick on the Main Splash layer and choose Copy Layer Style. Then Right-click on the first displacement layer with the white displacement map and choose Paste Layer Style to copy the Outer Glow. This not only enhances the overall glow more, but also hides small imperfections in the hair. We’re pretty much done with the overall ef fect. The last thing we did was to add a simple design element to the background. You can see how that ’s done by watching this short video. Hopefully, you now have a deeper understanding of how displacement maps work and how you can get creative by separating the tones into multiple maps, which also gives you more control over the distortion, especially when using smart objects! n

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KIRK NELSON

PHOTOSHOP DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS

CREATE YOUR OWN METALLIC TITLE TEXT EFFECT Crafting fun title treatments is one of those tasks for which Photoshop seems intentionally built. Who doesn’t love a bright, shiny metallic title? Accomplishing this effectively is an exploration in layer styles and other filters, but it goes way beyond just basic Bevel & Emboss. The key is understanding the limitations of the styles and working to apply them within those constraints. Sometimes that means creating multiple layers for a single line of text; sometimes it means folding smart objects inside other smart objects. In any case, it’s a fun journey with great results! (This effect was inspired by the movie The Adam Project, now streaming on Netflix.)

STEP ONE: In Photoshop, create a new document with File>New and set the Width to 1500 pixels, the Height to 500 pixels, Resolution to 72 ppi, and the Background Contents to Black. Give the file a name, something like “Metal Title Text,” and click Create. 102

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Step Two

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put plenty of space between the letters. Now use the Move tool (V) to position the type layers as shown here. STEP THREE: Create a new layer by clicking the plus icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. Double-click the name of this layer, rename it “Text Back,” and move it below all the text layers. Then hold down Shift-Command (PC: Shift-Ctrl) and click on each of the text layer thumbnails in the Layers panel to create a selection in the shape of all the text. Set the Foreground color to a gold hue (#ffdb46), hold the Option (PC: Alt) key, and tap Delete (PC: Backspace) to fill the selection with that color. Cancel the selection with Select>Deselect. Go to Edit>Transform>Scale. In the Options Bar, make sure the Width and Height fields are still unlinked, and set the Width to 99%. Click the checkmark to apply the transformation and see that this is a quick-and-dirty way to approximate a slight 3D effect on the text.

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STEP TWO: Press D then X to set the Foreground color to white, and then use the Type tool (T) to create the main text. Use a stencil-type font such as Stenciletta, which is available at Adobe Fonts through your Creative Cloud subscription. (Just go to Type>More from Adobe Fonts in Photoshop, and when the webpage opens, sign in with your Adobe ID, search for Stenciletta, and then click the Activate Font Switch next to Stenciletta Regular to sync the font to Photoshop.) The plan is to have a light source in the middle of the title, so the text needs to be broken up into a few layers for that to work correctly. Click to create one text layer with the text to the left of the planned light source, and type “ATOM PR” at around 91 pts. Press Enter to commit the type, and then Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) for Free Transform. Up in the Options Bar, click on the chain link icon to unlink the Width and Height fields, set the Width to 148%, and press Enter. Press Enter again to commit the transformation. Click again to add another line of text to the right of the light source, and this time type “JECT” (the missing “O” will become our light source). Free Transform these letters as we just did with “ATOM PR.” Then add a third layer of type above the main text for the smaller article, “THE.” That article should be a much smaller point size, something around 33 pts. Select all three letters with the Type tool and increase the tracking to 300 in the Properties panel (Window>Properties) to

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STEP FOUR: Looking closely at some of the letters, particularly the “A” and “M,” certain points stand out that betray the fact that the gold backing isn’t truly 3D. To adjust this, use the Polygonal Selection tool (nested with the Lasso tool [L] in the Toolbar) to create small selections that will connect the top points of the gold backing to the top points of the white text. Fill the selections with the same gold color. When finished, cancel the selection with Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D).

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STEP FIVE: Starting with the first text layer, the ATOM PR text, open the Layer Style dialog by clicking the ƒx icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and choosing Bevel & Emboss. Set the Style to Inner Bevel, the Technique to Smooth, Depth to 220%, Direction to Up, Size to 3 px, and Soften to 1 px. In the Shading area, uncheck the Use Global Light box and set the Angle to 15° and the Altitude to 26°. This puts the light source to the right of the layer. Click on the Gloss Contour thumbnail and change it to Ring - Double in the Preset drop-down menu. Click OK to close the Contour Editor. Make sure the Highlight Mode is set to Screen and the color white, but increase the Opacity to 84%. The Shadow Mode should be set to Multiply with black color but reduce the Opacity to 22%. Don’t click OK yet in the Layer Style dialog.

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STEP SIX: Now add a Gradient Overlay style by clicking on it in the list on the left side of the Layer Style dialog. (Note: If you don’t see Gradient Overlay in the list on the left, click the ƒx icon at the bottom-left corner of the dialog and select it from there.) Keep the Blend Mode at Normal and the Opacity at 100%. Click on the Gradient prev iew thumbnail to open the Gradient Editor, doubleclick the lef t color stop below the gradient ramp, and set it to a mid-brown (#7e7459). Click OK to close the Color Picker. Set the right color stop to a cream color (#f7eed9). Click OK to close the Gradient Editor. Back in the Layer Style dialog, make sure the Style is set to Linear and the Angle is at 90°, then reduce the Scale to around 50%. Set the Method drop-down menu to Classic, and then click-anddrag directly on the canvas to position the gradient so the transition part is centered on the text vertically. Don’t click OK yet. STEP SEVEN: Next add a Satin layer style with the Blend Mode set to Overlay and the color to a pale yellow (#faf499). Change the Opacity to 38% and set the Size to 9 px and the Contour to the Gaussian curve. Then drag on the canvas again to position the Satin effect so it appears to be a thin reflected line on the surface of the text. This will adjust the Distance and Angle settings in the Layer Style dialog. Don’t click OK yet.

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STEP EIGHT: Just one more style to add here and that’s the Stroke layer style. Set the Size to 2 px, Position to Outside, Blend Mode to Screen, and Opacity to 100%. Change the Fill Type to Gradient. Edit the gradient to be white to black, but slide the white color stop over to a Location of 30%. Click OK to close the Gradient Editor and, back in the Layer Style dialog, set the Style to Radial and the Method to Linear. Then click-and-drag on the main canvas area to move the gradient around until it sits at the center of the first letter. Now you can click OK in the Layer Style dialog to apply all the effects.

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STEP NINE: Once that base set of layer styles is complete, it’s a much easier task to tweak them for application on the other text. Right-click on the “ATOM PR” text layer and select Copy Layer Style from the contextual menu. Then, Right-click on the “JECT ” text layer, and select Paste Layer Style. Double-click Bevel & Emboss on the “JECT” layer to open its settings. We want to move the light source to the left of the layer, so the Angle should be around 180°. Then go to the Stroke settings and drag the gradient highlight to the second to last letter in the text. Click OK.

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STEP 10: Paste the layer styles on the “THE” text layer as well. Click on the Eye icon next to the Stroke layer style to hide it. Then, Right-click on the word “Effects” just below the layer and choose Scale Effects from the contextual menu. Set the Scale to 25% to reduce the overall size of the layer effects without having to adjust the settings for each effect individually, and click OK.

STEP 11: Go to the Text Back layer and add an Inner Glow layer style. Set the Blend Mode to Overlay, Opacity to 55%, color to white, Technique to Softer, Choke to 0%, and Size to 6 px. Then add a Gradient Overlay style with the gradient using #fffeab for the left color stop and #404036 for the right color stop. Set the Style to Reflected, Angle to 180°, and Scale to 111%. Click OK.

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STEP 12: Click the top text layer in the Layers panel and then Shift-click the Text Back layer to select all of the text layers. Go to Layer>Smart Objects>Convert to Smart Object to combine all the text layers into a single object, and rename it “Title Text.” Then go to Image>Adjustments>Levels and pull the middle slider over to about 0.77 to slightly darken the effects on the text. Click OK.

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STEP 13: Grab the Ellipse tool (nested below the Rectangle tool [U] in the Toolbar) and set the Fill color to a pale yellow (#fef598) in the Options Bar. Hold down the Shift key to keep the shape perfectly circular and drag out a circle to fit in the gap where the “O” should be between the text layers; press-and-hold the Spacebar while drawing the circle to reposition it. Switch to the Rectangle tool and draw out a rectangular shape covering the top-right quarter of the circle. Shift-select both shape layers in the Layers panel and press Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E) to combine them. Then use the Path Selection tool (A) to click on the rectangular shape to make it active, and set the Path Operations (overlapping squares) in the Options Bar to Subtract Front Shape, which will carve out the rectangular shape from the circle. Grab the Direct Selection tool (nested below the Path Selection tool) and click on the bottom-right point on the rectangle so only that point is active. Pull down that outside corner of the rectangle to create an angle as shown here. Click Yes in the warning dialog that pops up.

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STEP 14: Duplicate the shape layer by dragging it to the Create a New Layer icon (+) at the bottom of the Layers panel, and use the Path Selection tool to make the top rectangular shape active. Set the Path Operations in the Options Bar to Intersect Shape Areas. Then tap the Up and Right Arrow keys several times to move the rectangular shape up and to the right to create the appearance of a carved-out set of clock hands.

STEP 15: Combine both shape layers into a single smart object, and rename it “Clock Face.” Add an Inner Glow layer style and set the Blend Mode to Soft Light, Opacity to 100%, color to a mustard yellow (#ffd306), and the Size to 6 px. Then add a Gradient Overlay style with the gradient colors set to white on the left and the same pale yellow (#fffeab) on the right, but move the white color stop to a Location of 30%. Set the Style to Radial and the Scale to 100%. Next, add an Outer Glow style with the Blend Mode at Screen, Opacity at 64%, Noise at 0%, color at another pale yellow (#f f f47b), the Spread at 7%, Size at 84 px, and Range at 50%. Click OK to apply the layer styles. Finish off this layer by adding a Gaussian Blur from Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and use a Radius of 0.5 Pixels to add just a touch of softness to the shape.

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STEP 16: Add a new layer above the Clock Face layer and name it “Light Glow.” Set the Foreground color to a dull yellow (#ffdb46), and grab the Gradient tool (G). Click on the gradient preview thumbnail in the Options Bar to open the Gradient Editor, select the Foreground to Transparent preset in the Basics set, and click OK. Select the Radial Gradient icon in the Options Bar and, starting at the center of the circular shape, drag the gradient outward to the letter “T” to create the glow. Change the layer’s blend mode to Screen near the top left of the Layers panel and reduce the Opacity to 55%.

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STEP 17: Go to the Title Text smart object layer and press Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A) to Select All. Then press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to copy the pixels to a new layer. Set the blending mode to Linear Dodge (Add) to use this layer to create a bright effect on the text beneath it. Go to Layer>Layer Mask>Hide All. Grab the Brush tool (B) and use a Soft Round brush with white paint (press D) on the mask to paint in the brightening effect on the letters adjacent to the light source.

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STEP 18: Add a new layer at the top of the layer stack and name it “gleam.” Go to Edit>Fill, set the Contents drop-down menu to Black, and click OK to fill the layer with black. Turn the layer into a smart object, go to Filter>Render>Lens Flare,

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If you tend to avoid layer styles because the default Bevel & Emboss and Drop Shadow are tired and overused, you’re not wrong! But there’s a lot of capability

within that dialog well beyond the familiar defaults. Don’t be afraid to explore and craft something new and exciting. n

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select the Movie Prime flare at 25% Brightness, and click OK. This filter will always render the gleam lines at an angle. The best way to get them to be horizontal is to fold the layer into yet another smart object (Layer>Smart Objects>Convert to Smart Object), and then use Free Transform to rotate the layer so the brightest gleam line is horizontal. Press Enter to commit the transformation. Set the blending mode to Screen to render the black pixels invisible and, finally, add a Hue/Saturation adjustment (Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation). Check the Colorize option, set the Hue to 53 and Saturation to 44, and click OK. Use the Move tool to position the center of the flare at the top right of the “T” in “ATOM.”

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LESA SNIDER

BEGINNERS’ WORKSHOP

CREATING COLORED STUDIO LIGHTING Bathing the subject of a photograph in colored studio lighting can completely change the mood and feel of the image. And, thanks to Photoshop, you don’t even need a real studio to get it done. In this column, you’ll learn how to use Gradient Fill layers to add diagonal pink and blue studio lighting to a portrait. This technique is easy, flexible, and full of creative potential. Let’s get started!

©Adobe Stock/Dima Aslanian

STEP ONE: Choose File>Open and navigate to a photo, such as this free one from Adobe Stock. (If you’re starting in Lightroom, select a thumbnail in the Library module and then choose Photo>Edit In>Edit In Adobe Photoshop 2022.) This technique looks especially good on portraits with a dark background, but feel free to try it on anything. If you’d like to download this image to follow along, click this link, log in with your Adobe ID, and click the License for Free button. This will download the 112

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Step Two

STEP TWO: Click the half-black/halfwhite icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Gradient. This creates a Gradient Fill layer, which we’ll use to make one of the studio lights.

STEP THREE: In the Gradient Fill dialog that opens, click the down-pointing triangle to the right of the Gradient preview (circled). In the Gradient Picker panel that opens, click the triangle to the left of the Basics folder and then pick the second thumbnail (also circled), which is the Foreground to Transparent gradient (don’t worry about the color because we’ll change it in the next step). Click an empty spot inside the Gradient Fill dialog to close the Gradient Picker. Next, make sure the Style menu is set to Linear, change the Angle to around 150°, and then change the Scale to around 15% (for a harder transition edge). Keep the Gradient Fill dialog open. STEP FOUR: Now let’s change the gradient color. In the Gradient Fill dialog, click atop the Gradient preview (circled). In the Gradient Editor that opens, double-click the leftmost color stop below the horizontal gradient preview bar (also circled).

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image to your computer as well as add it to your Libraries panel (Window>Libraries). Double-click the image in the Libraries panel to open it in Photoshop.

BEGI N N E RS’ WORKSHOP

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STEP FIVE: In the Color Picker that opens, drag the slider on the vertical rainbow bar into the light-blue range, and then click within the large square to choose a color (a hex value of #65b7e7 was used here, which is circled). Click OK to close the Color Picker and then OK again to close the Gradient Editor, but leave the Gradient Fill dialog open.

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STEP SIX: Now we’ll reposition the gradient so it starts on one side of the subject’s face. With the Gradient Fill dialog open, click atop the image and drag leftward so the gradient starts just to the right of her nose. If the gradient refuses to move, just click the down-pointing triangle to the right of the Scale setting (circled) and then try dragging again. Click OK to close the Gradient Fill dialog.

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STEP SEVEN: Near the top left of the Layers panel, change the blend mode menu to Color, and then lower Opacity to around 75% (both settings are circled).

STEP NINE: Double-click the duplicate fill layer thumbnail (circled), which is named Gradient Fill 1 copy. In the resulting dialog, change the Angle to around –30° and then click atop the gradient preview (also circled) to open the Gradient Editor.

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STEP EIGHT: Now repeat the previous steps to create a pink diagonal light. To save time, start by pressing Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate the Gradient Fill layer.

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STEP 10: In the Gradient Editor, double-click the left-most color stop below the gradient preview bar (circled). In the Color Picker that opens, drag the slider on the vertical rainbow bar into the pink range, and then click within the large square to choose a color (a hex value of #df65e7 was used here, which is also circled). Click OK to close the Color Picker and then click OK again to close the Gradient Editor, but leave the Gradient Fill dialog open.

STEP 11: To reposition the pink gradient, click atop the image and then drag rightward so the gradient starts on the left side of her face. Here again, if the gradient refuses to move, click the down-pointing triangle to the right of the Scale setting (circled) and then try dragging atop the image again to move the gradient start point. Click OK to close the Gradient Fill dialog.

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That’s all there is to it! Here’s the before and after version.

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Before

After

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As mentioned earlier, this technique is incredibly flexible. You can fine-tune it by adjusting layer Opacity and/or by changing the color of the lights. To do the latter, simply double-click a fill layer thumbnail to reopen the Gradient Fill dialog, click the Gradient preview to reopen the Gradient Editor, and then edit the color stop.

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document, and then press Command-V (PC: Ctrl-V) to paste the layers. If you apply this technique to another photo, you may need to adjust the positioning of the gradient starting point on one or both of the fill layers like you did earlier, but what a timesaver!

MASKING OUT THE LIGHTS APPLY TECHNIQUE TO ANOTHER PHOTO

And last but not least, if you want to hide the colored lights from part of the photo, you can use the layer mask that came along with each fill layer. For example, to hide the lights from the background, you could select your subject (Select>Subject), inverse the selection to the background (Select>Inverse), activate each fill layer mask, press X until the Foreground color is black, and then press Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace) to fill the selection with black (though that negates the look of real studio lights). The possibilities are many! Until next time, may the creative force be with you all. n

In addition, you can easily apply this technique to other photos (this one is also free from Adobe Stock, which you can find by clicking here). To do that, save the original document as a Photoshop file (choose File>Save As and pick Photoshop from the Format menu), and then Shift-click to activate both fill layers in the Layers panel. Next, open another photo in Photoshop and then drag the fill layers from the Layers panel from one document onto the filename tab of the other document (hold the cursor over the tab until the focus switches to that image, and then drop the layers directly into the image). Alternatively, you can press Command-C (PC: Ctrl-C) to copy the layers in one document, activate the other

After

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RICK SAMMON

PHOTO EFFECTS

GOT QUESTIONS? PHOTOSHOP HAS THE ANSWERS! Spoiler alert! This isn’t a technical, detailed step-by-step, how-to article on how to enhance your images in Photoshop. Rather, it’s more of a philosophical homily on how Photoshop can help you create the images you see in your mind’s eye.

ALL IMAGES BY RICK SAMMON

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I had other titles in mind for this article: “Awaken the Artist Within with Photoshop,” “Don’t Delete,” “Reality Leaves a Lot to the Imagination,” and “Before-and-After Adventures in Photoshop.” But “Got Questions? Photoshop Has the Answers!” won out. Here’s the basic idea: After you open an image and before you start playing with all the cool sliders in Photo shop, ask yourself the following questions: • W hat don’t I like about this image? • H ow can I rescue overexposed highlights and blocked-up shadows? • Would changing the mood help? • H ow can I get rid of that distracting background or change that background? • C an this shot be saved? • Is there an image within the image? If you take your time and use what Ansel Adams called your best photo accessory (the 12 inches behind your camera), I’m confident, due to the power of Photoshop, that you’ll wind up with more creative images and a higher percentage of keepers.

WHAT’S THE FIX? Original image

motion blur. The photo also had a bit of noise, due to the low light. I asked myself, “What’s the fix?” Well, the quick fix was to apply two Photoshop plug-ins, Topaz DeNoise AI and Topaz Sharpen AI. These before-and-after closeups show the results of running those plug-ins, plus everything I discuss in the list below.

Left: Original image; Right: After applying Topaz DeNoise AI, Topaz Sharpen AI, and Photoshop edits

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The photo, taken in St. Augustine, Florida, that opens this article is an example of questioning myself when I opened the original image on my computer. Here’s the original image to the right. I succeeded in capturing the peak of action, as well as a nice expression on the rider’s face but, because the action happened in low light (before sunrise), and because I was so excited about the shoot that I mistakenly shot at too slow a shutter speed (1/50th of a second), both the horse and rider’s heads have

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Before

After

The image had other problems:

HOW CAN I ISOLATE THE SUBJECTS?

• T he rider’s face was too dark, which I fixed by using the Dodge tool (O).

This is one of my favorite images from a recent shoot at Myakka River State Park in Florida. The scene would have been impossible to reproduce on film.

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• I couldn’t see the hair on the horse’s body because the shadows were blocked up, which was remedied by applying Clarity and Texture in Adobe Camera Raw to those areas using the Brush in the Masking tools.

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• T he sky was beyond boring, so I replaced it using one of the stock sky choices in Photoshop’s Sky Replacement feature (found under the Edit menu). I know! Using a stock sky isn’t the best option, as other photographers may use the same sky. Rather, it’s best to use one of your own sky photographs. I used the stock sky, for now, because I don’t have a sky that fits the color and mood of the original image. So, Scott Kelby, please forgive me for using the stock sky.

☺

• F inally, I cropped the image for more impact. Final

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STEP ONE: First, I used the Object Selection tool (W) set to Lasso Mode in the Options Bar to draw a loose

selection of the egret. Photoshop’s AI then worked its magic to select the egret. If you have Object Finder turned on in the Options Bar, Photoshop automatically tries to determine all the subjects in the image. Once it’s done (it can take a few seconds), if you hover your cursor over a subject, it will be highlighted in blue. So all I had to do to add the spoonbill to the selection was hold the Shift key and then click once on the spoonbill. As you can see in the screenshot below, the lower part of the egret’s legs, as well as the water between the spoonbill’s legs, weren’t selected. That wasn’t a big deal, as those areas were dark anyway, and I knew that, by using a small brush size, I could work on them independently. STEP TWO: Next, I went to Select>Select Inverse so the background was selected instead of the birds. Once selected, I reduced the exposure on the background using a Curves adjustment layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Curves), which used the selection to create a mask. In the Properties panel (Window>Properties), I pulled the center of the curve down toward the bottom-right corner. Just a small adjustment makes a big difference.

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Above is the original image. My main questions: How can I isolate the two beautiful birds, an egret and roseate spoonbill, from the distracting background; and how can I get rid of the small spoonbill’s butt and the other bird’s chopped off head in the foreground? Cropping and cloning would eliminate the smaller birds, but let's take a closer look at how I fixed the background and made the two main subjects stand out. The basic idea was to increase the contrast range.

PHOTO EFFECTS

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STEP THREE: Then I wanted to apply a Gaussian Blur (Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur) to create a depth-of-field effect. I clicked back on the Background layer in the Layers panel to make it active, pressed Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate it, and then Command-clicked (PC: Ctrl-clicked) the layer mask thumbnail on the Curves adjustment layer to reload the selection. At that point, I could apply the Gaussian Blur just to the background. STEP FOUR: As a final step, I inversed the selection again, used the Dodge tool to lighten the birds’ faces and necks, and applied a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to boost the colors in the birds.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

As long as we’re talking about questions and answers, I’d like to insert a Photoshop joke here: “How many

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Photoshop instructors does it take to change a lightbulb?” Answer: “Ninety-nine, and one to screw it in.” The point of this joke? There are many ways to reach the goals you want to achieve in Photoshop.

HOW CAN I CHANGE THE MOOD? Here’s another “keeper” from my Myakka shoot. Honestly, I call this a “Dumb Luck” shot because of the ballerina-like position of the beautiful bird’s wings. (Scott Kelby calls this a “Getting Even Shot,” that is, getting even for all the times we go out as photographers and everything seems to work against us, such as light, weather, and subject.) What added to my “luck,” however, was being prepared with the right gear for fast-paced action (a Canon EOS R3 with a Canon RF100–500mm lens), and observing the bird’s behavior, which as KelbyOne instructors

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Juan Pons and Moose Peterson know is key to getting good wildlife photographs. The original image has many of the same problems as the previous straight-out-of-the-camera shot. After I made similar adjustments, I found myself questioning the mood (due to the dull brownish water) of the image, as mood matters most in photographs.

PHOTO EFFECTS

The original has one main problem: the animals are backlit and in the shade, resulting in a flat picture with little contrast and color. In looking at the original I asked myself these questions: • H ow can I convey that intimate moment most effectively? Cropping for a close-up was the answer. • H ow can I fix the lighting? Adding Contrast and Vibrance in Camera Raw was the solution. • H ow can I get a clearer image? Surprisingly, Dehaze in Camera Raw was the answer. • H ow can I create a nice mood? Applying the Duplex filter in Nik Color Efex did the trick. • H ow can I draw more attention to the animals? Applying the Darken/Lighten filter in Nik Color Efex let me achieve that goal.

Original

To change the mood, I changed the Color Balance (Image>Adjustments>Color Balance) by boosting Blue and Cyan. Yes, the egret took on a bluish cast, which I like because the end-result picture looks as though it could have been taken at night. As a final step, I used the Dodge tool to lighten the bubbles behind the magnificent bird.

CAN THIS SHOT BE SAVED? Here’s a favorite photo safari image. It captures an intimate moment between a mommy cheetah and her cute cubs. Final

Original

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Well, my friends, have fun working and playing in Photoshop. Don’t delete. Remember that reality leaves a lot to the imagination, so enjoy your adventures in Photoshop. n

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SCOTT VALENTINE

PHOTOSHOP PROVING GROUND

CREATING CUSTOM CROP OVERLAYS The overlay feature in Photoshop’s Crop tool is a great way to use common composition guides when cropping your photos. You have diagonals, rule of thirds, golden ratio, golden spiral, triangles, and a basic grid. To activate these overlays, choose the Crop tool (C) and, in the Options Bar, click the drop-down menu just to the right of the Straighten option. Scott Valentine

While this is a great help when you’re ready to crop your photo, what if you just want to explore different options without actually cropping? Guide layouts work well for grids and rule-of-thirds compositions, but even these are generally locked in to the current size and orientation of your canvas. Having an overlay of various composition guides would really be handy, so let ’s build a golden spiral and see how we can put it to good use before we crop! Note: You may be wondering why not simply use guides, especially for rule of thirds and grids? Great question, and I’m glad you asked! When guides are created from the menu, they use the canvas edges to calculate their relative 124

positions. If you’re going to crop, transform, and rotate, the guide layout isn’t much use up front on the original image. STEP ONE: The golden spiral is built from a special sequence of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. All we need to remember about it for Photoshop purposes is “13 minus 8.” With a rectangular image open, create a new guide layout (View>New Guide Layout) with 13 columns along the long edge, and 8 rows along the short edge. Ensure that Clear Existing Guides is checked, and there are no gutters or margins. The idea here is to build a series of boxes from these guides. While they won’t be perfect squares, they’ll

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PHOTOSHOP PROVING GROUND

represent the correct ratio. I’ll refer to each area enclosed by guides as a “unit” for clarity, so the grid shown here is 13x8 units. STEP TWO: Create a blank layer at the top of your layer stack. STEP THREE: Select the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) and ensure snapping is set to on (View>Snap). Starting from the bottom-left corner of your document, drag out a selection of 8x8 units. That should be the complete short edge, and just over half of the long edge.

Step One

STEP FOUR: Stroke the selection (Edit>Stroke) with 20 px and a bright color, making sure the Center option is selected for Location. Click OK. Note: I’ve lowered the opacity of the image to make the selected area easier to see. STEP FIVE: Repeat the process using the next size down in the Fibonacci sequence. You have that memorized, right? If not, here’s the trick: 13 8 5 3 2 -

8 5 3 2 1

= = = = =

5 3 2 1 1

Each square will start from where the previous one left off so, in this case, since we created an area of 8x8 units on the left, the next will be 5x5 at the top right, then 3x3 at the bottom right, etc. Here’s a map of the pattern, showing the order and starting and ending point of each marquee selection. Stroke each selection region, then move on to the next. The order is important! Press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) when done to deselect.

Arrows showing which direction to drag each marquee selection

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• • • • •

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STEP SIX: Use the Curvature Pen tool (nested with the Pen tool [P] in the Toolbar) and start clicking (don’t drag!) each of the intersections in the same order. The image here shows where you should click each point and the order in which you should click. The Curvature Pen tool will automatically create curves that are close enough. Again, it won’t be a perfect golden spiral, but it will be close enough for our purposes.

Numbers indicate clicking order with Curvature Pen

STEP SEVEN: Once the path is complete, switch to the Brush tool (B) and choose a round brush with the Size at 20 px, Hardness at 100%, and no other options. Again, use an appropriate color for visibility over your image. Go to the Paths panel (Window>Paths) and, at the bottom, you’ll see a solid outline of a circle. Click that icon to stroke the path with the current brush settings.

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The green line represents the resulting path from clicking with the Curvature Pen tool

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STEP EIGHT: At this point, you can turn off or clear the guides and path. You should be left with a spiral and the outlined grid pattern. Now the fun begins! Notice that the spiral seems to have nothing to do with the content of the image, so we need to transform it. Right-click on the spiral layer in the Layers panel and choose Convert to Smart Object so we can work nondestructively. Finally, double-click the name of this layer and rename it “Spiral.”

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Tip: We’re going to use the Image>Crop command shortly, and for that to work properly, the composition guide needs to be aligned with the actual canvas edges. Stick to using the Rotate and Flip commands under the Edit>Transform menu, then you can fine-tune by rotating the image layer instead. That keeps the guide layer perfectly aligned with the canvas.

STEP 10: After some additional transform commands (scaling and stretching in particular), I have the image elements more or less where I want them. At this point, if I were only interested in cropping I could have simply used the Crop tool straight away. So why bother with this particular technique?

STEP 11: Now that I have my cropping guide, I can see more clearly that there are some problem areas, specifically the vertical lines. Rather than fiddling with the crop overlay, I can simply transform the image. Make a copy of your photo layer (Command-J [PC: Ctrl-J]), convert it to a smart object, and use Edit>Free Transform to adjust the perspective of the image as needed. After a little straightening, it’s time to actually crop the image.

STEP 12: Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on the Spiral layer to load it as a selection, then use Image>Crop to perfectly fit the image bounds to your composition guide.

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STEP NINE: Now we can treat the golden spiral layer like any other layer and transform it to our heart’s content. For this hummingbird image, I want to start by rotating the guide 180° (Edit>Transform>Rotate 180°). The image still doesn’t quite work, though.

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RETOUCHING AND DESIGN

Pexels/Tolga Ahmetler

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Keeping a composition guide visible can also be used to help other retouching choices, such as using dodge and burn to lead the viewer’s eye to a specific area. This image of leaves can be spiced up a bit with a little composition dodge-andburn goodness. And, of course, using guide overlays is a great way to manage design work as well (see next page).

LESS THAN TECHNICAL Keep in mind that the spiral we created above isn’t technically perfect because the aspect ratio doesn’t create perfect squares when we divide them up. You certainly could start by making the canvas size into a golden ratio (it’s called “phi” in case you want to research this online), but the point of these guides is to give you some kind of reference and consistency, not to ensure technical accuracy. There’ll always be more to composition than hair-fine alignment and math.

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Original image

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Using the overlay to guide dodge-and-burn choices

Final cropped image

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The general approach of creating a visual guide can be applied to the other popular composition methods and stored in a CC Library for use whenever you need. Some of the guides don’t lend themselves well to scaling, though. A popular one for laying out diagonals uses lines that must always meet at the corners of the image, but also maintain orthogonality or a right angle. If you transform the guide and change the aspect ratio, the guide becomes far less accurate.

I’m sure there are those of you thinking that you could find some templates online and use blend modes, or just trace the guides. Okay, if you want to take the easy way out, that ’s certainly fine. But consider the wow! factor when you sit down at someone else’s workstation and whip up a Fibonacci spiral in a few seconds (just remember “13 minus 8”!). And really, what ’s the point of working in Photoshop if we aren’t out to impress someone? n

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Pexels/Mary Nikitina

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DAVE CLAYTON

DESIGNING IN PHOTOSHOP

LET’S DO THE TYPE WARP! If you’ve been following my tutorials, you’ll know I love retro/vintage effects and anything typographical. So this issue we’re going to look at some type-warping techniques in Photoshop to give your images and designs that little extra. So many Photoshop users don’t realize how much they can do with type, and how easy it is to stylize it with the built-in effects. So get Photoshop fired up and let’s start creating some fun type designs!

WARP FACTOR 1

STEP TWO: ADD TYPE

Thanks to Photoshop’s wonderful versatility, we can warp text in several different ways. In this first method, we’re going to warp it manually.

Grab the Type tool (T), press D to set your Foreground color to black, click in your document, and type the word “PHOTOSHOP” in Bebas Neue Bold (available from Adobe Fonts with your CC subscription by going to Type>More from Adobe Fonts), or any bold font you have on your system, at 126 pt. You can also adjust the tracking to bring the letters a little closer if you wish by selecting them with the Type tool and using the tracking setting (space between letters) in the Properties

STEP ONE: CREATE NEW DOCUMENT Start a new document (File>New) that’s 1920x1080 px at 300 ppi and RGB Color (just for the purpose of this tutorial; if you wish to print, select a print output size and CMYK Color). Click Create. 130

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STEP THREE: PREPARE FOR WARP Right-click the type layer in the Layers panel and select Convert to Smart Object. You can’t use warp on live text using this method but you can on a smart object, enabling you to edit the type at any time by opening the smart object.

STEP FOUR: ADD BACKGROUND IMAGE

Pexels/Pixabay

Ideally, you’re warping the text for a specific reason, such as to fit a particular shape or to

make a really funky design for a sticker or logo. In this example, we’re going to replicate the style of the famous Nirvana album, Nevermind, where the word “Nevermind” was warped to mimic being under water. So, using a free image from pexels.com that you can find here, go to File>Place Embedded, navigate to the downloaded image, and click Place. Use the bounding box to resize the water image to fill the canvas, and press Enter to commit it. Drag it below the type layer in the Layers panel.

STEP FIVE: BEGIN WARPING With the type layer selected in the Layers panel, either press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to activate Free Transform, Right-click inside the bounding box, and choose Warp, or you can go directly to Edit>Transform>Warp. You’ll see the bounding box has a small node at each corner, and each node has two warp control handles that move independently of each other.

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panel (Window>Properties). We’ve set tracking to –10. Tip: With the letters selected, hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and tap the Left or Right Arrow key on your keyboard to change the tracking. Press Enter to commit the type.

DESIGNING IN PHOTOSHOP

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PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

Now, using the handles and clicking-and-dragging anywhere within the type, start to pull and push it around to reshape the word. The warp control is very powerful, giving you full control over your type as if it were putty. (Warning: Like anything in Photoshop, if you push the warp too far, you’ll start to see some pixelation problems, but done judiciously, it’s a great tool.) Once you’re happy with warp, click the Commit Transform checkmark in the top Options Bar or just press Enter on the keyboard. Even though you’ve now committed the warp, you can always go back and refine it. Just activate the Warp command again and you can continue to reshape the word right from where you left off. That’s how to warp manually.

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size so it still fits inside the smart object. In this example, we changed the word to “NEVERMORE.” To finish, we’ll add a subtle outer glow layer style. With the type layer active, click on the ƒx icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and select Outer Glow. In the Layer Style dialog, use the following settings and then click OK. • Blend Mode: Normal • Opacity: 50% • Noise: 50% • C lick the gradient thumbnail, double-click the left color stop below the gradient ramp, click on a light-green color in the water to sample it, click OK to close the Color Picker, and click OK to close the Gradient Editor.

STEP SIX: ADD EFFECTS

• Technique: Softer

What if you wanted to keep this warp, but change the word? Just double-click on the type layer’s thumbnail in the Layers panel to open the smart object in a separate file, change the word using the Type tool, and then save the file and close it. Note: If your new word is longer than your original word you may need to change its tracking or

• Spread: 50% • Size: 50 px • Range: 100% • Jitter: 0% • Leave everything else at their defaults.

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WARP FACTOR 2 Now let’s take a look at another method for warping text. This time we’re going to use one of the built-in warp effects to make a banner ribbon for a logo or crest.

STEP ONE: NEW DOCUMENT Start another new document (File>New) that’s once again 1920x1080 px at 300 ppi and RGB Color. Using the Type tool, type the word “PHOTOSHOP,” again using Bebas Neue Bold (or any bold font you have on your system) set to black. Set the font size a little smaller this time at 80 pt.

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STEP TWO: ADD CUSTOM SHAPE To begin our design, we’re going to use a custom shape for one of our elements. Before we do that, however, click the Eye icons next to both the type layer and Background layer in the Layers panel to hide them for now so we can see what we’re doing without distraction. To access custom shapes, click-and-hold on the Rectangle tool (U) in the Toolbar and, at the bottom of the stack of flyout tools, you’ll see a blob, which is the Custom Shape tool. Once selected, go up to the Options Bar and make sure the Tool Mode is set to Shape. Now you could use the Custom Shape Picker to select your custom shape while you’re here in the Options Bar, but we’re going to use the Shapes panel instead by going to Window>Shapes. The reason we’re using the Shapes panel is that we’re going to use an older shape that’s no longer visible by default in the Custom Shape Picker because newer versions of Photoshop decided to hide those old custom shapes. So, if you don’t see a set (folder) in the Shapes panel called “Legacy Shapes and More,” just click on the flyout menu at the top right of the panel and select Legacy Shapes and More, which will automatically add this set to the list. Expand that set, then expand the All Legacy Default Shapes set, followed by the Symbols set. Select the crest shape as shown, which is Sign 6. Holding the Shift key, click-and-drag in your document to draw a crest that’s around 672x678 px. Then, in the Properties panel (Window>Properties), set the Fill to No Color, and change the Stroke to black at 50 px.

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STEP THREE: WARP THE TYPE Now make your PHOTOSHOP type visible again by clicking where its Eye icon used to be in the Layers panel, and make sure it’s the topmost layer in the layer stack. If you just want to warp the type itself, double-click the type layer’s thumbnail in the Layers panel to select all the text, and then in the Options Bar, you’ll see an icon for Create Warped Text (it’s a T sitting on a curve). Click

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

that icon to activate the Warp Text dialog. From the Style drop-down menu, select Rise, set the Bend value to 50%, and click OK. Use the Move tool to drag the type into position. Even though the text now has a wave, it’s still live type.

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This design still needs something else, however, so this is where we’ll try something a little different. Let’s try creating a rectangular shape around the type first and then warping the type and a shape at the same time, so press Command-Z (PC: Ctrl-Z) to undo the warped text before moving on to the next step.

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STEP FOUR: WARP THE TYPE & SHAPE

to the Create Warped Text, except this time it’s a small grid shape sitting on a curve. Click this icon to activate the control for warp. To the left of this icon in the Options Bar, click the drop-down menu for Warp, select Rise, and set the Bend value to 50 to match the previous wave of the type, but this time it will warp the smart object instead. Click the checkmark in the Options Bar, or press Enter to commit the warp. Use the Move tool to position the banner. Once you’ve mastered warping text and shapes, you can then drop in backgrounds; change the colors of the Fill and Stroke of the shapes, as well as the text; and add effects to the shapes to give the design more impact. And it’s all completely editable.

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Background: Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

Select the Rectangle tool (U) and draw a rectangle around the type. This will be our ribbon. Move it below the type layer in the Layers panel but above the crest layer. In the Properties panel, set its Fill to white and Stroke to black at 50 pt. Also, click on the Sign 6 layer in the Layers panel, and then set its Fill to white in the Properties panel. Click on the type layer and then Shift-click the Rectangle layer so they’re both selected in the Layers panel. Rightclick on either layer and select Convert to Smart Object, which will combine both layers into a single smart object. Press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) for Free Transform and, up in the Options Bar, you’ll now see a similar icon

DESIGNING IN PHOTOSHOP

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WARP FACTOR 3 In this last example we’re going to use Perspective Warp to create a folded effect.

STEP ONE: ADD BACKGROUND I downloaded an Adobe Stock image of a brick wall, which is simple enough to find online or you can shoot your own (you can find the image we’re using by clicking here). Place this image into your new file and size it to fill the image. ©Adobe Stock/ParinPIX

Start another new document that’s once again 1920x1080 px at 300 ppi and RGB Color. This is going to be another combined warp, but this time we’ll use Perspective Warp on an image and type. Of course, you can do this on just the type using the same method.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

STEP TWO: ADD TYPE

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Next, click on the Foreground color swatch near the bottom of the Toolbar, set the color to #ffedc9, and click OK to close the Color Picker. Grab the Type tool and type the words “PHOTOSHOP WARP” at 35 pt in the font of your choice. Press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) multiple times to duplicate the type layer, and use the Move tool to stack them in two columns as shown here until the text fills most of the frame. With the top type layer active, Shift-click the image layer to select all the type layers and the image layer. Right-click on one of the selected layers and choose Convert to Smart Object.

DESIGNING IN PHOTOSHOP

STEP THREE: SET UP THE WARP Before we begin creating the warp, let ’s set up some guides to help us. Go to View>New Guide Layout and, in the New Guide Layout dialog, set Columns to 5 (you can use more if needed). Make sure everything else is turned off or set to 0, and click OK. With the smart object layer active in the Layers panel, go to Edit>Perspective Warp (you’ll see a little pop-up window with instructions on defining planes). Now click-anddrag out the first warp plane starting at the far left guide just above the top of the canvas down below the canvas to the second guide (it should snap to the guides). Then click at the third guide just above the canvas at the same approximate height as the first warp plane, and drag down and to the left to the bottom right point on the original warp grid. This will snap the new grid to the first grid. Repeat this three more times so that you have five warp planes that are all connected.

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STEP FOUR: WARP THE CORNERS Go up to the left side of the Options Bar and click Warp, which enables the perspective control. You can now click-and-drag control points to distort both the text and wall to make corners. Click-and-drag

every other point as shown here to make zigzag patterns at both the top and bottom of the image to get a realistic perspective warp. You can set manual horizontal guides to help line up the perspective by pressing Command-R (PC: Ctrl-R) to show the rulers and dragging down guides from the top ruler. Press Enter or click the checkmark in the Options Bar to commit the warp.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

Now you have a realistic folded wall and text.

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You can go back into the type layer in the smart object and add some distressed effects to the type using the Blend If sliders in the Blending Options section of the Layer Style dialog (check out my tutorial on recreating a Banksy style stencil effect in the April 2021 issue of Photoshop User). So that’s three cool ways to warp text and create some fun looks to accompany your images in your design projects. There’s so much more under the hood of the Type tool and type effects that I’ll be covering in future tutorials. n

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TERRY WHITE

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Q. Sometimes when I go to the Properties panel, the Remove Background quick action button isn’t there. Why is that? A. Remove Background is a quick action in Photoshop,

Q. I ’m about to buy a new computer to run Photoshop. Can you recommend which one I should get? A. I f I had to say which questions come up the most

and it can be found in the Properties panel (Window>Properties) as well as the Discover panel (click the search/magnifying glass in the upper-right corner in the Options Bar). When you go to the Properties panel, the Remove Background button will only show up if you have a regular layer selected, not the Background layer. Simply converting your Background layer to a regular layer by clicking its lock icon in the Layers panel will make the Remove Background button appear. If you run it from the Discover panel, however, it will run even if you haven’t converted your Background to a layer yet.

often concerning Photoshop, this one is probably in the top three. It’s also one of the hardest ones to answer because it’s a balancing act between recommending the best performer for the amount of money you’re willing to spend. It’s also a matter of what kind of Photoshop work you’ll be doing. Will you be working on high-resolution images all the time with lots of layers? That’s a very different level of need than the person who does retouching with only a few layers. Then there’s the platform question. Are you going with a PC or a Mac? Do you care which one? How long do you want it to last before having to upgrade to a newer model? If you upgrade every couple of years, then you may be able to get by with a lower-end computer since it doesn’t have to last 5–6 years. If you keep the same computer for 3–5 years, then I’d most likely recommend a higher-end configuration because it will last longer considering the changing demands of the operating system and Photoshop in the years to come. Rather than picking a specific model, it’s always easier to recommend the fastest processor, with the most RAM and storage that you can afford. RAM is the first thing on which I’d spend money, and I’d go with at least 32 GB of RAM. Then you’ll want a fast GPU (graphics processing unit) because many of Photoshop’s operations are now aimed at the graphics processor to relieve stress off the CPU (central processing unit). A fast CPU is the next most important thing, and more cores will benefit Photoshop too. Also, make sure you get a fast enough and big enough hard drive. The more RAM you have, however, the less important it will be that you have a superfast hard drive because it won’t be using virtual memory as much. If you’re getting a Mac, there’s a significant speed advantage in the new Apple Silicon Macs over the previous Intel generation. You may find a great deal on the Intel models, but you’re giving up on speed.

ALL IMAGES BY TERRY WHITE, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

PHOTOSHOP Q&A

Q. How can I place a new image on a smartphone screen if the screen is at an angle in the photo? A. T his is a compositing trick that we use all the time. You have a device screen that you want to put your message on but rarely is the screen flat. In this example, I started with a stock image of someone holding a smartphone and then did the following:

PHOTOSHOP Q&A

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1. I took a screenshot from my iPhone and placed it on top of the stock photo in Photoshop. 2. N ext, I pressed Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) for Free Transform, Right-clicked inside the bounding box, and chose Distort. 3. W hen in the Distort mode, I dragged the corners of the screenshot to match the screen on the phone, and pressed Enter to commit the transformation. 4. S ince the phone’s screen has rounded corners, I needed to mask the sharp corners of the screenshot, so I temporarily hid the screenshot layer by clicking its Eye icon in the Layers panel. 5. W ith the phone image layer active in the Layers panel, I used the Quick Selection tool (nested with the Object Selection tool [W] in the Toolbar) to select the white screen of the stock photo.

7. F inally, I clicked the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square) at the bottom of the Layers panel to mask the screenshot using the selection so that it fit inside the rounded corners of the screen.

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6. T hen I made the screenshot layer active again, and clicked where its Eye icon used to be to make it visible.

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PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

Q. W hile using the Clone Stamp tool I accidentally brought up the Clone Source panel. This looks interesting. What’s it for? A. T he Clone Stamp (S) has been around since the

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beginning of Photoshop, and the Clone Source panel (Window>Clone Source) was added back in the CS days. It really adds a lot of power to the Clone Stamp tool, especially if you have a lot of cloning to do. At the top of the panel are five Clone Source icons. Each one can be assigned a different source in your image. Click the first Clone Source icon at the top of the panel, and then Option-click (PC: Alt-click) on an area of your image to make that the source for the first brush. Now click the second Clone Source icon in the panel, and Option-click (PC: Alt-click) on another area of the image to make that area the source for the second brush. You can do all five, if needed. Now, as you use the Clone Stamp tool, you can switch sources just by clicking any of the five Clone Source icons in the Clone Source panel.

Q. In the last issue, you mentioned a way to run Photoshop plug-ins on an M1 Mac that weren’t native by running Photoshop in Rosetta mode. Are there any other features that aren’t yet native on M1 Macs? A. Yes, there are a few more features as of the date of this article that haven’t been made native yet on Apple Silicon Macs. Here they are:

• Import, export, and playback of embedded video layers

• Shake Reduction filter • Preset syncing • Share an Image/Quick Share • Opening or placing U3D formatted files • Starting Bridge from Photoshop menus. n

If you have a Photoshop question that you’d like Victoria Pavlov to answer in the pages of Photoshop User magazine, send it to letters@photoshopuser.com.

Since Lightroom first launched 15 years ago, Scott Kelby’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers has been the world’s #1 top-selling Lightroom book, and in this latest version, Scott did his biggest update ever, sharing all his newest techniques, insights, and invaluable tips using his award-winning, plain-English style that makes learning Lightroom easy and fun. This is the first and only book to bring the whole process together in such a clear, concise, and visual way. There is no faster, more straight-to-the-point, or more fun way to learn Lightroom.

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GET THE SCOOP ON THE LATEST GEAR

3 Legged Thing QR11 2.0

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

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Arca Swiss-Compatible Universal L-Bracket | Review by Dave Williams

The QR11 2.0 L-Bracket by 3 Legged Thing is a universal system designed to simplify the process of switching your camera from landscape to portrait orientation, and it does its job perfectly. Because of this, it’s difficult to write a lot about this product to review it, but here goes! It’s available in two sizes: Standard and Full Body/Gripped. The latter is for taller cameras, but they both have the same size base. Both are made up of two pieces that can be separated using the provided Toolz, which means that storage is optimized if you need to break it up to fit into a tight space. There are two 1/4"20 female threads on the vertical piece so you can attach items to it, such as a camera sling, microphone, or anything with a 1/4"-20 male thread. The side piece is detachable so that it can be reversed, allowing access to ports and connections on a variety of cameras. The plates will mount to a 3 Legged Thing Airhed, or to any Arca-Swiss compatible clamp on your ballhead in either orientation, which is why this item is necessary in most photographers’ gear. In a world where it’s tough to balance the importance of tall versus wide photos, particularly when shooting for social media where tall photos always win, it’s important that we can quickly switch between the two. Doing so with a QR11 makes it so simple it can be done in

Company: 3 Legged Thing, Ltd

Price: Standard: $59.99; Full Body/Gripped: $69.99

Hot: Does its job perfectly

Not:

“In a world where it’s tough to balance the importance of tall versus wide photos, particularly when shooting for social media where tall photos always win, it’s important that we can quickly switch between the two.”

REVIEWS

seconds with minimal variation to the perspective, and no hindrance to the weight distribution of the camera over the tripod. The whole point of an L-bracket is to enable photographers to move easily between landscape and portrait orientation while maintaining the horizon line. Where a lot of L-brackets are simply a hunk of metal without a lot of thought having gone into them, the 3 Legged Thing QR11 2.0 seems to have been designed with careful consideration given to a photographer’s needs, including the newly added cut-out “notch” on the base plate that affords access to the pull-out LCD screens available on most new camera models. The thing that really sets it apart from competitors is the price point versus the build quality. The engineering and the thought that has gone into it is on point, and at around one third the cost of the nearest competition, it’s getting a solid 5 stars from me. n

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Topaz Labs Sharpen AI v4.0.2

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

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Intelligent Sharpener Gives You Tack-Sharp Yet Natural Photos | Review by Dave Williams

Topaz Labs has a range of software aimed at helping us fix photographic problems, and the launch of their AI range is really helping to make these fixes quite special. The machine learning of the AI in each of their apps (and plug-ins) identifies and fixes problems in images, including in the new Sharpen AI version 4. The results are quite mind-blowing, to be honest! When you load a photo into Sharpen AI, it first sets its algorithms to work to ascertain what it thinks you’re looking at fixing, and it usually gets it right the first time. There are tricks and techniques we can employ using Adobe Photoshop to sharpen our photos, and I teach those techniques, so it does feel strange succumbing to a piece of software and potentially doing myself out of work; but I have to say that Sharpen AI does a fantastic job while retaining a natural look in photos, unlike a lot of techniques that we previously used. Sharpen AI can fix motion blur, focus blur, and the general softness caused by lens blur, helping images to stand out. It does this while applying various corrections to different areas of an image. Perhaps the most important application of Sharpen AI is to fix our mistakes and salvage photos that weren’t previously usable. To test this, I used a photo that I took in Norway of the northern lights over a small town. Embarrassingly for a professional photographer, the photo is out of focus. I’d already gone over a series of techniques I was aware of in other software and I’d given up. So, I used the Sharpen AI Out of Focus – Very Blurry Sharpen Model to see if I could salvage the image, and it worked. It isn’t perfect, but it’s no longer resigned to the hard drive; it’s good enough for a social media post. The software is intuitive and, therefore, easy to use, as is the Photoshop plug-in. Exporting images is equally simple. Topaz Labs offers an exceptional range of software at great prices. I’m very happy with the Topaz Labs Sharpen AI v4.0.2 software and I’ll be using it in my regular workflow moving forward. n

Company: Topaz Labs

Price: $79.99

Hot: Excellent use of AI to achieve the best results

Not:

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Capture One Live

Live Sessions with Clients and Team Members | Review by Erik Vlietinck

Photographers working with clients or in a team will like Capture One Live. With Capture One Live, clients can follow what you’re editing or adding when shooting images tethered, give star ratings, filter which images they want to see, and give a photo a color code like the ones you can give in Capture One Pro. It works simply by setting up an album in Capture One and then dragging images to it that you want to share. Then you click the Live button, set up a password, click Start Sharing, and your photos appear on a webpage literally instantly. Copy the link and send it to your clients and you’re set to collaborate on that album. The link stays live for seven days and everything that you do on either side of the connection is sent in real time. The client can give an image a star rating in their browser, and you’ll see that star rating appear in Capture One instantly. If you change anything to an image while the client is viewing the photos, they can see your edits instantly too. When you add images to the album, a large Download icon appears on the Live web page so your client can keep on following what you do. As there are currently no communications possible via the Live sessions, it pays off to agree upon what color codes will mean. If you close Capture One while the other side is still rating, you must click the Resume Sharing button when you launch Capture One Pro the next time. You must resume sharing before the expiration date, though, as you cannot extend a Live session beyond its expiration date. It all worked well, and I can see Capture One Live as an extra selling point for photographers active in the fashion and commercial industries. n

Company: Phase One

Price: $9.99/month

Hot: Works in real time with a decent Internet connection; clients can immediately see edits and new images; ratings and color coding work exactly as in Capture One

Not: The ability to annotate or communicate would earn this 5 stars

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REVIEWS

OWC miniStack STX

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

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Mini Companion Becomes First Certified Thunderbolt 4 Storage Solution | Review by Erik Vlietinck

The miniStack from OWC has long been a Mac Mini companion device. The newest version is the miniStack STX, featuring storage and Thunderbolt 4 expansion. The miniStack STX has the same form factor as the earlier miniStack models and as a Mac Mini, but it comes in black and has a universal SATA HDD/SSD and an NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD slot. Both can be used, even in RAID, so you can expand your Mac Mini’s storage capacity to a level that previously was useful only if you owned an Intel Mac Pro. The miniStack STX also has three Thunderbolt 4 USB-C type ports to hook up USB drives, displays, A/V mixers, cameras, and tablets, as well as supports charging 60W notebooks via Thunderbolt or USB-C. It comes with a power brick and, while the top is glossy black plastic, the sides are in black aluminum. The back is home to the power port, a Kensington lock slot, and four Thunderbolt 4 ports, one of which is designated as the one to connect to your Mac, but no USB-A ports. When I hooked up the STX to my iMac, it was clear it isn’t as whisper-quiet as OWC’s recent storage units. The noise from the fan is definitely audible in a quiet office, although it isn’t high-pitched, and will be silent enough for most people. My 2-TB SSD test unit’s performance was good, but by no means comparable with OWC’s fastest. Still, a write speed of about 680MB/sec and read speed of more than 750MB/sec is fast enough for anything from photo editing to small 4K video projects. The miniStack STX is also Apple Time Machine and Windows File History ready, and can be used with Thunderbolt or USB-equipped Macs, PCs, iPads, Chromebook, and Android tablets. n

Company: OWC

Price: $599 (as tested)

Hot: Storage capacity; speed; form factor; expansion capability

Not: Fan noise

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DxO PureRAW2

DxO PureRAW2 — Zoom

DxO PureRAW 2

Versatility, Speed, and Support for Fujifilm X-Trans Cameras | Review by Erik Vlietinck

PureRAW 2 from DxO allows users to pre-process images without leaving Lightroom, and it now supports Fujifilm X-Trans cameras. There’s also improved OS integration with access via context menus, and with an iMac you won’t notice, but on a Windows PC the app now supports HiDPI displays. PureRAW was awarded the EISA Best Advanced Photo Software 2021 prize upon its release, and version 2 builds on this success, offering new features and greater efficiency. The performance improvement I was excited about, though, didn’t materialize. PureRAW 2 got stuck on “About 1 second remaining” for well over a minute, just like the first version did. You’ll see the promised speed bump only on Apple Silicon machines and on the latest Windows computers. Admittedly, speed isn’t everything. Integration with editors and even the Finder are features that support a smoother workflow. And guess what? Lightroom Classic users can Right-click on a number of RAW files and have DxO PureRAW 2 process the images, creating newly enhanced Linear DNG files back into the same folder, without having to step outside the application. If you don’t have Adobe products on your system, you can now simply Right-click an image file and select PureRAW. This works with Windows File Explorer and macOS Finder. On macOS, it goes beyond just opening the file with PureRAW as you get access to some seven Quick Actions. Of course, the biggest news is for Fujifilm X-Trans camera users. DxO PureRAW 2 supports RAW files from X-Trans sensors, bringing the truly significant benefits of DeepPRIME to Fujifilm X-T photographers. Finally, it also has a host of new camera/ lens combinations. The update to the Optics Modules of DxO PureRAW brings the total number of supported camera and lens combinations to more than 70,000. Alas, it’s only new combinations that keep being added. The Hasselblad HD50 that I once tested, still isn’t available. Some newer models are. n

Company: DxO

Price: $129; upgrade $79

Hot: Improves even near-perfect shots; DeepPRIME keeps getting better; X-Trans support; dazzling number of camera/ lens modules

Not: Lack of modules for older cameras, even the ones that you’re bound to use for a number of years

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Win in the Age of Video 

Paolo Kernahan and Narrisa Mandol | Review by Peter Bauer

The subtitle of this publication is “The Foolproof Video Marketing BluePrint for

Publisher: No Fuss Video Series

Bigger Audiences, Reliable Income and Dynamic Business Growth.” The authors, both former journalists (print and broadcast), look at integrating video into mar-

Pages: 190

keting for virtually any enterprise. The focus is on creating video-related marketing strategies. The book does look at video both as a marketing tool and as a product in and of itself. For years, photographers have been integrating video into their “product line,” especially for special events, such as weddings. Using those skills

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

to help create better marketing tools seems like a no-brainer. While the authors

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don’t go into detail on how to create video content, they do include links to 10 blogs and online videos that cover everything from equipment to lighting to audio to scripting and speaking naturally on camera. You’ll also find a link to PDFs for generating content plans and strategies.

Price: $7.99 (Kindle)

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REVIEWS

Shoot! Photography Made Easy  Simone

Soldà (author), Vera Carbone (translator) Review by Peter Bauer

There are things to like about this book; for example, there’s lots of common-sense information. It’s a little tough to read, however, seeming to be a rather literal

Publisher: Self-published

Pages: 37

translation from the original Italian. (If you speak Italian, you may find the author’s YouTube interesting; he’s quite entertaining.) In addition, the lack of example

Price: $9.90 (Kindle)

photos is a major drawback. Once you get used to the linguistic style, you may discover that the author does an excellent job of succinctly describing the primary aspects of photography. He covers the mechanical workings of cameras and lenses, exposure, composition (and the basic “rules” of composition), focus and depth of field, file formats, and postproduction. Perhaps the most interesting sections are ”Photography as a language” and “Photographic culture.” The

introduction—a starting point from which you’ll begin your study of photography. n

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author’s concluding paragraph presents this short book as an introduction to an

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COLIN SMITH

PHOTOSHOP TIPS Hello, everyone, and welcome to another enticing episode of “Photoshop Tips.” I’m feeling a little tipsy this month, so I’ve provided some timesaving tips for you in this issue. Fortunately, my tips are

ROTATE AND REVERT If you draw or paint a lot in Photoshop, you know that it’s easier to paint with the arc or your arm, and it’s difficult to get a smooth brushstroke when you’re going against the arc. For this reason, artists often rotate their paper while drawing. You can do the same with Photoshop. Tap the R key for the Rotate View tool and you can click-anddrag to rotate your canvas to make it easier to work with. Okay, that’s a feature, not really a tip. Here’s the tip: Instead of struggling to put the canvas back to its original orientation, or reaching for the Reset View button in the Options Bar, just simply tap the Esc key at any time to reset the canvas.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

DON’T STACK IT, SMART OBJECT IT

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You can get some great results by duplicating a layer and changing the blending mode of the duplicate. This is an easy way to increase contrast and tone in an image; but did you know there’s a more efficient way to do the same thing? Rather than duplicating the layer and doubling the size of your document, try this instead. Right-click on the layer in the Layers panel and choose Convert to Smart Object.

ALL IMAGES BY COLIN SMITH | PHOTSHOPCAFE.COM

better than my puns. Bon appétit!

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TRANSFORM AGAIN There are times when you need to repeat a transformation on multiple layers. Say, for example, you’re scaling and rotating multiple thumbnails. Press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) for Free Transform, scale and rotate your object, and press Enter to commit the transformation. To apply

this exact same transformation to any layer, select the layer in the Layers panel, choose Edit>Transform>Again, and this same transformation will be made on the other layer. You can really ramp this up by adding a shortcut. If you hold down the Option (PC: Alt) key when choosing this menu command, a duplicate of the layer will be created with the transformation. If you keep repeating, you can build out fanning shapes like wings or kaleidoscopes. It’s really fun. The keyboard shortcut Command-Option-Shift-T (PC: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T) does the same thing.

LAYER STYLE CONTROL Layer styles are a quick way to dress up images and give them a little kick. Here’s an interesting thing, though: They’re based on the original image boundaries and not added layer styles. What do I mean? Click on the ƒx icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and add a wide Stroke layer style to a layer. Now, with the Layer Style dialog still open, try to add a Drop Shadow. Notice that you have to really add a lot of Spread to the shadow for it to appear, because it’s applying the shadow to the original contents of the layer and not to the Stroke that you just added. So it’s really difficult to get a subtle shadow at this point. Here’s a trick to help you apply any layer style to the entire stroke outline instead of the original art. First, apply the Stroke and click OK to close the Layer Style

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Press Command-L (PC: Ctrl-L) for Levels. Don’t make any changes to the Levels; just click OK. The image will still look the same, but now you have access to a little slider icon to the right of Levels in the Layers panel. Double-click the slider and you’ll see a Blending Options dialog appear. Change the blending Mode to something like Overlay and adjust the Opacity to suit your tastes. You now have the equivalent of two layers, as well as a layer mask, all while working on a single layer.

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HOW TO

dialog. With your layer selected in the Layers panel, press Command-G (PC: Ctrl-G) to place the layer into a group. Now apply a Drop Shadow layer style to the group and it treats the original Stroke layer style the same as pixels.

CONTENT-AWARE CROP With today’s social media, there are probably many times when you need to change the orientation of an image; for example, you need to turn a landscape into a portrait-oriented image for posting on Instagram. Sometimes you can crop into the image no problem. Other times you can use Content-Aware Scale. But there may be times when you need to use the Crop tool to crop larger and expand the boundaries of your image. Once you’ve done that, you’ll end up with solid colors (based on your current Background color) on any side of your image where the crop boundary extended beyond the canvas. Perhaps you use the Clone Stamp or Content-Aware Fill to populate those solid color areas for a seamless reshape, but Adobe sneaked an option into the Crop tool that people have overlooked. When you choose the Crop tool (C key) look up at the Options Bar, and you’ll see a box named Content-Aware. If you turn on that option and crop larger than the canvas boundaries, Photoshop will automatically apply Content-Aware Fill on those empty areas. This is also really useful when you’re using the Crop tool to straighten an image and need to fill those corners.

PHOTOSHOP USER > APRIL 2022

FORGOT TO FEATHER?

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Selections are useful for many tasks, particularly for masking out shapes. It’s important to have the right edge quality for convincing results. Many times, a little bit of a soft edge will blend in your masks in a convincing way. In Photoshop, a soft edge is called a feather. So, maybe you painstakingly made your selection and now you want to feather it. But did you know that if you enter a Feather setting into the Options Bar after making the selection, it won’t do anything? You have to add a Feather before drawing the selection. But how do you know how much feathering you’ll need? I suggest that you make your selection first with no feather. Then, click the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square) at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a layer mask. The mask will have a hard edge. Double-click on the mask thumbnail in the Layers panel to open the Properties panel and, in the Masks settings, adjust the Feather and you can visually see its effects now. If you need the selection for something else; Command-click

(PC: Ctrl-click) on the mask thumbnail, and the feathered selection will be loaded. You can choose Select> Save Selection if you need the selection later. Choose Select>Load Selection to turn it on when you need it.

LOCK TRANSPARENCY There may be times when you want to paint on an irregular-shaped layer and preserve the transparency. If you just paint on a layer, you’ll apply paint on the entire area; it doesn’t matter if there are existing pixels there or not. You could go ahead and load a selection to protect the transparent areas, as most people do; however, you could try some neglected tools in the Layers panel, called Lock tools. If you turn on the first option with the checkerboard pattern, it will lock the transparency of the layer, and now you can paint on the areas that contain pixels only and not on the transparent areas. The other lock options are Lock Image Pixels so you can’t paint on the layer, Lock Position so you can’t move the layer, Prevent Auto-Nesting to keep the layer from going into or out of a frame or artboard, and then the Lock All padlock which locks the layer entirely. These options are well worth exploring. n

Learning Light Designed by Scott Kelby

Learn lighting in the palm of your hand. • Made for educators and students • Designed to teach photography lighting • Offers a variety of lighting techniques • Lightweight handheld design • LED is cool to the touch • Optional mount for a tripod or stand • Standard AA batteries included

EDU Price: $89.90

Quickly switch between daylight and tungsten light

Center column rotates to change lighting options

Includes KelbyOne video training for students and educators

Experiment with various light techniques and effects

Direct Light

Diffused Light

Fresnel

Gobo

See how different light patterns look on your subject

Designed by Scott Kelby The Learning Light is the first educational lighting device that allows you to experiment with various lighting techniques without the need for complex or expensive equipment.

Split

Rembrandt

Butterfly

Loop

Scott is a photographer, designer, and awardwinning author of more than 80 books, including The Flash Book, Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It, and The Digital Photography Book Series. He’s Editor of Photoshop User magazine, and CEO of the KelbyOne Online Educational Community.

See it in action and order yours at fjwestcott.com/learning-light-by-scott-kelby

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Articles inside

 CONTRIBUTORS

 BENEFIT SPOTLIGHT

 KELBYONE COMMUNITY

 A NOTE FROM SCOTT