photoshopuser_aug2022

T H E MAG A Z I N E FO R L I G H T R OO M® & P H OTO S H O P® U S E R S

Developing the Shot

Knowing when to take your images from Lightroom to Photoshop during the editing process is key to maintaining maximum flexibility

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AUG U ST 2022

afford to hire a pilot for skywriting? No Beginners’ Can’t problem! You can create your own skywriting Workshop quickly and easily in Photoshop.

®

Cover Image by Michael Mammen |

KelbyOne Member

PROFILES, PRESETS, AND PLUG-INS Learning the three P’s of Lightroom Classic will quench your thirst for quickly creating better images

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AUGUST 2022

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VOL 25

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[020]

NO 8

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[042]

DEVELOPING THE SHOT

LIGHTROOM LABORATORY

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[062]

[070]

MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

VISUAL STORYTELLING

LIGHTROOM Q&A

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[078]

[082] PHOTOSHOP FOR LIGHTROOM USERS

Monument Valley: When to Use Photoshop

Nik Collection 5

LIGHTROOM TIPS & TRICKS

Learn to Work Faster and Smarter in Lightroom

Retouching Your Photos with Local Adjustments

Embracing Complexity

GOING MOBILE

Video Solutions Where You Need Them the Most

UNDER THE LOUPE

Editing Video in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic

Terry White Answers All of Your Lightroom Questions

The Adobe Camera Raw Filter

DEPARTMENTS [ 007 ]  A NOTE FROM SCOTT [ 009 ]  CONTRIBUTORS [ 010 ]  BENEFIT SPOTLIGHT [ 012 ]  KELBYONE COMMUNITY [ 018 ]  NEW ONLINE TRAINING

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THE THREE P’S OF LIGHTROOM: PROFILES, PRESETS & PLUG-INS SEÁN DUGGAN

[108]

[126]

[138]

DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS

DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS

BEGINNERS’ WORKSHOP

[146]

[154]

[160]

PHOTO EFFECTS

PHOTOSHOP PROVING GROUND

DESIGNING IN PHOTOSHOP

Minions Assemble!

Create a Surreal Street Diver Composite

Sammonisms for Photoshop Users

Add Skywriting to a Photo

Library Templates for Social Media

Engraving Images in Photoshop

mags

[170]

[174]

[182]

PHOTOSHP Q&A

REVIEWS

PHOTOSHOP TIPS

Answers to Your Photoshop Questions

Get the Scoop on the Latest Gear

Learn to Work Faster and Smarter in Photoshop

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A NOTE FROM SCOTT

JUST SAY NO TO BLUR sending the image to Topaz. The reason is: when they put those 1,000,000+ images into the AI computer, they didn’t have any sharpening or noise reduction added, so you’ll get the best results if you send your images to Sharpen AI the same way they were originally sent to create the sharpening AI code. You can create a preset in Lightroom (or Camera Raw) to zero out those two settings before you take your image over to Sharpen AI. Another tip is for when you have a situation such as a photo of a bird where the body is sharp (the eyes, beak, etc.), but there’s motion blur in the wings. If you decrease the image size by 50% before you apply the sharpening, then apply the motion blur correction, it works much better. With today’s huge sensors, along with the fact that you’ll probably be sharing the image at 1,080 pixels on Instagram or your online portfolio, image size won’t be an issue. Also, if you do make this size reduction, to get the best results, change the Resample method in Photoshop’s Image Size dialog from the default Bicubic to Bilinear; otherwise, any mild artifacts in the image may become exaggerated.

But, again, you only need to do either of these in this specific wildlife photo example.

If you want to try this plug-in (you should), you can download a demo version from topazlabs.com /sharpen-ai. If you decide, like me, you can’t live another day without it, it’s $79.99, but I found a discount coupon online (just doing a quick Google search) that gave me $12 off (so it wound up being $67.99). Let me know what you think over in the KelbyOne Community once you get a chance to give it a try.

Lastly, I announced my 13th annual Worldwide Photowalk, and I’m excited that we’re doing it in person this year. The official walk date is Saturday, August 13, 2022, and we’re again expecting to have walks in more than 1,000 cities worldwide. To find a walk near you, head to worldwidephotowalk.com. (If there’s not a walk already organized near you, maybe you should organize one?

Just hit the Lead a Walk button at the top of that page.)

Here’s wishing you super-sharp images, a great photowalk this month, good health, and safe travels.

🙂

All my best,

Scott Kelby KelbyOne President & CEO Editor & Publisher

KELBYONE .COM

I don’t sharpen in Photoshop anymore.

I didn’t say I don’t sharpen; I just don’t use Photoshop’s built-in sharpening any longer. No Unsharp Mask. No Smart Sharpen. No High Pass sharpening. No nuthin’.

So why the big change? I’ve found something that does a way better job, and it’s a plug-in. Yes, there have been sharpening plug-ins around for many years, but not like this.

So why am I telling you this? I don’t think it would be right for me to show you how to sharpen using Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask filter, which is 30+ years old, when I’m using a sharpening plug-in behind your back for my own images. I feel like my job is to show you what I’m doing and how I’m doing it, which is why I wanted to tell you. I’m not sponsored by the company or anything like that (I bought the plug-in myself, just like everybody else), so I don’t get a kickback or affiliate fee or anything like that if you buy it (and if you mention my name, they’ll say, “Who?”).

The plug-in is called Topaz Sharpen AI, and it’s so good that, at a recent talk I gave at the 75th annual NECCC Photography Conference up in Massachusetts, I described it as “almost cheating” to use this plug-in.

And one thing that I think is so amazing about it is the more out of focus or blurry an image is, the better it works. I find myself resurrecting old images, primarily ones where I didn’t hold the camera as still as I needed for the slow shutter speed my camera chose, and I’m absolutely amazed at the results. I know, I know, this sounds like a marketing pitch (and it’s not), but rarely have I seen a plug-in that was a real game-changer like this (Erik Kuna’s the one who got me using it, and everything he said about it is true).

It’s an AI-powered plug-in, so they essentially fed more than one million images into a computer and told it, “This is what a sharp image looks like, this is what a blurry image looks like, and this is what an image that has motion blur looks like,” and out popped this amazing code. When I open the plug-in, I let it analyze the image and determine what’s wrong with it on its own. It shows me a side-by-side before/after of the image, and I click OK. I don’t mess with the sliders (there aren’t many if you actually want to mess with stuff, but I generally don’t).

I’ll give you a couple of tips that will help you get even better results from the plug-in. One is to turn off the default sharpening and noise reduction that both Lightroom and Photoshop apply to RAW images. If you look in Lightroom’s Detail panel or the Detail panel in Camera Raw, you’ll see that, by default, the Amount slider is set at 40 for Sharpening, and the Color Noise Reduction is set at 25. Set both of those to zero before

7

THE MAGA ZINE FOR LIGHTROOM & PHOTOSHOP USER S

EDITORIAL: Scott Kelby, Editor-in-Chief Chris Main, Managing Editor Kim Doty, Associate Editor Barbara Thompson, Copy Editor

Cover Image: Michael Mammen

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 Michael Mammen, an IT consultant and certified Microsoft and Adobe Instructor. Based in Denmark, he’s self-taught, with a passion for all photography. Back in

WEB:

2003, when he first started his photography hobby, traveling

Adam Frick

was a huge part of it, but over the past years his photography

Yojance Rabelo

has revolved more around his family, especially his kids. Michael

Aaron Westgate

uses Lightroom and Photoshop for postprocessing. To learn more about Michael, turn to page 17.

PUBLISHING: Scott Kelby, Publisher Kalebra Kelby, Executive V.P. Jean A. Kendra, Business Manager All contents ©COPYRIGHT 2022 KelbyOne, LLC. All rights reserved.

ADVERTISING:

Any use of the contents of this publication without the written permission

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

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

HOW TO CONTACT KELBYONE: U.S. Mail: 138 Douglas Road East Oldsmar, FL 34677-2922 Voice: 813-433-5000

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Fax: 813-433-5015

are registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks mentioned belong to their respective owners. Some of the views expressed by contributors may not be the representative views of the publisher.

ISSN 2470-7031 (online)

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.

AUGUST 2022

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VOL 25

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NO 8

COREY BARKER

KIRK NELSON

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 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.

PETER BAUER

VICTORIA PAVLOV

LESA SNIDER

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 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.

DAVE CLAYTON

COLIN SMITH

was introduced to the magical world of art from her childhood. Her first language was the language of art. Victoria dedicated her professional life to digital and traditional imaging and photography. She has a passion for design and all things creative.

is the senior technical author and eLearning developer for TAITTowers. She also authored 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.

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.

IBARIONEX PERELLO

ROB SYLVAN

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.

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.

MARTIN EVENING

SERGE RAMELLI

SCOTT VALENTINE

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 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.

BRYAN O’NEIL HUGHES

RICK SAMMON

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.

ERIK VLIETINCK

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 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.

A J.D. by education, Erik has been a freelance technology editor for more than 22 years. He has written for Macworld, Computer Arts, Post Magazine, Red Shark News, and many others. Visit his website at Visuals Producer.

SEAN McCORMACK

FERNANDO SANTOS

TERRY WHITE

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.

is a photographer, part-time trainer, and Adobe ACE in Lightroom. Devoted to landscape and travel photography, he’s now also focusing on portraits. You can find him at the KelbyOne Community where he’s a Leader and Moderator.

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.

THE THREE P’s OF LIGHTROOM CLASSIC: PROFILES, PRESETS & PLUG-INS Seán Duggan Seán 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 more than 20 courses on photography, Photoshop, and mobile image making.

KelbyOne

BENEFIT SPOTLIGHT

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

10

As a Pro member, you’re receiving the ultimate

You can also get Photoshop, Lightroom, and

experience with KelbyOne. This is our complete

photography help from the amazing members in our

plan that includes everything to immerse yourself

Community. You get Photoshop User magazine

in learning. We want to make sure you know about

monthly along with access to more than 150

all of the added benefits you’re getting as a Pro

back issues, including all the issues of Lightroom

member so you can take advantage of them all!

Magazine. Then there’s the Creative Toolkit packed

Pro members have access to our entire course

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library (800+ courses), including a new course

last, but certainly not least, there are significant

every week, taught by world-class instructors who

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of quick tips and tutorials, guided learning tracks,

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Share the benefits of a Pro Membership with them to

members-only webcasts.

help accelerate their learning today! n

COMMUNITY Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photowalk Is Back On the Streets

P H O T O S H O P U S E R > AU G U S T 2 0 2 2

Scott Kelby recently announced that his Worldwide Photowalk is back. That means say goodbye to Zoom and hello to all of your fellow walkers. Photographers in more than 1,000 cities around the world will gather on Saturday, August 13, 2022, with their walking shoes on and their cameras around their necks ready to capture the beauty of the people and places around them.

Everyone is invited to join and become part of the world’s largest social photography event. Just go to worldwidephotowalk.com and click on Find a Walk to locate a walk near you. Each walk will have a leader who will let you know where to meet, and then you just follow the leader on his chosen route. The walks are leisurely paced and last two hours from start to finish. Most walks end up at a restaurant or pub where you can spend more time getting to know your fellow walkers and sharing stories and images.

You can also enter an optional photo contest for free.

Oh, did we mention the walk is free too? Everything is free. For the contest, just upload your best photo from your walk, and your walk leader will pick the winning image from your group. The winning photos from each group will then be entered into the worldwide competition where you could potentially win thousands of dollars worth of prizes.

Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photowalk is more than just about walking, taking images, and meeting new friends. Every year the event has a special mission to raise money for the Springs of Hope Orphanage in Kenya. When you join a walk, you’re asked to donate just $1 to help more than 60 children who need food, clothing, education, and medical care. One hundred percent of that money goes to Springs of Hope, and the donation is totally optional.

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Check out this video of Scott talking more about the walk. His excitement alone should have you clicking that Find a Walk button. And if you can’t find a walk near you, why don’t you try that Lead a Walk button instead?

CHRIS MAIN | ASHLEY FOSSE | DAVE CL AY TON

It’s Time to Start Getting Ready for Photoshop World

Photoshop World will be here before you know it. Are you prepared for one of the best online training conferences ever that covers everything from Photoshop to Lightroom to photography? With three full tracks, after-hours events, bonus sessions, and a special key­n ote that you just can’t miss, there’s more than anyone can handle in just three days. That’s why you’ll be able to access all the classes for a full year after the event, but you don’t want to be flailing around during the event trying to decide which classes to attend, and you certainly don’t want to miss out on the fun of Midnight Madness and other events.

So why not start planning now? Visit PhotoshopWorld .com and start browsing the class schedule and events, and take note of everything you’d like to see during those three days. You could even base your schedule on just your favorite instructors (on second thought, that might be a little tough, as we have so many great instructors). And if you need a little help planning, we have you covered. Visit the Insider to check out our guides for getting the most out of the show. Want to focus on photography? We have a guide for that.

Postprocessing? Sure, we can help you with that. Or maybe you’re looking for classes that will help build your confidence so you’re prepared to face any situation that arises in the creative world. (Be sure to read only the posts from 2022; anything dated 2021 is from last year’s Photoshop World.)

Oh, and don’t forget about the Guru Awards! All paid Photoshop World 2022 attendees (18 years of age or older) are eligible to enter up to three pieces in three different categories (no more than nine pieces total).

The winner in each category will be announced at the Conference Wrap-Up/Guru Awards Ceremony held on the last day of the conference. You could win a trophy, you could win prizes, but nothing beats winning the title of Photoshop World Guru Awards Winner. Put that on your résumé!

All Guru Awards submissions must be received no later than 11:59 p.m. (ET) on August 19, 2022, so what are you waiting for? Click here to learn more and submit your images today! We can’t wait to see you at the show. n

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

Artist Spotlight

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Steve Hadeen / member since 2021 / stephenhadeenphotography.com

KELBYONE COMMUNITY

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY



Artist Spotlight

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Cheryl Moore / member since 2010 / cherylmooreportraitstudio.com

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Artist Spotlight

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Ralf K. Wiegand / member since 2020 / ralfkwiegand.com

KELBYONE COMMUNITY

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY



Who’s Who in the KelbyOne Community

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Michael Mammen / member since 2012 / viewbug.com/member/themammen

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KELBYONE COMMUNITY

WHO’S WHO IN THE KELBYONE COMMUNITY MICHAEL MAMMEN

Michael Mammen is an IT consultant and certified Microsoft and Adobe Instructor. Based in Denmark, he’s self-taught, with a passion for all photography. Back in 2003, when he first started his photography hobby, traveling was a huge part of it, but over the past years his photography has revolved more around his family, especially his kids. Michael uses Lightroom and Photoshop for postprocessing.

One of his images is on the cover of this issue.

Congratulations on getting your image on the cover of this issue! Can you tell us a little about how that shot came about?

Let’s talk gear. Shooting outdoors and photographing people are two very different disciplines. What’s in your camera bag for both?

Thank you! This photo was taken in Rome while on

In my traveling camera bag, you’ll find a Nikon D850,

vacation. Our daughter loved the fountains and would

along with 16–35mm, 24–70mm, and 70–300mm lenses.

find any excuse to fill up her bottle of water, so I wanted

You’ll also find a tripod, remote trigger, and ND [neutral

to capture that scene.

density] and polarizer filters. The past few years I’ve added a drone too to my camera bag.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Where are you from and how did you fall into photography?

How did you discover KelbyOne, and what have been the most valuable aspects of your membership?

I live and work in Denmark. My primary job is as a

Back in 2012, I heard of Kelby Training through some

Microsoft and Adobe Instructor. I’ve always had a

colleagues, and later also NAPP [National Association

dream of working with photography, and I got my

of Photoshop Professionals]. I found a valuable source

first digital camera in the early 2000s. From there, the

of training for both photography and everything Adobe.

photography interest was rekindled, and I’ve had it as

Kelby Training and NAPP were then later consolidated

part of my life ever since.

into KelbyOne, and I’m still a member today. n

You shoot architecture, travel, and people. Which style of photography do you love the most and why?

Want to see your work featured on these pages?

I love to travel and shoot the experience, and I prefer

Our members have some serious talent and we

to include people in my images to bring them more

love to showcase it. If you’d like to have your work

life and harmony. When I’m shooting architecture, I’m

considered for use on the cover of Photoshop User

more about clean lines and the graphical aspect. Both

magazine, here in the Community pages, on social

are equally appealing, each in their own space.

media, or the KelbyOne Insider blog, complete the submission form on our member site.

Can you tell us a little about your postprocessing workflow? Do you have any tips you’d like to share?

member challenges, like the current Member

I use Lightroom for initial adjustments and Photoshop

Challenge 51 | Summer Fun. (Deadline for this

for when Lightroom isn’t enough. My most-used tips

challenge is September 25, 2022; see site for rules

would be to play around, try different paths, and go

and details.) View these Member Challenges as

three steps further. Even when it looks like a dead-end

impetus to practice the skills you’re learning here in

edit, you might end up in a good spot. And lastly, when

the magazine and in our online classes. Whether it’s

you hit that spot, dial it back 10%, save out, come back

compositing, retouching, or photographing, use the

the next day, and dial it back another 10%.

challenge as your reason to create something new!

KELBYONE .COM

Also, visit the KelbyOne Community for themed

17

Here Are Your Latest Online Courses

Everyday Sports Photography with Your iPhone Capture life’s most active moments with your iPhone! Join sports photographer, Rob Foldy, at Safety Harbor Park to unlock hidden features and make the most of your iPhone for photographing sports and action. In this class, Rob explains key settings, features, options, lenses, and shooting modes on your iPhone to help you create dynamic photographs of your friends, family, athletes, and regular people just having fun on the move.

Designing a Kick-Butt Photo Workstation Whether you’re shooting tethered in your studio or out in the field and coming back to your desk to do your postprocessing—your workstation matters. In this class, Terry White explores all the pieces that go into a kick-butt photo workstation so that you can work better.

Every week, we publish at least one new training course.

Check out these brand-new courses below:

Travel Photography: Photographer’s Guide to Prague Take a photographic tour of one of the most beautiful cities in all of Europe! Join Scott Kelby and Larry Becker as they walk you through all of the locations a travel photographer would want to visit in the photogenic city of Prague. Scott shares his recommendations for the gear to bring, how to plan ahead for the photo locations you’ll want to include, and then gives you the inside scoop for how to create the best photographs of each of these iconic locations.

Getting Up to Speed with Boris FX Optics 2022 Join Erik Kuna as he gets you up to speed with Boris FX Optics 2022, a plug-in for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic as well as a standalone program. Boris FX has been a leader in visual effects for video and now for stills. In this class you’ll learn how to perform color grading, lighting effects, light leaks, particle generations, and more using Boris FX Optics.

Erik takes you step by step through different example workflows, from basic to more and more advanced.

MARTIN EVENING

DEVELOPING THE SHOT

MONUMENT VALLEY (TSÉ BII’ NDZISGAII): WHEN TO USE PHOTOSHOP A few years back I took a memorable road trip through the southwestern states of the U.S., the highlight of which was an overnight stay at The View Hotel in Monument Valley. This provided a perfect location to stop and rest and take in the amazing views of the Mittens. Not surprisingly, when we arrived close to sunset, there were already several dozen photographers huddled together in the one location, ready to capture the classic shot of Monument Valley (the traditional Navajo name is Tsé BII’ Ndzidhsii).

ALL IMAGES BY MARTIN EVENING

Rather than join them, I looked around for a more unique angle and was drawn to this spot where the pile of rocks in the foreground added some depth to the photo.

The only problem with the photo was the distracting camera tripod shadow. To remove this I thought it best to open the image in Photoshop where I could make use of the Spot Healing Brush (J) and Clone Stamp (S) tools to carry out the required precision retouching.

To keep these edits nondestructive, I carried out the 20

retouching on separate new layers with the Sample All Layers option enabled for both tools.

As I explain in Step One, I shot a bracketed series of exposures, each one stop apart. This gave me the option to merge the photos as an HDR image or, alternatively, have a range of exposures to choose from to edit. For optimum image quality, I’ll usually aim to select the brightest exposed image that has recorded a full range of tones without the highlights being clipped. In this



instance I chose a RAW capture that was roughly one stop overexposed.

I was quite pleased with the final image.

So much so that I chose to feature it across a double-page spread in one of my Photoshop books. Unfortunately, the designer forgot to take into account the gutter, which swallowed up the middle section of the photograph. Consequently, the final image in the book showed just two mittens instead of three. Oh well, there is only so much one can do, I suppose.

(KelbyOne members can click here to download a smaller DNG version of this image for practice purposes only.)

THE STEPS STEP ONE: When photographing this scene, I shot a range of bracketed exposures, one stop apart, which allowed me the option of creating an HDR Photo Merge but, in the end, I selected just one of the brighter exposure shots to work from as the master. Start by applying some Basic panel tone adjustments to darken the image and optimize the contrast as shown here.

STEP TWO: In the Lens Corrections panel, select the Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections op­ tions. The latter will apply a profiled lens correction to the image to correct for vignetting and geometric distortion.

KELBYONE .COM

Before

DEVELOPING THE SHOT

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STEP THREE: Having applied these basic adjustments in Lightroom, choose Photo>Edit In>Edit in Adobe Photoshop (Command-E [PC: Ctrl-E]). This will create a rendered pixel image from the RAW original and automatically open the photo in Photoshop. Working in Photoshop, add a couple of new blank layers, and use a combination of the Spot Healing Brush (J) and Clone Stamp (S) tools to remove the tripod shadow from the foreground, as well as a parked car in the distance (on the left). Make sure to set both tools to Sample All Layers in the Options Bar at the top.

[For more on using the Clone Stamp and Spot Healing Brush, check out the “Photoshop for Lightroom Users” column by Scott Kelby in the April 2021 and May 2021 issues of Photo­shop User magazine.—Ed.]

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STEP FOUR: After completing the Photoshop edits, choose File>Save, which will save the edits made to the image and automatically add it to the Lightroom catalog, adjacent to the original RAW file. Next, open the Profile Browser by clicking the four-square icon at the top right of the Basic panel, and apply the B&W 12 profile in the B&W set to convert the image to monochrome.

Increase the Amount setting to 120, which makes the profile conversion slightly stronger.

Click Close to return to the Basic panel.

DEVELOPING THE SHOT

STEP FIVE: There are lots of options available through selecting different profiles and adjusting the Amount intensity, but you can also further modify a black-andwhite conversion by editing the B&W panel sliders. Here, I adjusted the settings to achieve the desired tone balance between the rocks and the sky.

STEP SIX: After refining the black-and-white settings, make some further edits using the Tone sliders in the Basic panel to add a bit more tone contrast as shown here.

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STEP SEVEN: In this step let’s add a couple localized adjustments. First, click on the Masking icon (gray circle with dotted outline) and select Linear Gradient. Drag out the Linear Gradient in the sky and apply a darkening Exposure adjustment.

The main rock in the foreground has some hot spots. So, to knock these back, click Create New Mask in the Masks panel and select the Brush tool. Paint on the rock to add some Exposure darkening and extra Clarity.

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STEP EIGHT: In the Color Grading panel, adjust the Shadows and Highlights wheels to add a sepia split-tone coloring effect to the black-and-white image. In this instance, I just dragged both circles in the middle of the color wheels at a slight angle upward and to the right to adjust both the Hue and Saturation. Set the Blending to 100 to intensify the effect, and the Balance to +5 to slightly favor the Highlights.

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DEVELOPING THE SHOT

STEP NINE: Finally, select the Crop Overlay tool (R) and drag the top-middle handle downward to apply a panorama-proportioned crop to the photograph.

After

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SWITCHING BETWEEN LIGHTROOM AND PHOTOSHOP

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There’s so much you can do using the tools available in Lightroom Classic that many Lightroom users question whether they actually need Photoshop. I include myself in that number, as Lightroom is the only program I need most of the time. Where I do find myself needing Photoshop is for advanced retouching. With the photograph I featured in the steps above, I felt it best to do the intricate retouching work in Photoshop. I suppose I could have tried removing the tripod shadow using Lightroom’s Spot Removal tool (Q), but the Photoshop tools are quicker to work with and more precise.

With commercial work, I find most images will require a significant amount of Photoshop editing. The question then is when is the best point to carry out such retouching?

It might make sense to edit the photo in Lightroom first and edit in Photoshop last. That can work, but such a workflow has its limitations. What if the client wants the final photograph to be in black-and-white, or they request you add a special color grading type of effect? If you process a Lightroom image too fully before passing it over to Photoshop, you lose the ability to step back and re-edit the effect settings. This is a particularly important point to bear in mind when you consider how many different ways you can subtly re-edit, say, the black-and-white settings.

The workflow I use is to initially edit the RAW image in Lightroom to achieve a preliminary optimized look; one where I mainly adjust the Basic tone and color settings and perhaps add some localized adjustments if necessary.

I will then choose Photo>Edit In>Edit in Photoshop where I have all the tools I need to carry out the necessary Photoshop retouching.

Once that’s done, I save the photo to create a rendered TIFF image that’s automatically added to the Lightroom catalog, alongside the master RAW image. I can then continue using Lightroom to add extra adjustments such as a black-and-white conversion, add a color grading effect, or dramatic shading. Ultimately, this workflow offers the most flexibility.

If a client is happy with the effects, but wants further retouching, I can select the TIFF image version and re-open it in Photoshop (choose Photo>Edit In>Edit in Photoshop, but remember to select Edit Original in the dialog that pops up). When I resave the image, the Lightroom catalog image preview will refresh to update the retouch edits plus effects adjustments that have been added in Lightroom. If the Photoshop edits are fine, but someone wants changes made to the color grading, you can simply readjust the Lightroom settings for the TIFF edit version image.

In the example shown above, you can see on the left, the RAW original with optimized Basic panel adjustments; in the middle is the retouched TIFF version edited in Photoshop; and on the right, the same TIFF image with color grading edits added in Lightroom. n

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INSPIRATION A letter from Scott Kelby Photoshop World is back, live, and online! On August 30-September 1, we are hosting the biggest Photoshop, Lightroom, and photography event on the planet. This year, we’re pulling out all the stops to make it as close as possible to the in-person event you know and love. Complete with an opening keynote, Midnight Madness, the attendee party, the Guru Awards, An Evening with Moose Peterson—the whole nine yards…it’s going to be awesome! It’s also the place where you get the latest news from Adobe, see the latest gear from the best in the industry and learn the latest techniques from the best lineup of instructors ever to gather under one roof. And just like always, you can watch any session in any of the tracks, plus we archive the entire conference for a full year so you can catch any sessions you missed or re-watch any sessions you want to see again. We simplify learning by creating easy to understand classes in a variety of topics. Regardless of your skill level, we have the right training for you.

To top off all of the fun and knowledge offered at the actual conference, we will be giving all paid attendees a 6-month KelbyOne Pro membership and a full 1 year of conference replays. Yes, you heard that right! 6 full months of unlimited online training at KelbyOne, AND 1 full year afterward to watch any conference session you missed or rewatch the sessions you attended as many times as you like! You can’t afford to miss this amazing event!

From our past Kelbyone Live Conference attendees “I loved all of the segments and had

“This was way better than sitting on

“Love the diversity of classes! I have

a hard time choosing between them.

a chair in a conference room. Plus,

been shooting for 10 years now and

Luckily we have the replays! I can‘t wait to watch them. „

I got to sleep in my own bed—no hotels needed.„

I still learned something in each and every class.„

Learn from the very best in the industry Real Photographers, Real Live—Online—Interaction, and the best part about all these instructors is that we’ve included time for you to interact with them after class and at events. Get one-on-one time with your favorite landscape, portrait, sports, pet, fashion, wildlife, travel, automotive, wedding, Photoshop, and Lightroom experts.

Our instructors capture your attention and bring the fun. They are so excited to share this experience with you!

INSTRUCTORS

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Scott Kelby

Larry Becker

Mary Bel

Dave Black

Scott Bourne

Lisa Carney

Dave Clayton

Glyn Dewis

Frank Doorhof

Sian Elizabeth

Rob Foldy

Kaylee Greer

Mark Heaps

Karen Hutton

Ramtin Kazemi

Erik Kuna

Bret Malley

Joe McNally

Kirk Nelson

Kristi Odem

Victoria Pavlov

Moose Peterson

Ian Plant

Serge Ramelli

Rick Sammon

Deborah Sandidge

Kristina Sherk

Gilmar Smith

Tracy Sweeney

Rob Sylvan

Terry White

Photoshop World At-A-Glance You want fun? With sessions and events during the day and after hours, we’ve got it all: Pre-Conference Workshops, The Meet up, Keynote Address, 3 Days of 3 Conference Tracks, After-Hours Party, Midnight Madness, An Evening with Moose Peterson, Guru Awards & Conference Wrap-up, and our Digital Show Floor.

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

THE MEETUP

AFTER HOURS PARTY

MIDNIGHT MADNESS

GURU AWARDS & WRAP-UP

Register Today and Save at photoshopworld.com Adobe, Photoshop and Lightroom are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems, Incorporated.

Topics That Push Your Creative Skills Get your coffee and a comfy chair ready and join our incredible lineup of instructors. Dive deep into Photoshop, Lightroom, and photography with 3 different sessions to choose from each hour. Each session will be live either on Track A, Track B, or Track C. And anything you miss, you can watch through replays for one full year!

ADVANCED PHOTOSHOP

PHOTOSHOP

PLUGINS

PHOTOGRAPHY

BUSINESS/INSPIRATION

LIGHTROOM

SESSIONS Pre Conference (08.29.22) Schedule Start Photoshop World the day before the conference kicks off with our optional sessions. These introductory sessions are intended to help you get up and running before the conference sessions begin.

TRACK B

TRACK A 10 POST PROCESSING TIPS EVERY PHOTOGRAPHER NEEDS TO KNOW with Erik Kuna | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

LIGHTROOM ESSENTIALS with Terry White | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

TODAY’S EVENTS TRACK C THE PHOTOSHOP CRASH COURSE with Scott Kelby | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

ORIENTATION SESSION | PHOTOSHOP WORLD 101 with Larry Becker | 10:00 am - 11:00 am EDT

THE MEET-UP All attendees Invited | 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm EDT

Register Today and Save at photoshopworld.com Instructors and sessions are subject to change without notice

Day 1 (08.30.22) Conference Schedule TRACK A

TRACK B

PHOTOSHOP CAN DO THAT?? with Dave Clayton | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

DOUBLE EXPOSURE—DOUBLE THE FUN with Deborah Sandidge | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR IMPROVED SELECTIONS AND MASKS with Glyn Dewis | 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm EDT

EVOLUTION OF AN IMAGE with Rick Sammon | 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm EDT

LUNCH BREAK 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

LUNCH BREAK 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

PHOTOSHOP FIXES FOR LANDSCAPE PHOTO FAILS with Ian Plant | 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm EDT

THE IPHONE IS A REAL CAMERA: 60 TIPS IN 60 MINUTES TO PROVE IT with Scott Bourne | 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm EDT

PORTRAIT POST PROCESSING: PLAYING WITH COLOR AND LIGHT with Tracy Sweeney | 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

USING PRESETS AND TEMPLATES TO SPEED UP YOUR EDITING with Terry White | 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

PHOTO RESTORATION: BRINGING PHOTOS TO LIFE with Victoria Pavlov | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm EDT

LIGHTPAINTING: ENHANCING THE ACTION IN YOUR SPORTS PHOTOS with Dave Black | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm EDT

TODAY’S EVENTS

TRACK C LIGHTROOM FOR PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHERS with Scott Kelby | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

KEYNOTE All attendees Invited | 9:30 am - 10:30 am EDT

EDITING FOR EYE MOVEMENT with Kristi Odem | 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm EDT

LIVE WITH MYLIO All attendees Invited | 6:15 pm - 7:15 pm EDT

LUNCH BREAK 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

AFTER HOURS PARTY All attendees Invited | 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm EDT

BEYOND BASIC MASKING IN LIGHTROOM CLASSIC, LIGHTROOM, AND CAMERA RAW with Rob Sylvan | 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm EDT

View the Photoshop World 2022 Schedule at photoshopworld.com

Instructors and sessions are subject to change without notice

TOP SECRET LR + PS TIPS AND TRICKS with Kaylee Greer | 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

5 STEPS TO NATURAL DRAMA IN LIGHTROOM with Serge Ramelli | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm EDT ©Serge Ramelli

Day 2 (08.31.22) Conference Schedule TRACK A

TRACK B

TYPOGRAPHY FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS with Scott Kelby | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

NEW WORLDS: ADVANCED LANDSCAPE COMPOSITING with Bret Malley | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

LIGHTING WITH A MASK with Moose Peterson | 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm EDT

BOKEH THAT BACKGROUND INTO OBLIVION! with Kirk Nelson | 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm EDT

LUNCH BREAK 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

LUNCH BREAK 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

CREATING DIGITAL ART WITH REFLECTIONS AND LAYERS with Kristi Odem | 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm EDT

PHOTOSHOP + ILLUSTRATOR + INDESIGN with Dave Clayton | 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm EDT

SAMMONISMS FOR PHOTOSHOP USERS with Rick Sammon | 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

DEEP DIVE INTO BLENDING MODES FOR COMPOSITING & COLOR CORRECTION with Lisa Carney | 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

CREATE A BEAUTIFUL BACKGROUND FOR COMPOSITING FROM SCRATCH with Victoria Pavlov | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm EDT

BREAKING DOWN COMPELLING LANDSCAPE COMPOSITIONS with Ramtin Kazemi | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm EDT

TRACK C

TODAY’S EVENTS

KILLER FASHION SHOTS YOU CAN EASILY RECREATE with Frank Doorhof | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

LIVE WITH PLATYPOD All attendees Invited 6:15 pm - 7:15 pm EDT

LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY: FIND YOUR OWN VISION with Karen Hutton | 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm EDT

AN EVENING WITH MOOSE PETERSON All attendees Invited | 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm EDT

LUNCH BREAK 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

LIVE WITH MYLIO All attendees Invited | 9:00 pm - 9:30 pm EDT

LOCKER ROOM ACCESS: TELLING THE STORY OF SPORTS with Rob Foldy | 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm EDT

MIDNIGHT MADNESS with Scott Kelby, Larry Becker, & Erik Kuna All attendees Invited | 10:00 pm - 12:00 am EDT

WILD EXPLORATIONS WITH A CAMERA with Moose Peterson | 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

BACK TO BASICS: GETTING STARTED IN BEAUTY PHOTOGRAPHY with Siân Elizabeth | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm EDT ©Siân Elizabeth

Day 3 (09.01.22) Conference Schedule TRACK A MODEL STAND OUT with Frank Doorhof | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

HOW TO STAY CALM WHEN THE S&*T HITS THE FAN with Joe McNally | 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm EDT

LUNCH BREAK 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

TRACK B SECRETS OF MODERN LANDSCAPE POST PROCESSING with Ramtin Kazemi | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT CRAFTING CINEMATIC LIGHTING FOR YOUR PHOTOS with Kirk Nelson | 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm EDT LUNCH BREAK 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

SAVE TIME ENHANCING YOUR PHOTOS WITH PLUGINS with Erik Kuna | 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm EDT

AUGMENTED REALITY COMPOSITING with Bret Malley | 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm EDT

AT THE END OF THE DAY (OR THE ASSIGNMENT), WE ARE STORYTELLERS with Joe McNally | 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

CREATIVE KIDS COMPOSITES with Kristina Sherk | 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

QUICK & EASY NOISE REDUCTION, RESIZING, AND SHARPENING with Erik Kuna | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm EDT

AUTOMATION, ACTIONS, AND ADOBE...OH MY! with Mark Heaps | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm EDT

TRACK C PERFECT PRINTS: NO FUSS, NO JARGON. JUST WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW! with Glyn Dewis | 11:00 am - 12:00 pm EDT

LIGHTROOM MOBILE EDITING with Kristina Sherk | 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm EDT

TODAY’S EVENTS CONFERENCE WRAP-UP/GURU AWARDS with Scott Kelby | 6:15 pm - 9:00 pm EDT

View the Photoshop World 2022 Schedule at photoshopworld.com Instructors and sessions are subject to change without notice

LUNCH BREAK 1:15 pm - 2:15 pm EDT

A PERSONAL BRAND: KNOWING WHAT MATTERS MOST with Mark Heaps | 2:15 pm - 3:15 pm EDT

WHITE SEAMLESS, 11 CREATIVE WAYS TO USE IT with GIlmar Smith | 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

CREATING A PAINTERLY PORTRAIT...FROM SHOOT TO PHOTOSHOP with Mary Bel | 4:45 pm - 5:45 pm EDT

©Mary Bel

SERGE RAMELLI

LIGHTROOM LABORATORY

RETOUCHING YOUR PHOTOS WITH LOCAL ADJUSTMENTS The whole point of using tools in Lightroom is to guide the eyes of the viewer into the photo so they can fully enjoy the subject without any distractions. Let me show you several tools you can use in Lightroom to achieve this result and get spectacular photos every time!

ALL IMAGES BY SERGE RAMELLI

This is a photo taken in Diamond Beach in Iceland. I love the composition, and the star of the photo is this mini iceberg that landed on the beach. So let’s see how we can make it stand out and lead the eyes of the spectator into the photo.

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

STEP ONE: First, we’ll do a basic retouch. We can open up the Shadows to +100, bring down the Highlights to –100, and set the black point (Blacks) to –30 and the white point (Whites) to +4.

STEP TWO: A key step is picking the correct white balance. I like to start with a preset white balance from Lightroom and then tweak the Tint and Temp.

For this image, we’ll start with Shade as a base and, because I’m addicted to magenta, we’ll add some Tint (+37). We’ll also add overall Contrast (+31) to finish the basic retouch.

STEP THREE: Before we get into the local adjustments, let’s use the Crop Overlay tool (R) to make the photo more dynamic. I find that the 16x9 crop makes the photo much more compelling! You can also use the Angle tool to make sure that your horizon is level. You need to crop depending on what you care about most in your photo; you might want to focus on a nice sky and then crop a bunch of foreground, or vice-versa. I love the water in this image so we’ll crop out some of the sky.

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STEP FOUR: Now let’s start using the local tools. The first tool we’ll use is the Linear Gradient, so we’ll click on the Masking icon (gray circle with dotted outline below the Histogram) and choose Linear Gradient. We’ll drag out a gradient at the top of the photo starting in the middle of the sky to just below the iceberg. We’ll then lower the Exposure (–1.17) to darken the sky and “close up” the

photo. The secret tip here is to add another gradient at the top of the photo that covers only the sky and lower the Exposure to –0.29; some of the greatest masters of black-and-white like to do that because it leads the viewer’s eyes toward the subject in the image (the iceberg in this case). To add a second gradient, click Create New Mask in the Masks panel, and select Linear Gradient again.

STEP FIVE: Now we’re going to do some dodging-and-burning using a brush. Click on Create New Mask again in the Masks panel, and select Brush. Set the Flow and Density for the brush to around 70, zoom in to 100% on your subject to make it easier to see, and boost the Exposure

to 0.50. Now just paint to enhance the brightest parts of your subject to complexify the light. To see what you’re doing, temporarily boost the Exposure to 1.0, and then bring it back down when you’re done painting to make it look more natural.

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STEP SIX: The key to dodging-and-burning is to create a new brush for the burning so you can tailor your photo.

So create a new Brush in the Masks panel, and do the exact opposite of what we just did: lower the Exposure

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

to –1.0 so you can see what you’re doing and paint to enhance the darker areas on the subject. When done, bring up the Exposure to –0.50.

Tip: If you don’t know if you went too far dodging-and-burning an image, leave your image and then come back to your retouch a few hours later.

If the dodging-and-burning now looks obvious, then you went too far.

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STEP SEVEN: We can create a new Brush, boost the Exposure (0.65), and paint to enhance the leading lines in the image to help guide the viewer’s eyes into the subject. In this example, there are natural lines in the water, so we’ll brighten those.

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STEP EIGHT: The brightest part of the photo is the first thing that a viewer will see, so let’s add a Radial Gradient centered on the subject. In the Masks panel, click Create New Mask, and choose Radial Gradient. Drag out the gradient around your subject, and boost the Exposure (0.42) to brighten it.

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STEP NINE: To enhance the leading lines to the subject even more, we’ll add a new Brush, lower the Exposure –0.73, and paint the darker areas around those bright lines in the water so the brightest parts stand out even more.

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STEP 10: To enhance the sunset, you can use a Radial Gradient around the area of the sky where the sunlight is still visible, and add some magenta (a Tint of 15) and yellow (a Temp of 18), and boost the Saturation (46).

Here’s the before and after.

You can see how the eyes are drawn into the photo toward the main subject. This is the magic of the local adjustments. I hope you’ll be able to retouch your photos with that in mind. n

After

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ROB SYLVAN

UNDER THE LOUPE

EDITING VIDEO IN LIGHTROOM AND LIGHTROOM CLASSIC In the June 2022 update for Lightroom (Lr), Lightroom Classic (LrC), and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), Adobe added the ability to edit video in the Lightroom cloud-based family of apps. I got a chance to use it recently and wanted to share how it worked. I captured a time-lapse of the Milky Way using the built-in time-lapse feature of the Canon EOS R10. This allows you to configure all the settings, fine-tune exposure with test shots, then start the time-lapse process of recording a final MP4 video completely in camera. While not the preferred method for having ultimate control over the postprocessing, retouching, and video creation, it was super easy to set it and walk away while we were on vacation.

ALL IMAGES BY ROB SYLVAN

The camera did its thing for about two hours, starting from around 10:45 p.m. until almost 1 a.m. At one point, I walked down to check on the camera perched on the edge of a lake, but otherwise, left it alone until I thought it was done. The red from my headlamp showed up at the start of the video, about midway through, and at the end. Lightroom’s limited video-editing capabilities wouldn’t allow me to do anything with the red light in the 42

middle, but I could trim off the beginning and the end.

I also wanted to adjust tonal values a bit, tweak the white balance, and see what else Lightroom would let me do.

STEP ONE: First, I imported the video into Lr; I opted to import it into Lr on my laptop so I could view it on a larger screen. I decided not to bring a LrC catalog with me on this trip and just ingest everything through either

UNDER THE LOUPE

Lr on my laptop or on my iPhone. All the images would eventually upload to the cloud, and then download into my LrC catalog.

In Lr, the import of video is the same as stills. It’s important for LrC users who sync with the cloud to remember that any photo/video you import into any Lr app will count against your cloud-storage quota, unlike smart previews synced from LrC, so you need to manage your cloud storage to avoid running out of space (more on this at the end of the article).

STEP TWO: While the files are syncing to the cloud, they’re stored locally after import, so I can play the video within Lr as well as begin editing before syncing is complete.

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STEP THREE: After playing the video to see what needed to be edited, I decided to start with trimming the beginning and the end where the red light from my headlamp lit the foreground. When a video is selected/active, you’ll see which tools are supported on the right edge of the

interface. The Edit panel contains the tools for adjusting the look of the video (only a small subset of editing tools are supported). The Crop icon, which becomes Trim & Rotate when you have a video selected, is where you can find the tools for trimming the video. Clicking the Crop

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UNDER THE LOUPE

icon provides access to tools for trimming, rotating, and flipping the video (it appears as though rotating and flipping videos isn’t yet supported on iOS devices).

To trim, grab the handle at the beginning or end of the video below the preview (see previous page) and drag inward as much as desired to remove unwanted footage (I only need to get rid of a second or two).

STEP FOUR: From there, I clicked the Edit icon to make adjustments to tonal values and color. Panels containing unsupported tools are grayed out, as are unsupported tools within a panel that isn’t grayed out, such as Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze in the Effects panel, while Vignette and Grain are active (though I wish the opposite were true).

STEP SIX: After you apply a pre­ set, you can drag the playhead across the timeline to get a quick preview of how the changes affect the entire video.

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STEP FIVE: Also worth noting is that there’s a new group of video-specific Premium presets within the Presets panel you might want to explore. A very useful feature of Lr for desktop is that, as you move your cursor over presets, you not only see a live preview of the settings, but also the sliders move to show you what’s being adjusted.

If a preset is selected, don’t forget that awesome Amount slider to fine-tune the results.

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STEP SEVEN: Playing the video within Lr is fine, but you can also export a copy with your edits in MP4 format, or the unedited original. Just click the Share icon at the top right to access the export options. I’m not a big video creator or editor, but I’m glad to have this basic functionality inside Lr (editing and exporting is possible on mobile too).

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WHAT ABOUT LIGHTROOM CLASSIC?

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For Lightroom Classic users, we’ve been able to import AVI, MP4, MOV, and AVCHD video formats from our memory cards and store them right alongside the stills in our catalogs for many years now. In fact, some people have probably forgotten that LrC can edit video too, so let’s review. (Click here to check out all the supported video file formats in LrC.) Once imported, you can move, rename, and delete video files in just the same way as you can with your photos. When viewing your files in Grid view (G) of the Library module you’ll notice that the video files display a timecode on each thumbnail indicating its duration.

You can even scrub through a video thumbnail by moving (don’t click) your cursor over a given clip to get a quick glimpse of what it contains. Double-click the thumbnail to jump to Loupe view where you can play the clip in full.

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UNDER THE LOUPE

PLAYING AND TRIMMING The video controls appear in a bezel below the video, and allow you to play/pause the clip, save out a still frame from the video, set the poster frame, and trim the in and out points. Here’s how to trim the in or out points:

STEP TWO: Click the frame icon (left of the gear icon on the video bezel) and choose Set Poster Frame. LrC will update the thumbnail to display the selected frame from now on.

STEP ONE: Click the gear-shaped icon to reveal the individual video frames and the tools to trim the video.

Note you can click-and-drag the outer edge of the video bezel outward to fill the width of Loupe view so you can see more frames.

VIDEO EDITING Similar to what I described previously in Lr, we also have a limited set of edits that we can apply to videos in LrC, such as White Balance, Exposure, Contrast, Tone Curve, and color adjustments. The easiest approach to editing is to expand the Quick Develop panel in the Library panel and use any of the active controls to make adjustments (any controls not available for video will be grayed out).

STEP TWO: Click-and-drag the current-time indicator to find the video frame that you want to make the new in point.

STEP THREE: Grab the beginning marker tucked into the left end of the bezel (it looks like two little vertical lines) and drag it to the new point that you want to be the beginning of the clip. Trimming the out point works the same way, but from the other side of the bezel.

Similar to cropping a photo, this edit is only applied to copies during export or when viewing the clip inside LrC, which means you can change it again at any time.

When the video is imported, the thumbnail (called the poster frame) you see is generated from the first frame of the video, but this frame isn’t always representative of the actual clip. Luckily, it’s easy to change this with a few clicks (this isn’t possible in Lightroom at this time).

Here’s how: STEP ONE: Drag the current-time indicator to a frame that you want to set as the new poster frame.

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SET POSTER FRAME

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HOW TO

Step Six

You can even apply a Develop preset to a video clip, but note that LrC will warn you if the preset contains adjustments that aren’t supported for video. Adobe also provides in LrC the set of Premium video presets that we covered in Lr.

STEP THREE: Select the JPEG frame in the Filmstrip, and press D to jump to Develop.

STEP FOUR: Adjust the JPEG as desired, but keep in mind that only the adjustments supported by video can be applied back to the clip.

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STEP FIVE: Hold the Command (PC: Ctrl) key and select the video clip in the Filmstrip (keeping the JPEG the active image).

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While those options work great for some adjustments, the Quick Develop panel doesn’t give you access to the Tone Curve or Color Grading. You can’t take a video clip into the Develop module, however, so here’s how to work around that, using an image from the video clip:

STEP SIX: Click the Sync button to open the Synchronize Settings dialog, check the boxes next to the adjustments you want applied (note that unsupported options will be grayed out), and click the Synchronize button to apply those settings to the video. Press the E key to jump back to Loupe view and view the adjusted clip (see above).

STEP ONE: Scrub through the video to find a frame you feel is a good representative of the clip.

Tip: You can also create virtual copies of your video (Photo>Create Virtual Copy) if you want to process the clip a couple of different ways and compare to see which you like better.

STEP TWO: Click the frame icon and choose Capture Frame to save out a JPEG still of that frame to the same folder as the video file.

There are also a few options for exporting copies of your video clips. In the Video section of the Export dialog, you’ll

EXPORTING VIDEO

first need to check Include Video Files to enable these options. Once enabled, you can choose between DPX, H.264, and Original video formats. Choosing Original means an exact copy of the original clip will be exported without any of the changes you made in Lightroom Classic.

The DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) format is only used in a video postproduction workflow such as with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. So, for most of your video exports you’ll want to choose H.264 and then choose a quality level based on your output destination, before clicking Export.

WHAT ABOUT SYNCING VIDEO FILES? A word of warning about syncing as it pertains to video files. If you don’t sync your Lightroom Classic catalog

UNDER THE LOUPE

to the Lightroom cloud, then feel free to skip this part; however, if you do have sync enabled, you’ll want to be aware that you cannot sync a video file from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom, as it’s not possible to create a smart preview of a video (which is all that’s ever synced from Lightroom Classic).

If you import a video file into any of the Lightroom apps, the full-resolution video will upload to Lightroom cloud and count against your cloud storage quota. Once uploaded to the cloud, that video file will download to your Lightroom Classic catalog just the same as a full-resolution photo will, but videos won’t appear under All Synced Photographs in the Catalog panel; they’ll appear in the local folder to which they’re downloaded in the Folders panel.

This is a long way of saying that you need to be mindful of the quirks of how video behaves in a synced catalog situation, as this can quickly fill up your cloud storage if you only have the 20 GB of storage in the Photography Plan subscription. I still use it as a means to transfer video files from my phone and trail camera to my Lightroom Classic catalog, but the only way to remove video files from your cloud storage is to delete them from any Lightroom app. n

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SEAN MCCORMACK

MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

NIK COLLECTION 5 As the keeper of the Nik Collection keys, DxO is mindful of its heritage. Despite the transition between many companies, they’re keeping the flame alive and regularly adding value to these much-loved and -used plug-ins. In mid June they launched Nik Collection 5. Like the previous update, two of the plug-ins have been rewritten from the ground up. This time it’s Color Efex and Analog Efex getting that love.

ALL IMAGES BY SEAN MCCORMACK

In the mind of DxO, there are two parts to the Nik Collection: the creative part, which covers Color Efex, Silver Efex, Analog Efex, and Viveza; and the technical part, which covers Dfine, Perspective Efex, HDR Efex, and Sharpener.

With this update, the creative part has been fully rewritten and updated with a modern interface.

In line with the previous plug-in updates, Color Efex gets both ClearView and film grain additions, which add world-class dehaze and film grain emulations, respectively.

The new additions to control points seen in Silver Efex in the previous release, have also been added. These give far greater precision for making local adjustments within each filter. A surprise new addition is that of PhotoLab 5 50

ESSENTIAL. This means that casual plug-in users get a free RAW converter using DxO’s much-loved conversion process. With PhotoLab 5 ESSENTIAL, you can go straight from camera to Nik processing without the need for another host application.

IS THERE MORE TO THE NIK COLLECTION? It’s probably bad of us to assume familiarity with the Nik Collection. As one of the oldest plug-in sets out there, most photographers have probably come across it at some point. The company, Nik Software, created most of the plug-ins between 1995 and 2012. At the time, the plug-ins could be bought individually, or as

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a discounted set. Thirty-five percent of the company was owned by camera company Nikon, for whom Nik created Capture NX for editing Nikon camera files.

In 2012, Google bought the company to get access to the code for use in its own products, as well as selling the plug-ins. It dropped the price for the Collection from $500 to $150; a huge drop, much to the joy of photographers everywhere, unless you’d just bought them. In 2016, Google made the software free, and by 2017 announced that there would be no further development. There was great sadness amongst Nik lovers everywhere.

That’s when DxO stepped in and purchased the Collection in late 2017. Since 2018, they’ve been updating the plug-in yearly, and they even added the new plug-in Perspective Efex in 2020. Obviously, they couldn’t do this work for nothing, so the $149 price point returned. With all the work DxO is doing, it’s clearly not money for old rope, and long may they continue this work.

As a collection, these plug-ins cover most of the postprocessing and image-finishing a photographer could require and were often seen used on winning photos from professional competitions internationally.

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vs .

ADOBE

As with most other add-ons, the benefit of using the Nik Collection is having tools that do a particular task faster and easier; with such tools as Dfine and Sharpener, it’s having more precise noise reduction or sharpening tools. With the creative plug-ins, it’s having specific looks achievable immediately. A great example is the Tonal Contrast filter, which creates a far more interesting look than mere Adobe Contrast or Dehaze can achieve.

MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

COLOR EFEX PRO 5 We’ve covered Color Efex Pro in the past, so this will just highlight some basic edits to show some of the new processing and interface. Start the process by choosing Color Efex Pro 5 from the Edit In menu in Lightroom Classic.

The new interface opens, and it’s glorious! That immediate full-screen view is a joy to behold. On the left are the available filters and presets. On the right is the settings panel, where you’ll find the Loupe and Histogram, followed by the DxO Filters panel with ClearView and Grain. Below that is the main filter stack (after you add your first filter). One notable change is that there’s no Add Filter button. This is now done on each filter: Clicking a filter name will replace the current filter; to add a filter instead, click the + to the right of the filter’s name.

At the top of the preview window is Compare and Zoom. Compare lets you choose between the after, a split before/after with a slider, or a top and bottom before/ after view. Zoom gives Fit or Fill, 1:1, and a menu of other zoom options.

The install process is straightforward.

Unlike a lot of installers, it uses colorful custom screens that take you through the process. Once installed, you are invited to download PhotoLab 5 Essential.

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INSTALL

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On the left, the Filters categories are in a compact mode, showing only six categories. Click Show All just below those category buttons to reveal all the categories.

From there you can choose a narrower range such as Landscape.

The photo here is fairly unedited, bar some spot removal.

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STEP ONE: Before applying one of the creative filters, you can improve the general contrast using ClearView. Set it to 30% for a deeper contrast. This does darken the image, but you’ll be correcting this when you add filters.

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STEP TWO: The first filter that’s worth applying is the Skylight Filter. Because this is the first filter we’re adding, clicking its name will add it; there’s no need to use the + icon here. This filter cleans up the look, and adds warmth and clarity. Even the default setting looks great on this image. Note that there’s now an orange bar on the filter ’s name on the left to let you know it’s applied.

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MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

STEP FOUR: The final full filter we’ll need here is Sunlight. The default is nice, but we can do better. Let’s set Light Strength to 59%, with a Light Temperature of 5310K. To compensate, we’ll move Brightness to 7%. The Contrast needs a change as well, so we’ll set that to 55%. Finally, we’ll set Saturation to 8% to introduce more color.

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STEP THREE: Click on the + next to Pro Contrast. Changing Correct Color Cast to 100% will warm this image nicely. We’ll also set Dynamic Contrast to 28% and Shadows to 44%.

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HOW TO

STEP FIVE: The photo looks great for so few changes.

There’s one more thing to do, though, and that’s to darken the sky. For this we can use the Pro Contrast filter again, so we’ll click the + next to it to add one. Next, we’ll click the Control Points + icon in the Pro Contrast filter in the filter stack on the right and click multiple times in the image to add a series of control points to cover the sky.

There are seven here. Shift-click on the non-selected points to select all of them. To see the mask, click the square icon above the control points in the panel.

Here we set the Luminance to 66% so the brighter parts of the sky are selected, and then set Dynamic Contrast to 98% and Opacity to 32%.

With the photo complete, there are a couple things to consider before saving.

Creative Control The first thing we need to consider is: “Do we want to be able to edit this image again?” There’s an option in Nik to use a part of the TIFF specification to create files that can

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be edited nondestructively. Such files contain the original image, an edited preview layer (which is what the user sees), and the instructions for Nik to turn one into the other. It’s a fantastic use of metadata and, while the cost is a larger file, it’s worth it for the editing ability.

When you open a TIFF file in Nik Collection 5, you get a dialog letting you know that you can save this in a way to make it editable in the future.

MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

Save Preset The second thing to consider is: “Would we like to use these settings again on another image, but far quicker?”

That’s where presets come in, and Nik Collection 5 makes this easy. There’s a Save Preset button right there at the bottom of the Right panel.

Click the button and the Custom Preset dialog appears.

Name the preset and click Save. This preset now appears in the Custom section on the left.

The checkbox it refers to is at the bottom right of the photo preview.

Apply When you’re done, click apply to return to your host application. As this one started in Lightroom, it’ll return to Lightroom. To edit again, use the Edit Original option when sending it back to Nik Collection.

After

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ANALOG EFEX PRO 3

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Analog Efex follows the new interface you’ve seen with Color Efex, but it’s a slightly different beast.

With Analog Efex, you build the look from the Camera Kit on the left, choosing from things such as Film Type, Lens Distortion, etc., to create something retro and unique. You can’t remove Basic Adjustments (on by default); but you can use the checkbox in the settings panel on the right to turn off the effect. The combination of Detail Extractor and Contrast gives an amped-up version of Lightroom’s Clarity.

STEP ONE: We’ll begin by setting Detail Extractor to 15%, and everything else to 0.

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MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

STEP TWO: There are plenty of bokeh and blur effects, but for this let’s go with a more retro framed plate. Click the + on Film Type to change the color tone. From the drop-down menu in the settings panel on the right, we’ll choose B&W Neutral. You can choose whichever look you prefer, but here it’s the third one on the second row. We’ll set Fade to 35% and Strength to 31%. To decrease grain, we’ll lower Grain per Pixel to 169.

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STEP THREE: To grunge up the image a little, add Photo Plate.

There are a few different types, but for this try the Streaked section. Quite by accident, we’re again using the third option in the second row. We’ll pull back the effect by setting Strength to 81%.

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STEP FOUR: To go really retro, you could go for a Polaroid border. Click the + next to Frames, and from Filmstrip, choose the first in the bottom row. It fills the frame too much, so we need to set Scale to 50% to reduce coverage.

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STEP FIVE: For additional grunge, add some Dirt & Scratches.

Selecting Scratches from the drop-down menu, click the first one in the second row.

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MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

STEP SIX: The final step is to regain some of the con­trast via Levels & Curves. Here’s how the interface looks at the end. The orange beside each section in Camera Kit indicates that it’s active in the current look.

You can’t control the order of effects in the right panel; they match the order from Camera Kit. Click Apply to return to your host program.

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PHOTOLAB 5 ESSENTIAL DxO’s PhotoLab 5 ESSENTIAL is included with Nik Collection 5. They also offer a discounted upgrade to the ELITE version, should you desire. With ESSENTIAL, you’re not getting the same processing as you would with DxO PureRaw 2.0, which uses the new DeepPRIME engine for processing. It also has options for HQ and PRIME, but ESSENTIAL only offers the HQ option, so it gives the most basic of the methods DxO has for RAW processing. It does, however, give a flavor for the processing that can be done in PhotoLab 5 ELITE. PhotoLab could take a book to discuss, so we’ll only take a passing look.

On install, you get the option to choose how much auto-processing is done. You also get the option to install a plug-in for Lightroom.

With the app installed, run it to see what’s there.

There are two main parts: PhotoLibrary and Customize.

PhotoLibrary

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PhotoLibrary uses a browser on the left. The preview area is empty until you select a folder. Once you select a folder,

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PhotoLab will suggest a list of modules to download for automatic corrections. Selecting a photo will populate the metadata information on the right.

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MAXIMUM WORKFLOW

Customize

Nik Integration In PhotoLibrary, at the top right of the preview area, is a Nik Collection icon.

Click on this to access all the plug-ins.

This means the Nik Collection can act as a standalone system from DxO.

PROCESS AND PROGRESS While some of the biggest changes are cosmetic, they really make the collection feel more modern and co­hesive. The updated interfaces make Nik Collection 5 a pleasure to use, especially with Color Efex Pro 5, one of the most-used of the plug-ins.

Things like Last Edit in the Nik Collection Selective Tool (in Photoshop) for the creative presets mean you can get to your edit faster.

The addition of PhotoLab 5 ESSENTIAL is an interesting one, and does make the Nik Collection usable without requiring the purchase of an additional host. n KELBYONE .COM

In Customize, you can edit your selected file. As well as the Customize tab at the top left, you can doubleclick on a thumbnail in PhotoLibrary to switch to Customize. On the left is the Histogram, a navigator in the Move/Zoom panel, a History panel, and the Preset Editor. On the right are the Basic Tools. These include DxO Smart Lighting and ClearView Plus.

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IBARIONEX PERELLO

VISUAL STORYTELLING

EMBRACING COMPLEXITY There have been countless lessons I’ve learned about photography. The most important lesson, however, is that there isn’t one singular way to practice photography. We each wield the equipment and software differently. Photographs are unique based on how we see the world and what we want to express. It took me a while to understand that.

ALL IMAGES BY IBARIONEX PERELLO

Like countless beginning photographers, I was fixated on gear and technique. That was appropriate during those early years. I learned about light, exposure, and postprocessing, which was necessary to achieve consistently good results. This was an essential phase as it helped me develop confidence. Once I gained technical confidence, I began taking risks and experimenting.

Eventually, I learned a personal workflow that led me to make photographs instead of just taking them.

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Taking photographs is what most people do. They raise their device, whether a smartphone or a mirrorless camera, and document what’s in front of them. The images are good enough if they’re well-exposed and sharp.

Making photographs is more purposeful. The photographer carefully evaluates the scene for lighting, composition, and the moment. There exists an intentionality, a series of choices that leads the photographer to create an image sparked by a unique blend of awareness and

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“ Taking photographs is what most people do….

Making photographs is more purposeful. The photographer carefully evaluates the scene for lighting, composition, and the moment. There exists an intentionality, a series of choices that leads the photographer to create an image….”

THE PHOTOGRAPH I was initially drawn to this scene because of the light and contrast. The shadows of the signs on the wall created a fantastic graphic of what otherwise would have been an expanse of negative space. A bright blank wall would be a distraction, diminishing the impact of the composition.

The two boys behind the window were illuminated by the same late afternoon light. They were necessary for the success of the composition. Lastly, I noticed the light on the sidewalk on the far left.

Awareness of these various elements led me to create my initial composition. I made a series of images paying careful attention to the gesture of the two boys and any pedestrians on the sidewalk. The best image recorded the boys mirroring each other’s gestures as they sipped on their respective straws. At that moment, a man with a red shirt walked past, adding a colorful human element to the scene, which created a nice overall balance to the entire photograph. Looking at the scene this way has been essential to my development.

My experience allowed me to resolve the technical challenges of exposure and contrast and focus on more aesthetic choices. [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.]

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imagination. It doesn’t rely solely on luck; but the presence of luck is always welcomed.

Photographers of various genres influenced my early years as a street and travel photographer. I learned and was inspired by photojournalists, portraitists, and street and fine-art photographers. Admittedly, I emulated these photographers to understand how they produced their unique imagery. Had I ended it there, I’d have ended up only a poor imitation of the original.

Inevitably, there came a time when I had to take what I had Before learned from them and make it my own.

My initial forays into street and travel photography involved a lot of walking. I spent countless hours walking city streets on the hunt for a photograph. As I discussed in my article in the March 2022 issue of Photoshop User, hunting involves constant movement, scanning, and waiting for a moment to reveal itself. It was an approach I practiced and refined for years.

Fishing refers to a different approach. Fishing involves finding a scene that offers the potential of a good photograph. The photographer using this approach considers lighting, contrast, colors, and static elements to refine a composition. They then wait for another element to find its way into the scene, usually a person. This involves lots of standing around, waiting for that final flourish or gesture. I practice hunting and fishing with my photography, but the latter has led me to make more complex and interesting compositions.

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

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HOW TO

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STEP ONE: After opening the image in Photoshop’s Camera Raw converter, go to the Profile Browser (the icon with the squares) and select Adobe Neutral in the Adobe Raw set of profiles. This provides a flatter rendering of the RAW file, which makes the most of the image’s wide dynamic range. Click the Back button (LrC: Close button) to exit the Profile Browser.

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STEP TWO: I increased the image’s overall brightness using exposure compensation when making the photograph. This prevented the wall from being rendered gray as well as any loss of shadow detail. Begin by tweaking the look in the Basic panel: set Exposure to –0.15, Contrast to +16, Highlights to –61, Shadows to –3, Whites to –17, and Blacks to –2.

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

STEP FOUR: Though the image is not awash in color, the reds, greens, and oranges are vital to the success of the photo. To begin tweaking those colors, set the Vibrance to +12 and Saturation to +6. This helps to draw the viewer’s attention more to the people than the wall.

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STEP THREE: The previous global adjustment added contrast to the overall frame.

You’ll next work on tweaking the midtone contrast by adjusting the Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze. Set Texture to +32, Clarity to +26, and Dehaze to +16. Notice the increased details throughout the midtones, with little impact in the extreme shadows and highlights.

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STEP FIVE: The image can benefit from a controlled and more refined contrast adjustment. In the Curves panel (LrC: Tone Curve panel), choose the Parametric Curve option; it’s the first option to the right of Adjust at the top of the panel. Adjust Highlights to –26, Lights to –5, Darks to +8, and Shadows to –22. This Curves adjustment and the previous changes bring out the wall’s texture and sustain its overall brightness. Too much of an adjustment would result in the wall revealing details but render it a muddy gray.

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STEP SIX: As with all RAW files, the image can benefit from some modest RAW sharpening. In the Details panel, click on the arrow next to the word “Sharpening” to reveal several sharpening controls. Set Sharpening (LrC: Amount) to +64, Radius to 1.4, Detail to 25, and Masking to 43.

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STEP SEVEN: An individual color adjustment will further refine the photograph’s look. In the Color Mixer panel (LrC: HSL panel), go to Adjust, and from the pull-down menu, select HSL. Select the Luminance tab and change Reds to –16, Oranges to –1, Yellows to –22, Greens to +8, Aquas to +7, Blues to +19, Purples to +6, and Magentas to +21. Finally, click on the Saturation tab, and adjust Reds to –8.

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STEP EIGHT: To help keep the viewer ’s attention on the main characters in the composition, it’s an excellent time to apply a vignette. Go to the Effects panel, and set Vignetting (LrC: Amount) to –24, Midpoint to 39, Roundness to +90, Feather to 74, and Highlights to 0.

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STEP NINE: The sidewalk is a bit too bright and distracting. Click on the Masking icon (gray circle with dotted outline) in the Toolbar on the right, and select the Radial Gradient to create a new mask. Apply it to the sidewalk below the man in the red shirt. Then in the Light panel (LrC: Effect panel), set Exposure to –0.40 and Highlights to –1.

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

Before

After

who provides a critical color counterpoint to the brighter area of the frame.

It’s not about blindly following a strict, absolute rule but finding what does and doesn’t work for each photographer. Refining an individual approach will help lead to a photographer’s style or voice, which will evolve and change over a lifetime. n

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My approach to this scene is markedly different from when I started photography. The proper technique directly reflects the kind of situation I’m in. In certain scenes, I become like a gunslinger, reacting instantly to what appears before me. While in others, I take in the scene patiently and calmly, waiting for the telling tug on the line.

Understanding the capabilities and limitations of the camera and my evaluation of the scene resulted in informed decisions. This frees me to observe the subtle changes in the scene, such as the man in the red shirt

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TERRY WHITE

LIGHTROOM Q&A

ALL IMAGES BY TERRY WHITE

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Q. If you use Lightroom Classic to upload to Adobe Stock, how do you keep track of which images you’ve uploaded?

A. L ightroom Classic has a Publish Services feature

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that’s dedicated to uploading to Adobe Stock. It’s great and I use it all the time; however, it’s not always easy to tell which of your images have been submitted to stock without scrolling your collection of potentially thousands of images.

There are a few ways you can accomplish knowing which images you’ve already submitted. The first one is that Lightroom Classic keeps track of which collections your images are in. There’s even a little icon in the lower-right corner of your image thumbnails in Grid view that, once you click on it, will tell you which collections that image is in. This is great for spot-checking image by image, but doesn’t really help you to quickly find the ones you’ve submitted.

In this case, I recommend either one of two things: You could choose and dedicate a color label for images that have been submitted to Adobe Stock.

For example, you could use the purple flag because

it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut and therefore you’re not likely to accidentally hit it. Then you could just filter for all your purple labeled images.

There’s yet another way that might be even better.

Create a keyword such as “Submitted to Adobe Stock.” Apply that keyword to all the images you submit, then you can easily check them by searching for that keyword.

Q. I know that Lightroom Classic and Adobe Bridge have the ability to upload to Adobe Stock, but what about Lightroom?

A. Unfortunately, Lightroom desktop and mobile don’t have a direct upload to Adobe Stock, but there’s an easy workaround. Add the images you want to upload to a new album. Let’s call it “Adobe Stock – For Submission.” I’ll explain why I worded it kinda weird in a second. Now go to the contributor portal, click the Upload button as if you were going to upload images from your hard drive, and you’ll see a section on the uploads page that says Import from Lightroom with a Select Albums button.

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Q. I’m still confused by syncing to the cloud using Lr and LrC. My question is: once the collection/album syncs down into LrC from Lr, if I then unsync it, will it delete the images in LrC? A. T his is a common concern that keeps coming up.

It can be scary; however, keep in mind that once the images have downloaded into LrC from the cloud, they’re now on your hard drive. Unsyncing the collection or removing the images from the cloud does not remove them from LrC. Just like unchecking the sync box next to your collection doesn’t delete the images either.

Q. N ow that Lr has video editing support, is it the same as in LrC that you still can’t cut and assemble clips?

A. T he two applications actually have some overlap when it comes to video editing, but they’re different in a few ways. First off, neither Lr or LrC allows you to cut out portions of a video in the middle or assemble clips. Those tasks are still best left to Adobe Premiere Rush and Premiere Pro. Both LrC and Lr can trim the ends of a clip to cut off the

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Once you click the Select Albums button, you’ll be able to choose which album(s) of images you want to submit. It will copy them from your Lightroom album to your uploads area and convert the non-JPEGs to JPEGs on the fly. Keep in mind that it will upload/transfer the whole album, so only put the images in that album that you want to submit to Adobe Stock.

The reason I had you name your Album “Adobe Stock – For Submission” is because Lightroom lists your albums in alphabetical order and, if you have a ton of albums, there’s a limit to how many it shows. Having your stock album start with the letter A puts it near the top of the list.

LIGHTROOM Q&A

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beginning or end. In LrC, you can’t edit a video in the Develop module, but in Lr, you can edit a video in the Edit panel. You can apply many of the same kinds of edits you’d apply to an image. You can also apply one of the new Premium presets for video in the Video: Creative Set. Once you’re done trimming and editing the look of your video, you can export the new clip. [For more on video in Lightroom, check out “Under the Loupe” in this issue.—Ed.]

Q. My Lightroom Catalog has a Quick Collection with a + sign following it. I didn’t create it, so what’s it for and can I get rid of it?

A. A h yes, the Quick Collection is actually a built-in feature of LrC, and there’s no way to remove it. It’s designed for temporary use; for example, say that

you want to export images from multiple collections. By default, the Quick Collection is the “target” collection, and that’s why it has a + sign next to it. Whenever a collection is designated the target collection, you can quickly send images to that collection by selecting them and pressing the B key on your keyboard. So, in my example of wanting to export images from multiple collections, you can select the images from each collection and press the B key. Now all of those images will be in the Quick Collection where you can select them all at the same time and click Export. Once you’re done, you can select all of those images and press the B key again to remove them from the Quick Collection.

Q. O kay, great! Now I get what a target collec­tion is, does Lightroom have that feature too?

I don’t see the Quick Collection there.

A. Although Lr does not have a dedicated Quick Collection

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(album), you can easily make one. As with LrC, you can designate any album as the target album, but I suggest creating a new album called “Quick Album.”

Then, go up to the Edit menu and choose Albums> Set “Quick Album” as the Target Album. Now if you want to send images to this album, you can press the T key on the keyboard. n

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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.

SEÁN DUGGAN

LIGHTROOM TIPS & TRICKS In the feature article for this issue, I covered the Three P’s of Lightroom: Profiles, Presets & Plug-ins.

With three main topics to cover and a limited amount of space, I ended with a bit more material than could fit in the article. Fortunately, I also have this column for that additional material. So, let’s get started with those extra tips!

DOWNLOADING AND ORGANIZING PLUG-INS When you download a plug-in for Lightroom Classic (plug-ins currently aren’t supported in the cloud-based Lightroom), it will most likely be saved to your Downloads folder. After I download a plug-in, the first thing I do is move these files to a more logical location. In my Applications folder, I’ve created a folder named “Adobe Lightroom Classic Plugins” (I also have a similarly named folder for presets and profiles). Using the full name of the Adobe program ensures that it appears next to the actual application files when sorted by name.

This makes it easy to find these files and I don’t have to go digging through my cluttered Downloads folder.

You can store the files in any folder you want, of course, as long as you know where to find them during the installation process.

ORGANIZE PRESETS WITH LOGICAL FOLDER GROUPINGS

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When you create a preset, you can choose the group where it’s saved.

For maximum efficiency, use folder groupings for presets that reflect what they’re used for. In this way you can easily find a specific preset for certain adjustments or effects. In the screen capture shown here, you can see how some of the default Premium presets are named and grouped, so you can get ideas for how you might organize your own presets.

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MOVE PRESETS TO DIFFERENT GROUPS In Lightroom Classic you can move presets into different groups in the Presets panel by dragging them onto the group name. Or you can Right-click a preset, choose Move, and select the group in the Move Preset dialog. In Lightroom, Rightclick on a preset, choose Move to

Group, and select the group in the menu. Note: You can only move presets that you’ve created or imported.

USING PRESETS WITH VIDEO IN LIGHTROOM With the June 2022 Lightroom updates you can now use the Premium and AI-powered Recommended presets with videos in the cloud-based Lightroom. This is a big step forward for that program! You can also use your own presets. Keep in mind that some presets may include adjustments that don’t apply to video files, and you may see a message about this before you apply the preset. If that’s the case, then only the adjustments that are compatible will be applied to the video.

USING PRESETS WITH VIDEO IN LIGHTROOM CLASSIC For Lightroom Classic you can use presets with videos, but not from the Develop module (if you try to access this module with a video selected, you’ll see a dispiriting message that “Video is not supported in Develop”). You can only apply them to video using the Saved Preset drop-down menu in the Quick Develop panel of the Library module. Just as with Lightroom, if

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ALL IMAGES BY SEÁN DUGGAN

Using presets with video in Lightroom

some of the adjustments aren’t applicable to video, then only the settings that do work with video will be applied.

CREATING A VIDEO PRESET IN LIGHTROOM CLASSIC Since you can’t apply Develop adjustments to videos in Lightroom Classic, how would you create a preset to use with a specific video? Fortunately, there’s a workaround for that. Double-click on a video thumbnail to view it in the video player in the Library module. Click the small

picture icon to the right of the time display and choose Capture Frame. This creates a JPEG still of the visible video frame and stacks it with the video in the folder where the video is stored (the number badges on the thumbnails indicate these files are part of a stack).

Now take the still frame capture into the Develop module and apply whatever adjustments you want, and then save a preset for that video. If it ’s designed to be a temp video preset, you may want to give it a name that denotes this. Then you can return to the

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Using presets with video in Lightroom Classic

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Video file

Frame capture from video

Library module, make the video file active, and you’ll find your new preset in the Saved Preset menu at the top of the Quick Develop panel.

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CHECK THE PROCESS VERSION

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Before you save a preset in Lightroom Classic based on the settings you’ve applied, it ’s a good idea to make sure those Develop settings are made using the current Process Version. If you see a lightning bolt symbol under the Histogram, that ’s a sign that an older version is applied. Mouse over this to see what process version is being used, and then click it to update the image to the current process version.

You can also update to the current process version in the Settings menu.

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CAN PRESETS BE USED LIKE LAYERS? This is a common question about presets, and the answer is generally no, but the more nuanced answer is, it depends. It depends on what settings are saved in the preset and whether settings that were applied with the first preset are overwritten by the same settings in the second preset. Remember that presets are simply the saved adjustments that were active when the preset was created. If preset #1 contains White Balance and Color Grading settings that create a warm color look, but preset #2 has settings for the same adjustments that create a cool color balance, then that warm color

look will be overwritten and reset to whatever has been applied in the second preset.

SPECIFIC ADJUSTMENT GROUPS FOR PRESETS Earlier in the article I mentioned using logical groupings to organize your presets. If you take this a step further and organize them into specific adjustment groups based on a narrow range of adjustments, then it’s much easier to treat them like layers or, to use another term, to “stack” them. Adjustment-specific presets would be divided into categories such as lightening, darkening, contrast, colors, looks, clarity, and dehaze, etc. With this approach, the settings from one type of preset wouldn’t be replaced if you then stacked a different preset, say for a color look, on top of a previously applied preset that only affected the overall tonal and contrast qualities of the image. Refer to the feature article in this issue for recommendations for creating an adjustment-specific preset. n

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Checking the process version is especially relevant if you’re working on an image that’s been in your catalog for a while. If the initial Develop settings were applied a long time ago, the process version may be old enough that the sliders in the Basic panel of the Develop module are different, reflecting the controls that were available in Lightroom Classic at the time the image was last adjusted. For example, in the image shown above, the Recovery and Fill Light sliders, which haven’t been in Lightroom Classic for many years, are visible, and the Texture and Dehaze sliders are missing from the Presence adjustments. This is because the program was using Process Version 1 the last time I worked on this photo.

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BRYAN O’NEIL HUGHES

GOING MOBILE

VIDEO SOLUTIONS WHERE YOU NEED THEM MOST When it comes to mobile creativity, not only does every phone have an incredibly powerful still camera, but a video camera as well. Gone are the days where video on a phone resolved postage-stamp-sized output. In its place we have 4K, high-frame-per-second captures that can generate incredible footage.

In the same way that some iPhones can natively capture RAW files, the same is true of ProRes for video!

It’s astonishing what you can capture on your mobile device, but what do you do with it?

ALL IMAGES BY BRYAN O’NEIL HUGHES

Sticking to the example of iOS, the Apple Photos app is surprisingly powerful and my first recommendation for getting somewhere with your video clips. Using the native iOS solution for video is as easy as working with 78

still images. Simply click Edit and you’re presented with four buttons.

The video icon, which is the first control, allows you to adjust the length of your clip by pulling in either edge of

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GOING MOBILE

the timeline. Committing a change will prompt a choice of making these changes to the existing clip or creating a new one. It’s nice to have an edit and an original, especially with video.

Next are the same edit controls you enjoy with your photos: tonal adjustments, color adjustments, even detail, and vignetting. You can dramatically change the look of your video with a few simple sliders.

Third are presets. One could argue these should come before individual adjustments, but here they are.

As with still images, these are fast ways to change many parameters of your video clip in a single click.

Last is a familiar crop icon and it does just that.

Cropping presets are available in the upper right of the screen, and there are also quick controls to straighten and even adjust the perspective of your video.

I leverage the Photos app for editing video on the iPhone and iPad and use AirDrop to share images between devices (videos tend to be large and unwieldy). This app is strong in terms of speed and a blend of basic tools.

surprised to find that these problems can now be solved in an application you’re likely already using: Lightroom!

That’s right, you can now add, edit (think a subset of color adjustments), and share a link to your cloud-hosted file (very powerful) in Lightroom, right alongside your stills.

Let’s take a look:

EDITING VIDEO IN LIGHTROOM

STEP TWO: With your video loaded, you’ll see that you now have a subset of your Edit controls. Presets are, as always, a great place to start. Note that you have a number of presets just for video.

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I often want to go further with color editing and sharing and, while Adobe’s Premiere Rush is a phenomenal solution for those problems and more, you might be

STEP ONE: In Lightroom, navigate to the Add Photos button at the lower right. Tap the From Camera Roll option and select your video of choice.

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STEP THREE: If you want to go further, you also have tonal controls. Under Light, you have Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks. This gives you the ability to precisely adjust tone. Under Color, you have Temperature, Tint, Vibrance, and Saturation for detailed color adjustments. Under Effects, you can apply precise Vignettes. Lastly, you can also trim the video.

STEP FOUR: Perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of the Lightroom video workflow (aside from your files living together and enjoying the same familiar tools) is that you can easily share your video. Simply navigate to the share icon at the upper right!

The team is just starting on this exciting journey, so stay tuned!

[For more on editing video in Lr and LrC, check out “Under the

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Loupe” in this issue.—Ed.]

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ADOBE EXPRESS Another mobile application that’s moving quickly in terms of media support, features, and unique workflow solutions is Adobe Express (formerly Creative Cloud Express). With Adobe Express, a tool tuned for social graphics and quick, polished creations, you can resize video to conform to any common destination, as well as add rich, immersive text and graphics. Let’s check it out!

QUICK ACTIONS STEP ONE: Upon launching Adobe Express, simply hit “+” at the bottom of the screen for a pop-up menu of several options. Before adding your video clip, note that there are Quick Actions to Trim Video and Resize Video, the latter being unique to Express.

So select Resize Video, tap Camera Roll, and navigate to your video.

STEP TWO: In the example shown here, I’ve selected the common Instagram Story size. You can drag the video clip inside

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ADDING TEXT AND GRAPHICS TO VIDEO STEP ONE: To enjoy social graphics and the wonderful type engine in Express, you’ll want to hit “+,” select Video, and navigate to the video on your camera roll. Select a size for your video, and click Done.

STEP TWO: With your video added, Adobe Express will automatically add type with all of the control you’ve come to enjoy in this powerful new app: font, color, opacity, effects, and more. My favorite way to try out many different text parameters is to navigate to Style, where I can spin the wheel and see randomized applications of the many different settings. Once I’m close to something I like, I can fine-tune it for final output! You can even add design elements and animate the text.

THE VIDEO EVOLUTION So there you have it, three applications that each started as still editors, which grew mixed media powers as the camera itself evolved. So, whether you’re leveraging the native tools in Apple Photos to trim and make tonal adjustments, the rich editing powers and sharing in Lightroom, or the dynamic resizing and powerful text and graphics in Express, you now have some great solutions for your video files.

As I mentioned before, the Adobe teams are moving quickly, so make sure to update your apps and explore the regular and significant updates. If you want to go further with your mobile workflow and video files, I recommend checking out Adobe Premiere Rush.

Rush gives you nearly everything found in the apps above, plus controls for speed, audio, motion graphics presets, Premiere integration, and more.

I hope to see some of your videos! n

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the preview to select which portion of the video will be visible when it conforms to those narrow proportions.

Quick Actions are just that; when you click Save, it will take the file back to your camera roll and quickly get you on your way.

GOING MOBILE

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SCOTT KELBY

PHOTOSHOP FOR LIGHTROOM USERS

THE ADOBE CAMERA RAW FILTER So far, we’ve covered some pretty important (and amazing) Photoshop filters, but this month we’re going to introduce a filter you probably didn’t realize was in Photoshop. Even though it’s a filter, it’s actually a version of Lightroom’s Develop module that lives inside Photoshop. You can pull up this filter and use it any time you think what you’re about to do would be easier if you were just back in Lightroom, but because you can do that stuff here in Photoshop, it keeps you from bouncing the same image back and forth between Lightroom and Photoshop multiple times.

ALL IMAGES BY SCOTT KELBY

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STEP TWO: To take an image over to Photoshop, press Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E). If it’s a RAW image, your image will simply open in Photoshop. If it’s a JPEG or TIFF image, you’ll see a dialog appear that asks if you want (a) to make a copy with any changes you already made in Lightroom (this is the one I always choose), or (b) you want to make a copy, but ignore the changes you’ve made in Lightroom (I’ve yet to choose this one ever), or (c) edit the original (Yikes! No, not this one. Well, in one rare instance you

might want to do this, but not today). Choose Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments and click OK. STEP THREE: So here’s our image inside Photoshop. Let’s go ahead and get rid of some of those stray hairs on the right side of her head. Not all of them, but the kinda crazy ones. This is something that Lightroom would do pretty poorly using the Spot Removal brush, because where those hairs meet her veil, it would smear the edges (and the whole process would be kind of a mess); but for Photoshop, this is a piece of cake. So, start by getting the Clone Stamp tool (S), which is shown here selected in Photoshop’s Toolbar along the left side (we covered this tool back in the April 2021 issue of this column).

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STEP ONE: Let’s do a quick project, and this will all make much more sense. We’ll begin with our image in Lightroom (shown above). Then, we’ll take it over to Photoshop and pick it up there.

PHOTOSHOP FOR LIGHTROOM USERS

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STEP FOUR: Let’s zoom in tight, so we can really see what we’re doing. Luckily, zooming in Photoshop uses the same keyboard shortcuts that we use in Lightroom. Just press Command-+ (PC: Ctrl-+) a few times to zoom right in (as shown here). Once you’re in tight, if you hold the Spacebar on your keyboard, it temporarily switches you to the Hand tool.

Now you can click-and-drag your image around right where you want it, so the stray hairs are front and center (as shown here as well).

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STEP FIVE: Now hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and click once in a nearby clean area where there aren’t any stray hairs.

Make sure your brush size is just a little larger than the hair you want to remove. You can use the same brush-resizing shortcuts we use in Lightroom: the Left Bracket key ([) to make the brush size smaller, and the Right Bracket key (]) to make the brush larger. Now we’ll paint a stroke right over the stray hair (well, the one you saw in the previous step), and it’s gone, with no smearing or muss or fuss.

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STEP SIX: Okay, getting rid of distracting stuff. That’s a typical thing we might jump over to Photoshop for, right? So, let’s get rid of the rest of the stray hairs while we’re here using the Clone Stamp tool. Here’s what it looks like when the most egregious stray hairs are gone.

PHOTOSHOP FOR LIGHTROOM USERS

STEP SEVEN: Now let’s back out to a full image view (known as the Fit on Screen view). We do that a little differently here in Photoshop than we do in Lightroom. All you need to do is go over to the Toolbar and double-click on the Hand tool, and it puts your photo into the Fit on Screen view (as shown here).

STEP EIGHT: Okay, this version of Lightroom’s Develop module that lives inside of Photoshop is called the Camera Raw Filter, and you can choose it from the Filter menu up top (it’s near the top of the list because they know you’ll be using this one a lot). Before we go on, an important little history lesson: Camera Raw came first. It was a part of Photo­shop before Lightroom was ever born, so when they created Lightroom, Adobe took Camera Raw and dropped it directly into Lightroom, but in Lightroom, instead of calling it “Camera Raw,” they called it the “Develop module.”

But it has the same sliders, in the same order, using the same math, that does exactly the same things, and written by the same man (Photoshop creator Thomas Knoll also wrote the Camera Raw plug-in). Okay, history class dismissed. See you in the next step.

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STEP NINE: When you choose Camera Raw Filter, your image opens in the Camera Raw window (as shown here), and if you’re thinking, “Hey, that looks a lot like Lightroom’s Develop module,” well, at least now you know why. By the way, it hasn’t always looked as much like Lightroom as it does now. A couple of years ago, Adobe changed the interface to look much more like Lightroom’s, which is a good thing.

Anyway, take a look at the Basic panel over on the right, and you’ll see, yup, the same sliders in the same order as Lightroom’s Basic panel. The rest of the panels below it look the same as well, except for two of them, which do the same things but have different names. The Lens Correction panel in Lightroom is named the Optics panel here in Camera Raw, and the Transform panel in Lightroom is named Geometry here in Camera Raw. Why the different names? Adobe just wanted to mess with our heads (is my best guess).

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STEP 10: Now let’s do some­ thing here in Photoshop that we’d normally do back in Lightroom, like adding an edge vignette (darkening the outside edges all the way around the image).

In the Camera Raw window, scroll down to the Effects panel, and drag the Vignetting slider over to –11 (as shown below) to add a very subtle darkening to the edges. To see the before/after effect of just this edge vignetting, click-and-hold on the little “eye” icon to the right of the word “Effects.” It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, right? But, it’s subtle enough that no one looking at the image would think, “Oh, you added a vignette.”

STEP 11: Also, like Light­room, you can see a side-by-side before/after view of your image by clicking on the little white rectangle icon just below your image on the right (I circled it here in red in the top image above).

PHOTOSHOP FOR LIGHTROOM USERS

STEP 12: Directly above is the before and after view.

After you click the little white rectangle for the before/ after view, it changes to three icons. When you’re done with the before/after view, click the first one of those icons four times to cycle through the different before/ after split-screen views to get back to the normal view.

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STEP 13: When you’re done editing in Camera Raw, click the OK button in the lower-right corner, and it returns you to your regular Photoshop document. So now you know that you can pull up this filter anytime you need it, make a quick edit that you’d normally have to wait to get back to Lightroom to do, and then you can continue your editing in Photoshop, all without ever actually leaving Photoshop.

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Okay, that’s it for today, folks.

Next issue, we’ll head a little further down that amazing rabbit hole that is the wonderful world of Photoshop.

See you then. n

Never get “stuck” in Lightroom again!

The Quickest Ways to Do the Things You Want to Do, Right Now!

The fully updated third edition of Scott Kelby’s best-seller is available for pre-sale! Lightroom has become the photographer’s tool because it just has so much power and so much depth, but because it has so much power and depth, sometimes the things you need are…well…kinda hidden or not really obvious. This book was designed to get you straight to whatever you need to do in Lightroom right now, get your answer fast, and get you back to editing your images. Just one “thing” per page. Easy peasy. Scott tells you exactly how to do it all, using the same format and casual style that made his The Digital Photography Book, part 1, the best-selling digital photography book, ever.

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Taking advantage of profiles, presets, and plug-ins in Lightroom Classic can help you discover new artistic interpretations, streamline your processing workflow, and extend the creative possibilities of Lightroom. Let’s take a closer look at each of these, starting with profiles.

By Seán Duggan

P ro roff i les Pro At the most basic level, a profile in the Lightroom ecosystem rof is simply a way to interpret a file. It can serve as a starting point for your fi image-processing explorations via the initial interpretation of a RAW il or it file when it’s first imported, can be a more creative or stylistic interpretation that’s applied les later in your editing process. In Lightroom Classic, as well as in the cloudes based Lightroom, you can find the profiles by clicking the grid icon at the top of the Basic or Edit panels to open the Profile Browser. The currently selected profile (in many cases this may be the default that was applied when the image was imported) is visible to the left of the grid icon.

In Lightroom for mobile on a tablet device, the location is essentially the same (tap Browse to see the Profile Browser). In the Edit screen of Lightroom for mobile on a phone, swipe left on the row of icons below the image and you’ll find the Profiles near the end of those icons. Tap the icon, then tap the name of the currently displayed profile group to see all the available profiles.

for iPad

Both profiles and presets are saved settings that affect the look of the image so, in that sense, they’re similar. Presets are generally more image-specific and are created by moving sliders in the Develop or Edit panels to achieve the look you want, and then saving the precise settings as a preset. Profiles never affect any of the sliders in the Develop or Edit panels.

ALL FEATURE IMAGES BY SEÁN DUGGAN; BACKGROUND AND INTRO PAGE DESIGN ELEMENTS ©ADOBE STOCK

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Are Profiles Similar to Presets?

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Since the sliders aren’t affected, this makes a profile an ideal starting point for processing an image. Or you can also apply a profile after you’ve done your main processing, and even after applying a preset, to take advantage of the overall creative look that a profile may offer. Because the profile doesn’t affect any changes you’ve made previously to the sliders, it won’t affect any of the imagespecific adjustments you’ve made.

Adobe Raw and Creative Profiles A RAW file always needs to be interpreted, and this is the first instance where a profile is applied to your photos. The Adobe Raw profile group in the Profile Browser contains seven profiles for basic interpretations of the RAW file. Take some of these for a spin to see how they affect the photo with which you’re working. The profiles in the Adobe Raw group can only be used on RAW files. Fortunately, many profiles can be applied to both RAW and non-RAW formats, and this is the case for the more than 40 Adobe Creative profiles, which can be found in the Artistic, B&W, Modern, and Vintage groups.

After applying the Vintage 09 profile to a newly imported file, none of the sliders are affected.

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Camera Matching Profiles

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Many cameras offer a choice of picture styles or film simulations that can be applied to JPEG shots.

These looks are permanently applied to the JPEG files, but you have more flexibility if you shoot RAW or RAW + JPEG. If your camera offers a choice of styles or film simulations, the Profile Browser will display a group of Camera Matching profiles for any RAW files from that camera.

For instance, in the illustrations shown here, you can see the Camera Matching profiles for my Sony and Fujifilm cameras. With the Camera Matching profiles, I can choose to apply the same profile I had set in the camera

Sony Camera Matching profiles

Fujifilm Camera Matching profiles

to the RAW file if I feel that any adjustments I want to apply would benefit from the additional information in a RAW file.

Tip: Override Adobe Defaults for Specific Cameras In Lightroom Classic, you can set up a default for a specific camera that will automatically apply the Camera Matching profile when you import RAW files made with that camera. To do this, open the Preferences (under the Lightroom Classic [PC: Edit] menu) and click the Presets tab. At the top, you’ll see the setting for Global (if you haven’t changed it, this will be set to Adobe Default). Below that, click the checkbox for Override Global Setting for Specific Cameras.

Then select the camera model, choose a new default setting for that camera, and click the Create Default button. Note that any Develop Settings that are chosen in the Import dialog’s Apply During Import panel will override this if that Develop preset uses a different profile.

Fine-Tuning with the Amount Slider Some profiles will display an Amount slider with which you can adjust the strength or intensity of the profile’s look by either reducing or increasing it. Not all profiles allow access to the Amount slider. Typically, profiles designed specifically for RAW files, as well as Camera Matching profiles don’t have this feature. In Lightroom, the amount slider is below the thumbnail of the selected profile; in Lightroom Classic, it ’s placed at the top of the Profile Browser; and in Lightroom for mobile on a tablet or a phone, the slider appears under the image preview.

for iPad

Third-party profiles are a great way to acquire some new looks for your images. Follow the installation instructions that come with the profiles you’ve purchased. Different vendors may have different procedures for installing their profiles. For this example, I installed a set of profiles from Matt Kloskowski. Matt has set these up with clear instructional videos for installing and using them. The bundle I downloaded included profiles for the four seasons, B&W, landscape, portrait, and wedding images.

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Importing Third-Party Profiles

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To install profiles in Lightroom Classic, click the Plus icon at the top left of the Profile Browser and choose Import Profiles (in Lightroom, click the three-dots icon at the top of the Profile Browser to find this option). Navigate to the location of the downloaded zip file that contains the profiles, select it, and click Import. The profiles will immediately show up in the Profile Browser, ready to use. Any profiles you install in the Lightroom desktop program will automatically sync to the Lightroom for mobile app on your phone or tablet devices. Profiles installed in Lightroom Classic will also automatically be available in Camera Raw.

Managing Profiles You can choose which profiles are visible in the Profile Browser via the Manage Profiles dialog. In Lightroom Classic, click the plus symbol at the upper left of the Profile Browser. In Lightroom, click the three dots at the upper right of the Profile panel.

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Deleting Profiles

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For any profile that you’ve imported or created yourself, you can Rightclick on it in Lightroom Classic and choose Delete Profile to delete it.

You can also Right-click an entire profile group and select Delete Profile Group to delete it. In the Lightroom desktop program, you can delete an individual profile by Right-clicking on it, but you can’t delete a profile group. To remove a profile group, you first must delete all the profiles inside the group.

When the last profile is deleted, the empty group will also be removed.

Where are Profiles Stored?

Presets Presets If profiles are an initial point of departure in your editing journey, or even a final dash of “seasoning” to create a more specific look, presets are recipes based on all the settings in the different panels when the preset was created. Depending on the preset and what it’s designed to do, the result can sometimes be very similar to a profile and create a more general look and feel. Other presets may be more image- and

• M AC: Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/ • W INDOWS: C:\ProgramData\Adobe\CameraRaw\ On my system, the MattK profiles that I imported are stored inside the CameraRaw folder in a subfolder for ImportedSettings, and some custom profiles that I created are stored in the Settings subfolder.

In the cloud-based Lightroom for desktop, as well as the Lightroom for mobile app, profiles and presets are stored with your account in the Lightroom cloud.

scene-specific and create very targeted results, such as darkening the sky or lightening only the darker shadow tones. With the addition of the new AI Adaptive presets and Premium presets, it’s easier than ever to take advantage of the power of this feature.

The Presets Panel In the Develop or Edit sections of Lightroom Classic or Lightroom, you’ll find the presets. In Lightroom Classic, they’re located in the Presets panel on the left side of the interface (you can also find them at the top of the Quick Develop panel in the Library module). In Lightroom, click the Presets button at the top of the Edit panel or use Shift-P to open and close the Presets panel.

In Lightroom for mobile, they’re located next to the Crop tool.

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In Lightroom Classic, profiles and presets are stored in a specific folder on your hard drive. The easiest way to find this is to open the Preferences, select the Presets tab, and click on the button for Show Lightroom Develop Presets. A window will open in the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer showing the contents of the CameraRaw folder.

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Recommended Presets from Lightroom Discover In Lightroom, the Presets are presented in three panels: Recommended, which are organized into different tabs and populated from Lightroom Discover after a quick analysis of your image; Premium, which shows the many different groups of the new Premium presets; and a tab for any presets that you’ve created and saved.

If you move the cursor over a Recommended preset in Lightroom, you can click a button for More Like This, or click the three dots in the upper right of the thumbnail to see who created the preset. You can save this so it appears in the Yours set of presets, or save a version of the image that uses the settings from the preset. You can also click the icon for the creator to view their profile in Lightroom Discover. If you like what you see, you can follow them to see more of their images in Lightroom Discover.

Deconstructing a Preset

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As you take different presets for a test drive, check out the Develop or Edit panels and you can see how the sliders were adjusted to create that preset. If you’re new to Lightroom, this is an excellent educational tool you can use to get a better sense of how different adjustments were achieved.

In the example shown here, you can see all the different adjustments that create one of the Premium presets in the Urban Architecture category.

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Before:

After:

Subject: Urban Architecture, Preset: UA07

Saving a Preset If you’ve adjusted one of your images and feel you might want to apply that same effect to another photo, that’s a good reason to save a preset. Click the plus icon at the top of the Presets panel and choose Create Preset (clicking the + icon in Lightroom will automatically open the Create Preset panel). In the New Develop Preset or Create Preset dialog, choose only the settings that are relevant for the preset effect you want to save. For instance, say you’ve created an interesting color tinting look. If you’ve also significantly lightened or darkened that photo, those overall brightness adjustments may not be relevant to a preset that’s primarily about that color tinting look you cooked up.

For example, the image I used to create a warm color preset was a bit underexposed and had too much contrast.

In addition to the warming effect, I also adjusted the Exposure and Shadows sliders, as well as applied a custom curve to lessen the contrast. But those settings were used for a specific image and may not work when applied to other photos.

So, I chose to save only the settings that created the warm nostalgia effect.

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Saving an Adaptive Preset The most significant update to presets in the June 2022 release is the ability to create Adaptive Presets that take advantage of the AI sky- and subject-masking.

With this new functionality, you can make a preset that creates an AI mask of the sky or the subject and apply a change to just that area. Even though you use a specific image to create the preset, the AI masking will automatically adapt when the preset is used on a different photo, and accurately create a sky or subject mask for that image. To take advantage of this, make sure that you choose to save the specific masks that you created for an adaptive preset. You’ll see the names of your masks in the New Develop Preset or Create Preset dialog.

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Updating a Preset It’s not uncommon to fine-tune a preset and make changes after you see how it looks applied to other images. If you want those changes to be saved with the preset, Right-click on its name in the Presets panel and choose Update with Current Settings.

Install Third-Party Presets

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If you’ve purchased and downloaded some thirdparty presets, make sure you know where they are on your system and review any installation instructions that are provided by the developer. In Lightroom Classic, click the plus icon at the top of the Presets panel and choose Import Presets. In Lightroom, this command is found by clicking on the three dots icon at the top of the Presets panel.

Navigate to the folder you downloaded and locate the files for importing. In many cases the developer may have gathered different preset groups into a compressed ZIP file, as can be seen in the screen grab here showing presets from Matt Kloskowski. As long as it has been prepared as a specific preset import file, you can select a single or multiple ZIP preset files to import into Lightroom or Lightroom Classic.

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P lug-Ins Pl that “plug in” to the Plug-ins are software Lightroom Classic or Photoshop architecture lufunctionality. The most to provide additional well-known plug-ins are those that provide external editing capabilities ug that expand on what you can do in the Develop module, or that offer creative effects and enhancements that gare not possible in Lightroom Classic. There are also plug-ins that address a wide range of -I workflow tasks including viewing and working In ns s

with metadata, finding duplicates in your catalog, and converting camera scans of film negatives. Let’s take a look at some of the different types of plug-ins that are available and how to get them working with Lightroom Classic.

Note: At this time, plug-ins are not supported by the cloud-based Lightroom. If the plug-in you’re interested in is also available as a Photoshop plug-in, then you can choose File>Edit in Photoshop in the Lightroom desktop program. Once in Photoshop, you can apply the edits using the plug-in in Photoshop and then save the file back to Lightroom.

Retouching and portrait enhancements with ON1 Portrait AI.

Some plug-ins come with an installer file that does everything for you; just double-click on it and you’re good to go. If it’s a product that has both Lightroom Classic and Photoshop plug-ins, as well as a standalone version of the program, it may install all of these at the same time. For installations such as these you typically need to quit the programs that will have the plug-ins installed. Other plug-ins require that you unzip the download folder to reveal the .plugin file and then install that using the Plug-in Manager.

Zipped and unzipped plug-in file

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Installing Via the Plug-in Manager

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In Lightroom Classic, choose File>Plug-in Manager.

Click on a plug-in to see more information about it, including the location of the file on your system, buttons for disabling or enabling it (if it’s not currently running), as well as the license key and registration for those plug-ins that require such info. Click the Adobe Add-ons button at the lower left to see the Adobe Exchange web page that features other plug-ins and add-ons, such as presets and profiles (many of them free!).

If you’ve already unzipped a downloaded plug-in file and are ready to install it, click the Add button at the bottom of your list of plug-ins in the Plug-in Manager, navigate to where the file is located, select it, and

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click Add Plug-in. The newly installed plug-in will be added to the list. For some plug-ins you may need to activate it by entering a license key or the email address associated with the purchase. The Jeffrey Friedl Metadata Viewer plug-in shown here is distributed as “donationware;” it ’s free, but after six weeks the functionality is somewhat reduced. Unlocking full functionality requires registration and a minimum PayPal payment of 1 cent. I appreciate the time and effort that goes into developing plug-ins like this and felt that this was a very useful plug-in, so I donated $10 when I registered my copy. You can find many useful plug-ins by this developer at his website.

Accessing Plug-ins Plug-ins can be accessed in different Lightroom Classic menus. The specific menu location is often determined by what type of functionality it offers.

File>Plug-In Extras

Library>Plug-In Extras

• F ILE>PLUG-IN EXTRAS: This menu often contains plug-ins that aren’t specifically for external image editing, such as the jf Meta­ data Viewer mentioned earlier, though some external editing plug-ins may also appear in this menu.

• L IBRARY>PLUG-IN EXTRAS: This menu (found in the Library module) contains plug-ins that are relevant to the Library view in Lightroom Classic, such as the Find Duplicates plug-in, though other plug-ins for external editing may also be listed here.

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Photo>Edit In

• P HOTO>EDIT IN: This is the primary location where you can access plug-ins designed to edit the visual appearance of a photo.

You can also access this menu by Right-clicking on a photo and choosing Edit In from the contextual menu.

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A Typical External Editing Plug-in Workflow For most plug-ins that let you apply image enhancements, filters, or special effects, the workflow is similar. Choose the image you want to process and select the plug-in you want to use. You may see a dialog giving you options for how the file is exported into the plug-in.

The photo will be opened into the plug-in interface where you can apply whatever changes or enhancements you wish. When you’re finished, apply the edits. The file will be saved back to Lightroom Classic, and you’ll see it next to the file with which you started.

You can see this in the image below, where the original RAW file is on the left, and the version edited in Silver Efex Pro is on the right. The small number badges indicate that the plug-in-edited version is stacked with the original.

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A night photo with a strong color cast from nearby streetlights is transformed into a warm-toned black & white image with a custom border in Nik Silver Efex Pro 3

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New Workflow and Processing Possibilities Plug-ins can solve a specific photographic problem, add a creative effect, or improve your workflow in other ways.

Let’s take a quick look at a handful of plug-ins for both image editing and other tasks, to provide a hint of some of the many possibilities.

FIND DUPLICATES 2: This plug-in lets you scan your entire catalog, or a folder within the catalog, to search for duplicate files. You can specify what EXIF data is used in the search, and any photos with matching data are placed into a new smart collection so you can review them.

JF METADATA VIEWER: Lightroom Classic can display a fair amount of metadata associated with a file, but not all.

If you want to take a deep dive into seeing much more of a file’s metadata, this is a good plug-in for that task.

Find Duplicates 2

NEGATIVE LAB PRO: This plug-in is a must if you have a lot of color film negatives to scan. It works on scans made with a dedicated scanner, or RAW camera scans made with a camera and a macro lens (my setup is shown here). While it really shines at creating natural color conversions from color negatives that have a strong orange film base, it works equally well to create excellent conversions from black-and-white negatives. [For more on using Negative Pro Lab, check out “Camera Scanning and Retouching Film Negatives” by Jack Reznicki in the October 2021 issue of Photoshop User.—Ed.]

Raw camera scan of a 1984 Kodacolor VR 100 negative

Converted with Negative Lab Pro

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Camera scan setup for film negatives

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Top: Topaz DeNoise AI; Bottom: Topaz Sharpen AI

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ON1 PLUG-INS: ON1 software offers a series of excellent photography plug-ins that cover a wide range of targeted functionality, such as Portrait AI (seen in an illustration at the start of this section), NoNoise AI, Resize AI, ON1 Effects, and ON1 HDR. [KelbyOne has its very own ON1 Learning Center where you can learn how to use these plug-ins from Scott Kelby himself.—Ed.] TOPAZ LABS: Topaz offers three image-quality plug-ins: DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI, and Gigapixel AI for upsampling images. All are available as plug-ins and standalone apps.

They also have a Video Enhance AI product.

NIK COLLECTION BY DXO: The Nik Collection has been a popular plug-in suite for many years. I know several photographers for whom Silver Efex (seen in an illustration earlier in this section) is the only way they’ll convert to black and white. The eight plug-ins in the Nik Collection offer a lot of basic problem-solving functionality (noise, sharpening, etc.), as well as a wide range of creative effects.

[For more on the recently released Nik Collection 5, check out “Maximum Workflow” in this issue.—Ed.] SKYLUM: Skylum provides Luminar AI, Luminar Neo, and Aurora HDR. With Luminar AI you can start

with a wide range of templates to create an initial look or effect, or dive right into precise editing with an impressive amount of controls. Sky replacements and other creative effects are very easy, as are essential portrait retouching features. [For more on Luminar Neo, check out “Maximum Workflow” in the February 2022

issue; for more on Luminar AI, check out “Maximum Workflow” in the October 2021 issue.—Ed.] BORIS FX OPTICS 2022: This has become one of my favorite plug-ins for adding cinematic visual effects to my composite images. The interface offers more

Boris FX Optics

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Transforming an image with Luminar AI

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Image transformed with Boris FX Optics

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than 170 filters and thousands of imaging presets covering lighting and lens effects, creative film looks, and realistic particle creation. The ability to add layers and use masks is another plus that I really appreciate.

I look forward to more explorations with this software!

[For more on Boris FX Optics 2022, check out “Maximum Workflow” in the April 2022 issue of Photoshop User.—Ed.]

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Try Before You Buy Many plug-in vendors offer free trials so you can check out their products. If any of the plug-ins covered in this article sound intriguing, take them for a test drive! And don’t forget that, as a KelbyOne Pro member, you can get discounts on many of these plug-ins. Just check out the Discounts page before you buy.

But Wait! There’s More!

But Wait! There’s the More!

That was a lot to cover in one article; in fact, there’s three P’s in Lightroom, and you’ll take advantage so much more I could have written that I’ve included some additional tips on presets, profiles, and plug-ins in my “Lightroom Tips & Tricks” column in this very issue. I hope you now have a better understanding of

of all of them to help improve your workflow and make better images. n

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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COREY BARKER

PHOTOSHOP DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS

MINIONS ASSEMBLE! Banana! Ah, those lovable minions! This month we’ll explore creating a minion-inspired image pretty much from scratch using mainly shapes and layer styles in Photoshop. Mine came out so cool that I use it as the lock screen on my phone. You can download some assets I’ve prepared to follow along as well.

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STEP ONE: Start by creating a new Photoshop canvas by going under the File menu and choosing New. Set both the Width and Height to 2000 pixels for a square format in which to build the elements, and click OK or Create when done.

STEP TWO: Let’s begin by creating the basic shape of the minion’s eye goggles using vector shapes.

First, click on the Foreground color swatch near the bottom of the Toolbar to open the Color Picker, select a gray color (#6c6d6d), and click OK. Select the Ellipse tool (nested with the Rectangle tool [U]) in the Toolbar.

In the Options Bar, set the Tool Mode to Shape and the Stroke to No Color. Hold down the Shift key as you drag out a circle in the canvas area, as shown here.

Once the shape is created, use the Path Selection tool (A) to center the circle in the square canvas area using the smart guides.

STEP THREE: With the shape path still selected, press Command-C (PC: Ctrl-C) then Command-V (PC: Ctrl-V) to copy-and-paste the circle in place. Then, using Free Transform (Command-T [PC: CtrlT]), hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and drag a corner point inward to scale from the center of the shape to make it smaller as you see here. Press Enter to commit the transformation. Once in place, click the Path Operations icon (two overlapping squares) in the Options Bar and choose Subtract Front Shape. This will knock out the center circle, creating a large ring shape.

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STEP FOUR: Press Command-R (PC: Ctrl-R) to reveal the rulers, then drag out vertical and horizontal guides until they snap to the center of the document (if they don’t snap, make sure that View>Snap is checked on).

Using the Ellipse tool again with the same settings, draw a much smaller circle at the top-center edge of the larger ring shape using the vertical guide to help you place it. After you start drawing the shape, hold down Shift to lock the circle’s proportions.

You can also press-and-hold the Spacebar while drawing the shape to reposition it. This should also create a new shape layer in the Layers panel. If you held the Shift key before you began drawing the shape, it would add it to the same layer as the large ring.

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STEP FIVE: Switch to the Path Selection tool, hold down the Option (PC: Alt) key, click on the small circle shape, and drag it downward to create a duplicate. Using the vertical guide and smart guides, position the duplicate circle at the bottom-center edge of the ring shape.

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STEP SIX: With the bottom duplicate circle still active, Shift-click the original circle at the top so that both circles are selected. Invoke the step and repeat transform function by pressing Option-Command-T (PC: Alt-Ctrl-T). Hold down the Shift key and click-and-drag anywhere outside the bounding box to rotate the object 45°; it should snap to 15° increments with the Shift key held down, so just stop when you get to 45°. Press Enter when done.

PHOTOSHOP DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS

STEP SEVEN: Now hold down Shift-Option-Command (PC: Shift-Alt-Ctrl) and press T two more times to duplicate the circles and automatically rotate them 45° each. This will complete the rivet shapes around the edge and they’ll be evenly distributed.

Double-click the name of this layer in the Layers panel and rename it “Rivets.” Rename the layer with the large ring to “Main Frame.” Drag the Rivets layer below the Main Frame layer.

You can also turn off the rulers by pressing Command-R (PC: Ctrl-R) again.

STEP EIGHT: Select the Rectangle tool (U) in the Toolbar, and draw a vertical rectangle shape on the left side of the ring shape as shown here. Then drag any of the corner control points to round the corners a little. The corner control points are the four points inside the shape near each corner. If you don’t see these points, zoom into the document.

Once created, repeat Step Five on this rectangle shape, but this time drag the duplicate horizontally across to the other side. Name this layer “Buckle” and drag it below the Rivets layer.

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STEP NINE: Now let’s use the Rectangle tool to create the straps of the goggles. Draw your first strap on the left; it can go a little past the edge of the canvas. Add a little taper to the shape as it goes off the canvas edge using the Direct Selection tool (nested with the Path Selection tool [A] in the Toolbar). Just click on one of the points outside the canvas area to make it the only active point (it should be blue while all the other points are white), and drag it slightly toward the middle of the canvas. Click Yes in the warning box that says it will have to turn the live shape into a regular path. Repeat with the other corner that’s outside the canvas.

Finally, create a duplicate of the strap on the other side of the goggles as we did with the rivet and buckle. Activate Free Transform, hold the Shif t key, rotate this shape 180°, and press Enter. Name this layer “Strap,” and drag it below the Buckle layer in the Layers panel. Now would be a good time to save your work so far.

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STEP 10: Click on the Main Frame shape layer in the Layers panel to make it active, click on the inner circle with the Direct Selection tool to select it, and press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to copy this shape to a new layer. You’ll need to change the Path Operations setting in the Options Bar from Subtract Front Shape to Combine Shapes.

Double-click the new shape layer’s thumbnail in the Layers panel to open the Color Picker, choose an offwhite color (#e1e1e0) for the white of the eye, and click OK. Rename the layer “Eyeball” and place it at the bottom of the layer stack.

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STEP 11: Next we need the iris of the eye. I’ve provided a completed iris file that you can download by clicking here, but if you want to know how to create it from scratch, click here to check out a short video. Whether you download the file or create it yourself, in your working document, go to File>Place Embedded, navigate to the iris file, and click Place. Use the bounding box to resize and place the iris, and then press Enter to commit the image and make sure it’s above the Eyeball layer.

STEP 12: Once the iris is in place above the Eyeball layer, select both layers in the Layers panel, and then convert them into a smart object by Right-clicking on one of the layers and choosing Convert to Smart Object.

STEP 13: Double-click the smart object layer ’s thumbnail in the Layers panel to open it in a separate file and you’ll see the two layers inside. Select the Eyeball layer first, click the Add a Layer Style icon (ƒx) at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Gradient Overlay.

Start with these settings to begin defining the spherical shape. (Click on the Gradient preview to open the Gradient Editor. The color stop on the left side of the gradient ramp in the Gradient Editor is set to #737373.) Don’t click OK yet in the Layer Style dialog.

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Step 13

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STEP 14: Next, activate Inner Glow in the list of effects on the left side of the dialog. You can vary the color depending on your image but let’s start with this warm brown color (#613906) using these settings. This just gives the shape more volume using shadows. Click OK in the Layer Style dialog to apply the layer styles, and then save and close the document.

You’ll see the eye update in your main working file.

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STEP 15: We’ll get back to more detail around the eye in a little bit but let’s start building up the metal look on the goggles. Again, we’ll do this with layer styles. Select the Main Frame ring shape layer, go to the Add a Layer Style icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Bevel & Emboss. The first place you want to start is with the Gloss Contour. Click on its thumbnail preview to open the Contour Editor where you’ll find several presets from which to choose. Try some or even all of them.

Once you have one you like, play with all the other settings in Bevel & Emboss. Since it’s a live effect, you have the luxury of seeing the changes as you tweak the settings.

To add more edge definition, activate Contour in the list on the left. Then choose a Contour and adjust the Range.

Again this can alter the look quite a bit, so experiment with it until you see what you like.

Don’t click OK yet.

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STEP 16: Next, activate Color Overlay, click the color swatch to open the Color Picker, and choose a light blue (#6782a0), like an atmosphere being reflected in the metal. Click OK to close the Color Picker, and then click OK again to apply the layer styles. The goggles are starting to take shape but there’s still more to go.

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STEP 17: In the Layers panel, hold down the Option (PC: Alt) key, click on the ƒx icon on the Main Frame layer, and drag it to the Rivets shape layer below to copy the layer styles to this target layer. Once applied, double-click the ƒx icon on the Rivets layer to open the Layer Style settings.

Here you can see we chang­ ed the Technique setting to Chisel Hard and then tweaked some other settings based on the rivet shapes. The Angle setting plays a big part in how the effect looks as well. The Range setting in the Contour option on the left was also changed to modify the layer effect even more.

The Color Overlay stays the same, so once done, click OK. Remember you can always go back and modify layer styles.

STEP 18: Copy the layer styles from the Main Frame layer to the Buckle layer, and then once again modify the Bevel & Emboss and Contour settings as needed. The fact the layer styles are scalable saves a lot of time. Now that we have the basic elements of the eye and goggles set, let’s begin putting together the final image.

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STEP 19: Go under the File menu and choose New to create a new canvas. Set this one at 1700 pixels wide, 2500 pixels high, and 300 ppi. Click OK.

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STEP 20: Create a new blank layer in the Layers panel and then click the Foreground color swatch to open the Color Picker. Choose the base yellow color for the minion skin. Here’s the color mix we’re using (#ebc807). Click OK when done. Press Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace) to fill the new layer with that yellow color.

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STEP 21: Go back to the working eye image and select all the layers in the Layers panel (excluding the Background layer). Press Command-G (PC: CtrlG) to place the selected layers in a group folder.

Name the folder “Eye and Goggle” and then drag it to the new image with the yellow background. With the layer group active in the Layers panel, use Free Transform to resize and place the eye in the upper area of the overall canvas.

Press Enter to commit the transformation.

PHOTOSHOP DOWN & DIRTY TRICKS

STEP 22: Let’s start adding some finishing details, starting with reflections in the goggles. Here we have an image of a warehouse with some nice big windows that will give us some random areas of light. 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.

What we want to do is pull out just those light areas. Start by removing the color from the image by pressing Shift-Command-U (PC: Shift-Ctrl-U).

STEP 23: You can make a Levels adjustment (Command-L [PC: Ctrl-L]) if you want a little more contrast, and then open the Channels panel (Window>Channels).

Hold down the Command (PC: Ctrl) key and click the RGB channel’s thumbnail to load the luminance of the channel (the lighter areas) as an active selection.

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©Adobe Stock/chehov

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STEP 24: Back in the Layers panel, create a new blank layer, press D to set the default colors, and then press Command-Delete (PC: Ctrl-Backspace) to fill the selection with white. Press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to deselect. Select the Elliptical Marquee tool (nested with the Rectangular Marquee tool [M] in the Toolbar) and draw a selection over a part of the image that contains some of the windows and any light in the scene that would be reflected on glass.

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STEP 25: Copy this selected area to the clipboard by pressing Command-C (PC: Ctrl-C), then go back to the working image and press Command-V (PC: Ctrl-V) to paste the selection. Use Free Transform to position and scale the layer over the area of the eye so it goes almost to the outer edges of the ring. Press Enter when done.

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STEP 26: Hold down the Command (PC: Ctrl) key again and, in the Eye and Goggle layer group, click the Iris smart object layer’s thumbnail in the Layers panel to load the overall shape as an active selection.

With the copied light layer still active, go under the Filter menu, to Distort, and choose Spherize. Set the Mode to Normal and the Amount to 100%. Click OK. Pres s C ontrol- C ommand-F to apply the same filter once more, and perhaps a third time depending on how much curve you want.

STEP 27: With the se­­ lec­ tion still active, go under the Select menu and choose Transform Selection. Hold down Shift-Option (PC: ShiftAlt) as you drag a corner point inward to scale down the selection into the eye area a little. Press Enter when done.

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STEP 28: Press Shift-Command-I (PC: Shift-Ctrl-I) to Inverse the selection and then press Delete (PC: Backspace). This creates an edge as if it’s reflecting the dark edge of the ring, but it still needs more contrast with shadows. We’ll get to that in a moment. Press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to deselect.

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STEP 29: Click the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square) at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a mask to this light layer.

Grab the Gradient tool (G) and press D then X to set the Foreground color to black. Click on the gradient thumbnail preview in the Options Bar to open the Gradient Editor, select the Foreground to Transparent preset in the Basics set, and click OK. Click on the Radial Gradient icon in the Options Bar, and draw several gradients to fade out random areas of the light reflection.

We need just enough to convey that the glass is there and that it’s curved a little.

You can also now drag this layer into the Eye and Goggle group so if you need to move the eye, the reflection will go with it.

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STEP 30: To make the inner shadow between the edge of the reflection and the ring, we need to use the eye circle shape once more. So expand the Eye and Goggle layer group, and Command-click (PC: Ctr-click) the Iris layer to load a circular selection. Create a new layer directly above the Iris layer, and press Shift-Delete (PC: Shift-Backspace) to open the Fill dialog. Set the Contents drop-down menu to 50% Gray, and click OK to fill the selection with 50% gray.

STEP 31: Click on the Add a Layer Style icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Inner Glow. Start by going to the Blending Options section and, in the Advanced Blending section, lower the Fill Opacity to 0%.

Click back on Inner Glow in the list on the left to access its settings. First, select a dark brown (#342108) for the shadow color. I arrived at the other settings with some experimentation. This will give you a nice shadow between the eye and the ring. It also defines the edge of the reflection more. Don’t click OK yet.

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STEP 32: Activate Bevel & Emboss in the list on the left.

Using the settings shown above, you can get a little edge light reflection at the bottom left of the eye to help enhance the image reflection. Be sure to set the Gloss Contour to Linear.

Feel free to experiment to see what varied effects it gives you. Click OK when you’re done.

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Step 30

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STEP 33: Make the yellow background layer active, click the Add a Layer Style icon, and choose Gradient Overlay.

Click the gradient strip preview to open the Gradient Editor, and double-click the color stop below the gradient ramp on the left to change its color to a light brown (#734712) or tan. Click OK to close the Color Picker, and then OK again to close the Gradient Editor. Back in the Layer Style dialog, check on Reverse, and set the Style to Radial and the Blend Mode to Multiply. Then just adjust the Opacity and Scale to give the background a hint of light and dimension.

You can also click-and-drag directly in the document to reposition the gradient.

Click OK.

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STEP 34: Double-click the Strap layer ’s thumbnail in the Eye and Goggle group to open the Color Picker for that shape layer. Change the color to a darker gray (#222222), and click OK. Then click the Add a Layer Style icon and choose Bevel & Emboss.

Use the settings shown here, but note the Angle setting is extreme and the Gloss Contour has been set to Ring to give us that edge highlight effect.

We also changed the color of the Shadow Mode to a dark brown (#3c2704). Click OK when done.

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STEP 35: Select the Eye and Goggle group folder in the Layers panel. Once more, click the Add a Layer Style icon and choose Drop Shadow. Start again with a dark-brown shadow color (#2d271c). The settings shown here will produce a large soft shadow over the lower area below the goggles. As with the Gradient Overlay above, you can click-anddrag in the document to manually move the shadow around.

Click the plus symbol to the right of Drop Shadow in the list on the left to create another Drop Shadow instance. Modify the settings and the color (#3e3626) a little to produce a slightly darker and smaller shadow. This helps add more dimension.

Create one more Drop Shadow instance and dial the settings down, as you see here. This creates a more realistic varied lighting of the varied shapes.

STEP 36: For the mouth, create a new layer above the Eye and Goggle group and, using the Pen tool (P), draw a simple path that tapers at each end. Click to start the left side of the mouth, click-and-hold to create your next point, and then drag to create the desired curve along the path.

Option-click (PC: Alt-click) the point to remove one of its two control handles, which will make it easier to control the next curve.

Keep adding points until you get back to the starting point. Click on the original point to close the path, and press Command-Enter (PC: Ctrl-Enter) to convert the path into a selection. Press D to make sure the Foreground color is black, press Option-Delete (PC: Alt-Backspace) to fill the selection with black, and then deselect.

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STEP 37: Here’s one more trick with layer styles to give the mouth dimension and shape. Start by adding a Bevel & Emboss style, using the settings shown here. Now activate Drop Shadow on the left.

(This is one of those times when we’ll use a feature for something other than it was intended.)

By setting the color to white and tweaking the settings, you can create a highlight effect on the lower lip, giving it a little more depth with just a layer style. Reposition the mouth, as needed, with the Move tool.

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STEP 38: Create a new blank layer at the top of the layer stack, then fill that layer with 50% gray using the Fill dialog. Go to the Filter menu, to Noise, and choose Add Noise.

Set the Amount to 3%, select Gaussian for the Distribution, and check on Monochromatic. Click OK.

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STEP 39: Finally, change the layer blend mode to Vivid Light and lower the Opacity to around 85%.

That’s pretty much it; but if you want to see how to add an eyelid to manipulate his mood, watch this short bonus video.

Final image

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Note: Please keep in mind that any minions you create are only for learning different techniques in Photoshop and cannot be used for any type of commercial work. n

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KIRK NELSON

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CREATE A SURREAL STREET DIVER COMPOSITE A few issues ago we explored a piece involving a young woman dancing in the rain on a city street with a colorful neon umbrella. The colors and atmosphere of that project were powerful enough to warrant another exploration of a rain-filled city street; but this time, exploring the hidden depths below the surface of those rain puddles. In this surreal composite, we’ll work with several clever compositing tricks to create a visually enticing image of somebody diving through a rain puddle into the ocean depths.

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STEP ONE: Open Photoshop and go to File>New to create a new document. Set the Width to 2,500 pixels, the Height to 3,500 pixels, the Resolution to 72 ppi, and the Background Contents to Transparent. Click Create, and once the canvas is open, use File>Place Embedded to deposit the image of a city street with water puddles. Here we used an Adobe Stock image.

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. Drag the image from the Libraries panel (Window>Libraries) into your new document.

Use the bounding box to resize and position the stock image so it covers approximately the top 40% of the canvas as shown here. If you dragged the image from the Libraries panel, press Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E) to merge it with the layer below so you only have one layer, and then go to Filter>Convert for Smart Filters.

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©Adobe Stock/Sergei Sigov

This project does use several stock images. If you don’t want to purchase the full resolution images, feel free to use the free, watermarked versions or images of your own.

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STEP TWO: Launch the Neural Filters from the Filter menu and activate the Depth Blur filter by clicking its switch. If this is your first time using the filter, you’ll need to download it. Set the Focal Distance to 25, Blur Strength to 44, and Haze to 5. Click OK. This gives a nice soft blurring to the background so it doesn’t pull focus and become distracting.

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STEP THREE: Next, add the Adobe Stock image of the diver the same way we added the street scene in Step One, but this time leave the diver on his own layer. You can click here to find and download the image.

Resize and position it so it fills the rest of the canvas. Roughly line up the top of the water surface with the water surface of the central puddle in the street stock image. Then click the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square) at the bottom of the Layers panel to add a mask to the diver layer. Grab the Brush tool (B), and press D then X to set the Foreground color to black. Using a Soft Round brush tip, paint on the mask to start blending the diver image into the street image.

STEP FOUR: Place the Adobe Stock image of the water splash.

You can find that image by clicking here. Set the blending mode to Linear Dodge (Add) near the top left of the Layers panel to render the dark areas invisible. Use Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to transform the layer so it fits into the area just above the diver. Add a mask to this layer and use the Brush tool set to black to paint out the hard edges along the bottom and sides of the layer.

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Water Splash: ©Adobe Stock/anurak

©Adobe Stock/GVS

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STEP SIX: If the diver had really just jumped into the water to cause that amount of splash, there would be a lot of turbulence in the water around him. Place another Adobe Stock image of underwater bubbles. You can find the image we’re using by clicking here. Place it between the diver layer and the other splash layer. Set the mode to Linear Dodge (add), and use Free Transform to scale the layer so it’s just around the diver.

Second Water Splash: ©Adobe Stock/prasongtakham

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STEP FIVE: The water splash should have a similar blue hue as the underwater areas, so click on the layer thumbnail of the splash layer so it’s active and not the layer mask, and then go to Image> Adjustments>Hue/ Sat­uration. Check the Colorize option box and set the Hue to +198 and the Saturation to 46. Click OK. This should give the water splash a bright-blue color to coordinate with the diver’s background.

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STEP SEVEN: The transition area to the left can appear problematic. To help with this, make the top splash layer the active layer and press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to duplicate it. On the duplicate layer, drag the layer mask to the Delete Layer icon (trash can) at the bottom of the Layers panel to remove it. Use the Move tool (V), to slide the layer over so some of the splash covers the transition area between the city image and the underwater image. Hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and click the Add Layer Mask icon to add a black-filled mask completely hiding the layer. Use the Brush tool again, but with white, to reveal the splash along the seam between the images. If it’s too intense, lower the layer’s Opacity. We lowered it quite a bit to 7% (the image shown above is still at 100% so you can see the location of the layer.) If needed, use additional brushwork to adjust the mask of the diver layer to make everything appear seamless.

STEP EIGHT: The colored water splash is a bit too opaque to be convincing, so make another copy of the original splash layer and return it to the Normal blending mode, which reveals the black background again. Also remove the Hue/Saturation smart filter by dragging it to the Delete Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. Run a Levels adjustment (Image>Adjustments>Levels) and pull the white handle over to around 185 to considerably brighten up the splash. Click OK .

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STEP NINE: If we’re not using a blending mode to remove the black back­ ground, we need to use something else. Click the Add a Layer Style icon ( ƒx) at the bottom of the Layers panel, choose Blending Options to open the Layer Styles dialog, and go to the Blend If section at the bottom. On the This Layer slider, grab the black handle and pull it rightward until the black starts to disappear. Then hold down the Option (PC: Alt) key and click the black handle to split it so you can make the transition softer. Setting the handle halves to 142 and 195 should yield good results here. Click OK.

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STEP 10: To help create a better sense of compatibility between the two main images, some of the warm colored lights from the street should be shining through to the water below. Make the street layer the active layer and use the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) to make a selection of the bottom half of the street image. Press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J) to copy those pixels to a new layer. Double-click the name of this layer in the Layers panel, rename it “Light Streaks,” and move it above the diver layer.

Use Edit>Free Transform, hold the Shift key, and drag the bottom-middle handle down to the

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diver’s head to stretch the reflections vertically. Rightclick inside the bounding box and choose Perspective.

Drag one of the bottom corner points outward to force a very dramatic front perspective that elongates the light reflections even more. Press Enter to commit the transformation.

STEP 11: Go to Filter>Blur> Radial Blur and set the Blur Method to Zoom, the Amount to 100, the Quality to Best, and move the Blur Center upward into the top third of the grid. Click OK . This creates a nice soft streaking of the layer.

Set the blending mode to Overlay, reduce the Opacity to 77%, and add a layer mask. Paint on the layer mask with the Brush tool set to black to contain the effect to the sides around the diver.

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STEP 12: Use the same process to select and create yet another copy of the lower portion of the street layer. Name this layer “Underwater Light,” and drag it just above the diver layer in the Layers panel.

Using Free Transform, drag this copy of the street down to the bottom of the canvas.

Hold the Shift key, and drag the top-middle point up to the diver’s feet to stretch it (you don’t need to change the perspective of this copy). Press Enter.

Use Filter>Blur> Gaussian Blur with the Radius set to 19 Pixels to drastically blur the layer. Click OK. Then set the blending mode to Screen and use a layer mask to restrict the effect to mostly the sea floor area. You can lower the Opacity of the Brush tool in the Options Bar and paint on the mask to reduce the intensity of some of the light reflections w i t h o u t r e m o v in g them completely.

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STEP 13: At this point, there’s plenty of the street color bleeding down into the underwater scene, but there needs to be a bit more of the water color showing up in the street scene too. Add a new layer above the Light Streaks layer and name it “PuddleColor.”

Set the blending mode to Color, grab the Brush tool again, and reduce the brush Flow to around 25% in the Options Bar so you can slowly build up the colorization effect as your paint. Hold down the Option (PC: Alt) key and click in the image to sample a deep blue from the underwater area and then carefully paint over the surface of the puddle in the street scene. This will pull that blue hue into the street and help cohesively merge the two images together.

STEP 14: Likewise, add a layer above the diver layer called “Underwater Color ” (you can leave the blending mode set to Normal for this layer).

This time sample a dark gray from the street scene to paint into the underwater areas. Again, reduce the brush Flow to around 25% in the Options Bar to slowly build up the colorization effect as your paint.

Focus mostly on the areas just below the water surface furthest away from the diver.

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STEP 15: Go to the very top of the layer stack and add a Color Lookup Table adjustment layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Color Lookup). In the Properties panel (Window> Properties), set the 3DLUT File drop-down menu to the HorrorBlue.3DL preset, and reduce the layer Opacity to 80%. This helps solidify the color of the entire composition.

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STEP 16: As a final step, create a merged layer at the top of the layer stack by holding down the Option (PC: Alt) key and going to Layer>Merge Visible. Then go to Filter>Convert for Smart Filters and add a Filter>Camera Raw Filter. In Camera Raw’s Basic tab, set the Clarity to +16 and the Vibrance to +25. Then go to the Effects tab and set the Vignetting to –25. Click OK, and enjoy your surreal street diver image!

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Crafting surreal and visually spectacular composites is one of the most enjoyable things you can do with Photoshop.

Take the techniques learned in this project and find new and fun ways to apply them to different settings to create a surreal world of your very own. n

Final

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LESA SNIDER

BEGINNERS’ WORKSHOP

ADD SKYWRITING TO A PHOTO Skywriting is an incredible, yet vanishing art. So few can do it: it’s self-taught, takes great skill, plus the pilot can’t see what she’s writing. Today, you’ll learn how to perform digital skywriting using a free, cloud-shaped brush and a type layer. With zero risk to life and limb, you can add this beautiful art to any photo. Read on!

STEP ONE: Choose File>Open and navigate to the photo you want to use, such as this beach scene photo from Adobe Stock. (If you’re starting in Lightroom instead, select a thumbnail in the Library module and then choose Photo>Edit In>Adobe Photoshop 2022.) A photo with lots of clear blue sky and few (if any) clouds works best.

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.

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Adobe Stock/Idanupong

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STEP TWO: Press T to grab the Horizontal Type tool (circled). In the Options Bar, choose a rather thin yet handwritten-looking font. Rollerscript Rough from Adobe Fonts was used here. To activate an Adobe Font, go to

Type>More from Adobe Fonts and, when the website opens, search for the font you want to use. Click its Activate Font switch to sync it with Photoshop.

Set the size to around 200 points in the Options Bar; don’t worry about the color because you’ll create an outline of the text in the next step. Click near the top of the photo to create a Type layer, and then use your keyboard to enter “marry me,” all in lowercase (because a pilot would have a hard time creating all capital letters). Select all the letters with the Type tool, and in the Properties panel (Window>Properties) make sure the tracking (space between letters) is set to 0.

STEP THREE: With the type layer active in your Layers panel, choose Type>Create Work Path. This creates a vectorbased outline of the text. Click the Eye icon to the left of the Type layer (circled) to turn off its visibility.

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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 Resolution to 300 ppi, and click OK.

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STEP FOUR: Press B to grab the Brush tool (circled) and, in the Options Bar, click the down-pointing triangle (also circled) to the right of the brush preview thumbnail to open the Brush Preset Picker. Click the gear icon in the panel that opens (circled) and choose Get More Brushes.

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STEP FIVE: In your web browser that opens, scroll down to the set of Kyle T. Webster brushes named Concept and click Download (circled). Back in Photo­shop, open the Brush Pre­set Picker again, click the gear icon, and then choose Import Brushes. In the dialog that opens, navigate to your downloads folder, choose the file named “concept.abr,” and then click Open. (Alternatively, you can open your Downloads folder, locate the file named “concept .abr,” and then double-click it to automatically load it into Photoshop.)

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STEP SIX: Back in the Brush Preset Picker, scroll down to the bottom of your list of brushes, expand the folder named Concept, and click the brush named Clouds Chunky (circled). At the top of the Brush Preset Picker, set the size to around 75 pixels (also circled).

STEP SEVEN: Create a new layer for the skywriting you’re about to make. To do that, choose Layer>New>Layer, and in the Name field, enter “skywriting.” Click OK. STEP EIGHT: Press D on your keyboard to set the color chips at the bottom of the Toolbar (circled) to the default colors of black and white.

Press X to flip-flop them so white is on top. That’s the color that will be used in the next step.

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STEP NINE: Choose Window> Paths. In the panel that opens, the Work Path you created earlier should be activated (it’ll be a lighter gray than the panel background). Click the flyout menu at the upper right (circled; it looks like four lines), and then choose Stroke Path. In the dialog that opens, choose Brush from the Tool drop-down menu and click OK. Back in the Paths panel, click an empty area of the panel (also circled) to deactivate the work path so you can see the skywriting better.

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STEP 10: Fine-tune the skywriting by filling in the letters. With the Brush tool still active in the Toolbar (circled), mouse over to a letter and click multiple times, or click and drag, to fill it in. You can also create more of a tail on the “y” and the “e.”

Tip: To zoom in/out of your document, press Command-+/– (PC: Ctrl-+/–).

Tip: If you hide too much, press X again so white is on top and click or drag across that area to reveal it. In the realm of layer masks, painting with black conceals and white reveals.

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STEP 11: To make some letters thinner, less perfect, and more realistic to actual skywriting, and to open up the holes in the “a” and “e,” you can hide some of the cloud outline with a layer mask. To do that, click the circle-within-a-square icon at the bottom of your Layers panel (circled). With the layer mask active in your Layers panel (also circled), press X on your keyboard to flip-flop the color chips at the bottom of the Toolbar so black is on top (circled). Now click or drag atop any areas you want to hide. Use the Left and Right Bracket keys ([]) on your keyboard to decrease and increase brush size, respectively.

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STEP 12: To blur the letters, as the wind would do, choose Filter>Convert for Smart Filters; notice the new badge on the layer in the Layers panel (circled). Then choose Filter>Blur>Motion Blur. In the dialog that opens, choose an Angle for some fake wind (0° was used here) and set the Distance to around 40 pixels. Click OK.

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STEP 13: To add a bit of perspective, press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to summon Free Transform. In the dialog that lets you know Smart Filters will be turned off, click OK. Right-click within the bounding box that appears and choose Perspective. Next, click-and-drag the lower-right corner point (circled) leftward just a little and press Enter.

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STEP 14: Lower the Opacity setting at the top of the Layers panel (circled) to around 85%.

STEP 15: You can also apply the same technique to a path drawn with a shape tool. In the example shown here, the Custom Shape tool (nested with the Rectangle tool [U] in the Toolbar) was used on a new layer to create a heart.

To do that, create a new layer, activate the shape you want to use in the Custom Shape Picker in the Options Bar, and set the Tool Mode menu at the far left of the Options Bar to Path. Click-anddrag to draw the shape, and then use the Paths panel to stroke the path with the Brush tool as you did earlier in Step Nine (there’s no need to create a work path this time). Then follow the remaining steps in the technique.

Here’s the final image, after using the Move tool (V) to scoot the text and the heart over to the right.

Until next time, may the creative force be with you all! n

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Final image

Tip: The heart shape can be found in the Custom Shape Picker by expanding the Legacy Shapes and More folder, followed by the All Legacy Default Shapes folder, and finally the Legacy Default Shapes folder. If you don’t see the Legacy Shapes and More folder, open the Shapes panel (Window>Shapes), click on its flyout menu at the top right, and select Legacy Shapes and More to automatically load that set of shapes.

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RICK SAMMON

PHOTO EFFECTS

SAMMONISMS FOR PHOTOSHOP USERS First there was my KelbyOne class, Sammonisms: Speed-Learning Advice for Making Awesome Images.

This class was jam-packed with photo tips with catchy, easy-to-remember phrases to quickly drive home a photo technique. These Sammonisms included: “The name of the game is to fill the frame,” “Backlight shoot tight,” “See and photograph eye to eye,” and “The camera looks both ways.”

ALL IMAGES BY RICK SAMMON

Then came my KelbyOne session at the Landscape Photography Conference, Sammonisms for Landscape Photographers: Speed-Learning Advice for Making Awesome Outdoor Images. This class cut through complex tech talk and got right to the point, again with catchy, easy-to-remember phrases of how to make landscape images with impact. These Sammonisms included: “Use your camera like a spaceship,” “Photo reality leaves a lot to the imagination,” “Brushing is good for you,” and “You snooze, you lose.”

Staying true to my speed-learning philosophy, I’ve come up with a series of “Sammonisms for Photoshop Users.” These quick tips can help you expand your 146

creative horizons in Photoshop, as well as offer some suggestions on how to have more fun with this awesome, image-editing program. Let’s go!

CONTROL CONTRAST WITH CURVES I was going to title this Sammonism, “Cut the Contrast Adjustment,” because adjusting the overall contrast of an image with a Brightness/Contrast adjustment isn’t the most effective and creative method for adjusting contrast, because it adjusts the contrast globally, i.e., evenly throughout the image. Curves do a much better job and offer more options, because you can adjust the contrast more selectively.

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Original image

Here’s the four-step process I generally use for adding contrast to an image. It’s one of many techniques, for sure.

1. C lick the middle of the Curves line to add an anchor point.

2. C lick on the anchor point at the top right and drag it just a bit to the left.

3. C lick on the anchor point at the bottom left and drag it just a bit to the right.

4. C lick on the curve somewhere between the center anchor point and the top anchor point and pull it upward. The new Curves line now looks somewhat like an “S” curve.

But wait, that’s only, and I repeat, only a starting point.

Play around with moving that recently clicked anchor point up and down and to the left and right to add just

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Compare the original image of the whale shark shown above with the Curves-enhanced image at the beginning of this article. I chose an underwater image to illustrate this Sammonism because contrast is one of the first things you lose in underwater photography.

So, in reading this technique, keep in mind that Curves works very well for all low-contrast images.

Af ter conver ting the image layer to a smar t object (Layer>Smart Objects>Convert to Smart Object), I went to Image>Adjustments>Cur ves. Applying an adjustment to a smart object layer allows you to make changes to the adjustment at any time. Here’s the original Curves dialog. The steep sides of the “mountain range” in the histogram indicate that there are no deep shadows and no bright highlights, the telltale signs of a low-contrast image.

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the right touch of contrast to your image.

I promise, once you use Curves to adjust contrast, you’ll never go back to using the Brightness/Contrast adjustment.

LOVE THOSE LEVELS Check out the colors in the final version of this sunset image. The color is there in the original file, but I couldn’t see them on my camera’s LCD monitor or when I opened the image in Photoshop.

In the original Level’s dialog (Image> Adjustments>Levels), you’ll see a big gap in the middle of the “mountain range,” which indicates that the image has dark shadows (the left mountain) and bright highlights (the right mountain).

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The quick fix was to drag the shadow triangle slider on the left all the way to the left edge of the mountain on the right, which increased the saturation of the colors during the move.

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As you can see, there’s a big difference between the two images. I guess I could have called this Sammonism, “Don’t delete dull sky images.”

☺

Final image

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GIVE THRESHOLD A TRY Threshold, which lets you alter the amount of whiteness and blackness in an image, may be one of the leastused effects in Photoshop, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have some creative fun with it.

Here’s the original photograph from which I created my Threshold image. The technique is really fast and easy.

Go to Image>Adjustments>Threshold. Once in the Threshold dialog, play around with the slider, moving it back and forth for different effects. It’s that easy to create an image that may be a “scrolling stopper” on Instagram or Facebook because it’s quite different from most of the stuff we see.

Final image

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ALTER REALITY WITH ACTIONS Yes, puffins can fly in the snow, but that’s not what’s happening in this image. I added the snow using Photoshop’s Blizzard action. (Note: This technique is just for fun. I don’t recommend doing it for photographs that you plan to enter in a photo contest or post in a real-world nature magazine.)

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Here’s my original sunny-day puffin shot.

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Original image

Because of the many variations, actions offer countless creative options for enhancing, altering, and having fun with an image. In the Actions panel (Window>Actions), you’ll find some Default Actions,

including Vignette (selection), Wood Frame, Water Reflection (type), Sepia Toning (layer), and Cast Shadow (type).

If you click on the fly­out menu at the top right of the Actions panel, you’ll see even more sets of actions near the bottom of the menu that you can load into the Actions panel.

Choose Image Effects, and the set will appear in the panel. Image Effects include Aged Photo, Light Rain, Lizard Skin, Oil Pastel, and Blizzard.

To apply an action to an image, first select the desired action in the Actions panel, and then click the Play button at the bottom of the panel.

Depending on the action,

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it might open a dialog or two where you can either just click OK or change its parameters. Just keep clicking OK until the action is applied.

To create a custom Blizzard effect on my puffin image, I wanted to be able to control the Motion Blur settings. If you expand the Blizzard action in the Actions panel, you’ll see the Motion Blur step at the very end of the action. To the left of each step in an action, you’ll see a little box. If there’s a dialog associated with that step, you can toggle it on or off by clicking that box. If the box is empty nothing happens; but if the box has a dialog icon, when the action gets to that step, it will open the dialog and wait for your input before moving on.

So, before I ran the Blizzard action, I toggled on the dialog in the Actions panel to the left of Motion Blur. Then when I ran the action and the Motion Blur dialog popped up, I adjusted the Angle and Distance. Then I clicked OK and the action completed applying the effect.

Hey, this action may work well for a fun holiday greeting card!

BE BOLD WITH BLACK & WHITE Sure, there are wonderful plug-ins and standalone programs that offer creative black-and-white possibilities. But so does Photoshop. What’s more, because you can see the effect of applying different color filters at different degrees, you can actually learn about the black-and-white photography process.

Here’s my original, very colorful photograph from which I created the black-and-white image below using the Black & White adjustment at its defaults; that is, I haven’t moved any of the color sliders in the Black and White dialog.

You get to the Black and White dialog by going to Image>Adjustments>Black & White. The Black and White dialog is where the magic, and learning process, happens. By adjusting the color sliders, you can see live how the

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Original image

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values in the image change. Here I adjusted the Reds from the default setting of 40% to 121%.

Here’s the result of that Reds adjustment: a photograph with a much brighter feel. Spend some time playing in the Black and White dialog. You may be surprised at how all the color adjustments change the mood and feeling of an image, which is the most important element when it comes to a photograph.

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If you like these Sammonisms for Photoshop, let us know.

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SCOTT VALENTINE

PHOTOSHOP PROVING GROUND

LIBRARY TEMPLATES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA Social media dominates how photographers and digital artists share their work, but nearly all platforms have unique requirements for optimal image display (and none of them have native tools to help you sort this out). While automated tools do exist, most of us only need something quick and easy to create a handful of images every now and then. Also, automated tools often don’t give you flexibility in placing, sizing, or adjusting your images for best effect. That suggests a lower-tech approach, and fortunately it’s something we can do right in Photoshop with templates and CC Libraries. We’ll also make use of a little quirk in exporting images to keep everything tidy. ©Adobe Stock/Nejron Photo

For this mini project we’ll be setting up a template document to create a feature image for blog entries. The output will have the same look as the image shown above.

STEP ONE: The first step is to create a document (File>New) with the dimensions of the output you need. Our hypothetical blog requires 1700x850 px, and we’ll use sRGB with 8-bit color depth for more consistent display across a variety of screens. Leave the Background Contents at the default White and click Create. Immediately save the document locally and name it “FeaturedImage.psd.”

STEP TWO: Since you won’t always know what composition you’re going to work with, set up some basic defaults that 154

will apply to most situations. Go to View>Guides>New Guide Layout. Select a high-contrast color from the Color menu, then turn on both Columns and Rows. Enter 3 into each Number field, 0 for Gutter, and click OK. Now we’re going to repeat the process with a little variation.

Open the New Guide Layout dialog again but this time choose

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PHOTOSHOP PROVING GROUND

STEP THREE: Now we need to place an image by dragging it from Bridge, Lightroom, or an open folder to create a smart object (SO). Most images will not have the same aspect ratio as the FeaturedImage template, so we’ll need to resize things to fit. There are two cases to consider: the image is larger than the canvas size and will be cropped, or the image doesn’t completely fill the canvas. Seems like a no-brainer, but there’s a great reason for pointing this out!

Note: Dragging an image into Photoshop should automatically create a smart object by default. If dragging does not create an SO, open up Photoshop (PC: Edit)>Preferences,

and under General, ensure that Always Create Smart Objects when Placing is checked. Click OK to close the Preferences dialog and try again.

We’re going to be using a layer-based command for exporting our images (Export As). If the image is larger than the canvas size, there’s no problem; we get just the layer itself cropped to the document boundaries. But if the image doesn’t go all the way to the edge of the canvas, exporting the layer will produce a cropped image that has different dimensions than the template. How do we solve this? Hang on for a bit, we’ll get there in Step Four!

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a different contrasting color and enter 2 in each of the Number fields. Make sure Clear Existing Guides is not selected, then click OK. You’ll end up with two guide sets of different colors.

The reason I use this method is so I can easily compare centered and rule-of-thirds composition without creating new guides each time. The centered guides also allow me to snap placed images or files more conveniently.

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For now, the SO should already be reduced in size to fit within the canvas boundaries. Use the bounding box to align the center of the SO with the center of the canvas (turn on Snap under the View menu if necessary), and then hold Option (PC: Alt) while dragging a corner of the SO. Stop just short of filling the canvas, leaving a little blank space on either side. Drag the SO vertically to position the subject or important areas in the middle of the canvas. Press Enter to commit the image.

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STEP FOUR: To deal with the mismatched areas, we’re going to use a couple of tricks. First, add a Solid Color fill layer (Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Color) below the SO layer. Choose a neutral color in the Color Picker that will be acceptable as a background fill for your image, and click OK . Double-click the name of this adjustment layer and rename it “Base Color Fill.” Keeping this as an adjustment allows you to change it easily later on.

Next, select both the SO and the Color Fill layer in the Layers panel and press Command-G (PC: Ctrl-G) to group them.

Name the group “_Featured_Image,” including the underscore characters (but not the quotes). I’ll explain that in a moment.

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Why did we add the group? Because we can use E xpor t As from the group and have a flat image of everything inside the group. That means the space around the edges of the SO is filled by the Color Fill layer, preserving our template document dimensions. By itself, this doesn’t seem very magical, but wait!

STEP FIVE: Add some pizazz and flair inside the group, such as a text overlay, a low-opacity gradient fill, or a Color Lookup Table. Ensure everything you want to preserve on export is within the group. Here’s a view of my featured image layer stack showing text, a graphic ornament, an additional color fill layer that affects both the graphic and some text at the same time, and a subtle gradient. Notice I’ve also applied a layer style to the Text and Ornament folder.

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your needs. When using multiple templates, you should change the name to reflect the intended output location.

STEP SIX: It’s time to create the template file and get it into our library; but we’ve got a little hacking to do first.

After your template document is set up the way you want, delete the placed SO layer and add a blank layer where it used to be. Name the blank layer “Place Image Here” as a convenient reminder, and save the file.

Next, navigate to where you saved your template file on your computer and rename it by changing the extension from .psd to .psdt. Adding the “t” on the end tells Photoshop that you’re working with a special template file, so Photoshop will open a copy of the document rather than the original. (Note: It appears that in some cases the macOS might need a little workaround to change the file extension of the .psd to .psdt. Right-click on the file in the Finder, and choose Get Info. In the dialog that opens, expand the Name & Extension option, add the “t” to the file extension in

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When you have your image looking really snazzy, Rightclick on the group folder away from the _Featured_Image name to open the context menu. Choose Export As, and then choose your options, including format, metadata, etc.

Click OK when you’re done. Navigate to where you want to save the image and click Save.

Tip: If you want to speed up the process, you can try out the Quick Export option, which is just above Export As in the same context menu. In that case, you’ll want to open Preferences again, go to the Export section, and choose your functions. One caveat: choosing Export Files to an Assets Folder Next to the Current Document will cause you some headaches, because it will output to your Library items folder, buried in the system files. Instead, choose Ask Where to Export Each Time, which will default to the last place you saved your files.

Remember when I had you name the group? That’s how the flattened image is named when you export it.

For your own projects, use whatever name works for

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that field, and press Enter. The macOS will ask if you really want to change the extension. Click Use .psdt, turn off the Hide Extension box in the Get Info dialog, and then close the Get Info dialog.)

After you’ve renamed your file, it’s time to get it into your CC Library. There are three ways to do this: • O pen Bridge, then open the Libraries panel (Window>Libraries) inside Bridge, and finally drag your file into the Library of your choice.

• O pen the Creative Cloud desktop app, choose Files from the top menu, then Your Libraries on the left.

Open a window on your computer, then drag the file to the CC app to the library of your choice.

• F rom within Photoshop, open the Libraries panel (Window>Libraries) and click the “hamburger” menu at the top right, then choose View on Website.

This launches a browser and opens your CC Library.

Again, drag from your file system to the Library of your choice.

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©Adobe Stock/oneinchpunch

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ALL IMAGES BY SCOTT VALENTINE, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED

• I n each of these cases, the PSDT file will be placed in your library for later access. To use it, you need to Right-click on the template in the Photoshop Libraries panel and choose Open New Document to create a copy of the template as a regular PSD file.

Now you can easily create consistent images as you need them.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

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First, I like to organize my Library into groups. I have several libraries for different kinds of assets, and one specifically for Social Media Templates. Within that, I have groups for my blog and other accounts. This makes it incredibly easy to find templates or add new ones.

I also like to lock every layer that should be kept consistent.

This helps prevent accidentally moving things such as borders or gradients when you go to position the smart object layer.

Finally, think dynamically! To maintain flexibility, use adjustment layers and subgroups whenever possible. Having live adjustment layers means you can create variations as needed to deal with different color palettes in your images, which you can then save as additional templates or add to your library as a group by themselves. n

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DAVE CLAYTON

DESIGNING IN PHOTOSHOP

ENGRAVING IMAGES IN PHOTOSHOP When trying to come up with design ideas in Photoshop, I often find inspiration from things I’ve seen around me. I wanted to make a graphic around the current meme of a song by BBC documentarian Louis Theroux that’s doing the rounds on social media. For those of you who don’t know it, it starts with “my money don’t jiggle, jiggle, it folds….” I wanted to make a design that had the engraved look of bank notes and certificates to give the design a “money” look. I also wanted it to be fun, so I went hunting for images on Adobe Stock and found a great photo of another favorite face from online memes, Harold! So this tutorial is the result of experimentation and having some fun along the way.

STEP ONE: If we were making a fake money bill design, I’d say start with a dollar-bill size layout but, as we’re only experimenting, let’s just open the stock photo we’re using and work on that. Once you know how to create the effect, you can make your own engraved images to suit.

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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.

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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 5,000 pixels, and click OK. STEP TWO: First, we need to create the pattern for our engraving. We’ll start by creating a very small document (File>New), just 10 pixels high and 10 pixels wide at 72 ppi. Set the Color Mode to Grayscale and make sure Background Contents is set to White. Click Create.

STEP THREE: To work on this tiny image, press Command-0 (PC: Ctrl-0) so it fills the screen.

Press M to select the Rectangular Marquee tool, and then drag a selection around the top half of the image so it’s selecting a 10x5 px area; the selection should snap to the vertical center as you’re drawing it. To fill the top half with black, press Command-I (PC: Ctrl-I) to invert it. When zoomed in this close, you should see a pixel grid in the image.

STEP FOUR: Now deselect by using Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D). To finish our pattern, go to Filter> Blur>Box Blur. In the Box Blur dialog, zoom the preview to 800%. Experimentation is the key here; we’ll use 4 pixels for the Radius setting for now but try 3 or 5 for a slightly different result. Click OK.

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©Adobe Stock/nyul

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STEP FIVE: Finally, let’s define our new pattern by going to Edit>Define Pattern. Name it “Engrave,” and click OK .

STEP SIX: Create another new document. We want this to be larger than the image we’re using, so 6,000x6,000 pixels will work for this. Again, make this image Grayscale with a White background, and then click Create.

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STEP SEVEN: We want to fill this image with our new pattern so go to Edit>Fill and set the Contents drop-down menu to Pattern. Select the Engrave pattern you just created, which should be at the bottom of the Pattern Picker, and click OK. It’ll look a little weird.

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STEP EIGHT: We now need to use a filter to create waves in our pattern, so go up to the Filter menu and select Distort>Wave.

Here’s another dialog where you can experiment with the settings, but we’ll use these settings for now: select Sine for the Type and set the Number of Generators to 1. Then set the Min and Max values of Wavelength to 145 and 150, respectively; Amplitude to 45 and 50; and Scale to 45 and 50. Leave the other settings as is, and click OK. The resulting image will mess with your eyes!

Don’t worry, you can also zoom in to see the pattern we’ve just made.

Step Seven

The pattern at 100%

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STEP NINE: Press Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A) to select the entire pattern, and then Command-C (PC: Ctrl-C) to copy it to your clipboard. We need to add a fill adjustment layer, so click the Create Fill Adjustment Layer icon (half-black, half-white circle) at the bottom of the Layers panel, and choose Solid Color. Make it 50% gray by changing the B of the HSB values in the Color Picker to 50% and click OK. STEP 10: Now Option-click (PC: Alt-click) on the layer mask thumbnail of the new Color Fill layer in the Layers

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panel. That will put the image in mask view mode so that all you see is the white of the mask. Now press Command-V (PC: Ctrl-V) to paste the original pattern we previously copied into the mask.

STEP 11: Press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to get into Free Transform mode, Right-click inside the bounding box, and select Rotate 90° Clockwise. Press Enter to commit the transformation. Now click back on the layer thumbnail in the Layers panel to exit mask view, and set the layer’s Opacity to 90%.

Step 10 Step Nine

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STEP 12: Select both layers in the Layers panel and go to Layer>Smart Objects> Convert to a Smart Object ( just in case you want to go back and change the pattern rotation later). Now we’ll apply one last filter to “roughen” it up. Go to Filter>Distort>Ripple, and set the Amount to 10% and the Size to Large. Click OK, and that ’s our engraved texture/pattern ready. Press Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A), and then Command-C (PC: Ctrl-C) to hold the pattern in the clipboard to use on your image. I also recommend saving the pattern file as a PSD.

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STEP 13: The image we’re using is in color but we want it black-and-white; we also want to emphasize some of the detail (your image may already be black-and-white or dark and grungy enough).

Before applying the following settings, go to Select>Subject, and then click the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square at the bottom of the Layers panel).

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STEP 14: Go to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels and, in the Properties panel, set the shadows slider under Output to 7 and the white slider to 244. Set the midtone slider below the histogram to 0.40. Select both layers in the Layers panel and convert them into a smart object.

DESIGNING IN PHOTOSHOP

STEP 15: Go to Filter>Camera Raw Filter. Again, this is another area where you can experiment, but we really want lots of detail with which to work, so use the following settings for now:

BASIC PANEL • Highlights: –100 • Shadows: +48 • Whites: –75 • Texture: +100 • Clarity: +25 • Saturation: –100

DETAIL PANEL • Sharpening: 150 This should give you a nice, grungy black-and-white image.

Click OK.

STEP 16: Now add a new layer at the bottom of the layer stack, and grab the Gradient tool (G).

Click on the Foreground color swatch near the bottom of the Toolbar, set it to a gray color (#9a9797), and click OK to close the Color Picker. Set the Background color to a darker gray (#575656).

In the Options Bar, click on the gradient preview thumbnail to open the Gradient Editor, and select the Foreground to Background preset in the Basics set. Click OK, and then click on the Linear Gradient icon in the Options Bar. Holding the Shift key, drag from the top to the bottom of the document to fill the new layer with a light to dark-gray gradient, just to darken the background but not too much.

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STEP 17: Because you copied the pattern, you can now press Command-V (PC: Ctrl-V) to paste it onto your image. Drag this layer to the top of the layer stack.

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STEP 18: We need to change the blending mode of this layer, so from the drop-down near the top left of the Layers panel, choose Hard Mix. Now you can see the engraving texture punch through the image and those dark areas show up really well. You may need to zoom in a little to see the lines better. If you need to make the lines thicker, you can always use Free Transform on the engraving layer; just be sure to increase them proportionally.

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STEP 19: Let’s remove some of the image detail so that it looks less like a photo and more like an illustration. By keeping the engraved layer on top, it means we can play with the image and you’ll see the results live. First, click on the image layer in the Layers panel to make it active, and then go to Filter>Stylize>Oil paint. Push all the values to their maximum of 10, and uncheck the Lighting option.

Click OK. At this point, if you need to bring out or reduce any of the darker areas, you can go back into the Camera Raw Filter by double-clicking its name in the Layers panel.

Adjust the Shadows and Highlights as needed, and click OK when done.

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DESIGNING IN PHOTOSHOP

STEP 21: To add some color to our image and give it a bank note/certificate feel, let’s add a Gradient Map adjustment layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer> Gradient Map) at the top of the layer stack. Click on the gradient preview thumbnail in the Properties panel to open the Gradient Editor. Doubleclick the color stop below the gradient ramp on the left to open the Color Picker, and change its value to a dark green (#2b450b). Click OK to close the Color Picker, and then repeat for the color stop on the right, except change its value to a light cream (#f5f0c6) to give it that money look. Click OK to close the Color Picker, and then OK again to close the Gradient Editor.

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STEP 20: Make a copy of the image layer using Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J), and then reapply that Oil Paint filter to this new layer about another six times.

When you go back to the Filter menu, you should see the Oil Paint filter at the top. Just select it from there, and it will reapply with the last settings used.

Then add a layer mask and, using the Brush tool (B) set to black, paint around the eyes and mouth to hide the Oil Paint filter and reveal those details from the layer below.

Another step you can take is to use Free Transform on the engrave layer and rotate it so that the waves of the texture match the direction of any curves on the face. This is purely experimental; try to find an angle you like and press Enter to commit the rotation or resize.

You can also add a Levels adjustment layer below the engraved layer to do a last mix of the darks and lights to get the texture how you like. There are no specific settings here; play with the sliders below the histogram in the Properties panel until you’re happy. Next, we’re going to introduce some color.

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STEP 22: For this part, I couldn’t find the font style I wanted in Adobe Fonts so (for personal use only) I found a font called Dollar Bill on dafont.com to use for this. There are some money style vector letters in Adobe Stock but you’d have to place them as images, rather than typing out the words. So we’ll go with the Dollar Bill font.

Grab the Type tool (T) and, in the Options Bar, set the color to black, and click on the Right Align Text icon. Then, type out: “MY MONEY DON’T JIGGLE, JIGGLE, IT FOLDS” adding Returns as needed. With the type cursor inserted in the text, hold the Command (PC: Ctrl) key to temporarily put the type in Free Transform mode, and adjust the size and position of the text to fit the right-hand side of the image. Click the checkmark in the Options Bar to commit the text.

STEP 23: Next, drag the text layer below the Gradient Map layer, and drop the Fill to 90% in the Layers panel. Add a subtle bevel effect by going to Layer>Layer Style>Bevel & Emboss and using these settings. Click OK when you’re done.

• Style: Outer Bevel

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• Technique: Chisel Hard

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• Depth: 178% • Size: 8 px • Soften: 0 px • Angle: 30° • Altitude: 30°

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STEP 24: To give our image a finishing touch, we’ll add a grunge paper texture. I found a cool one from Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com. Go to File>Place Embedded, navigate to the texture image you wish to use, and click Place. Resize it to fill the image, press Enter, and drag it to the top of the layer stack. Go to Image>Adjustments>Black & White, click OK to desaturate the texture, and drop its layer Opacity to 50%. Finally, change its blend mode to Hard Light.

And there you have it, an engraved effect that you can use on any photo, and experiment as you go. That’s the best part about using Photoshop: having fun and playing! And if you still have no idea what that song is in the meme, Google it. n

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Photo by Pixabay

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VICTORIA PAVLOV

PHOTOSHOP Q&A Q. A s a lifestyle photographer, I often need to blur out the background in my photographs. What’s the quickest way of doing this in Photoshop?

A. I ’m with you on this. In Photoshop we have many

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ways of blurring an image’s background but, of course, we always like to do it the fastest way.

My favorite way is using a Neural Filter. First, go to

Filter>Convert for Smart Filters so you’ll be able to make changes to the Neural Filter after you apply it. Then, go to Filter>Neural Filters and turn on the switch for Depth Blur. If you haven’t used Depth Blur before, you’ll need to download it first.

Even in the beta stage, the Depth Blur filter is very helpful to blur the background. When you enable it, Photoshop will use AI to analyze the image and apply the best result, based on its calculations. You can adjust the result using the Blur Filter settings in the Neural Filter workspace.

The Focal Range and Blur Strength sliders along with the Focus Subject option are powerful tools that give you full control over the Depth Blur Neural Filter.

Q. My Photoshop has behaved strangely for the last week.

Is there any way to fix it?

A. I recommend that you

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Before

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After applying Depth Blur

first check that you have the latest Photoshop update installed.

If updating Photoshop doesn’t fix the strange behavior, try resetting Photoshop’s Preferences (before restoring preferences, be sure to save all opened documents). Go to Photoshop (PC: Edit)>Preferences>General, and click on the Reset Preferences on Quit button at the bottom right of the options. Click OK when Photoshop asks if you’re sure. Quit Photoshop and then relaunch it.

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Q. I ’m still learning Photoshop and I’m wondering if I can apply a mask to multiple layers at the same time?

A. First of all, welcome to the Photoshop family. Yes, you absolutely can apply a mask to multiple layers.

You’ll need to create a layer group first that contains all the layers to which you want to apply a mask. As usual, there are several ways to do that: select all the layers in the Layers panel that you want in the group and then either press Command-G (PC: Ctrl-G), go to Layer>Group Layers, or click the Create a New Group icon (folder) at the bottom of the Layers panel.

Of course, you can always drag layers into a group after you’ve created one.

After you have your layers in a group, click on the group in the Layers panel to make it active, and then click the Add Layer Mask icon (circle in a square) at the bottom of the panel. Now when you paint on that mask, it will apply it to all the layers in the layer group at the same time.

Q. I’m using Creative Cloud Libraries a lot, and my libraries are growing.

I spend a lot of time trying to find images I need. How can I get my libraries more organized?

A. Thank you for this question. I love my Creative Cloud Libraries and use them every day. When we start a new library, we often don’t consider organization, because we think we’ll remember every single image in that library. Of course, this is rarely the case. As a library grows, we can soon find ourselves spending more and more time looking for assets we need.

Like a bookshelf, our library needs organization.

I keep my library organized by using the group feature. At the bottom of the Libraries panel (Window>Libraries), click on the New Group icon (folder), and give the new group a name that makes sense to you. Now you can drag-and-drop any element(s) from the library to this group. You can select multiple images before creating a new group, and those images will automatically be added to the new group.

You can also create subgroups. I love subgroups because they help to create even more detailed organization of your libraries; for example, if you have a Pet group, you can create subgroups for Dogs, Cats, Birds, etc. There are a few different ways to create subgroups: (1) When creating a new group, after you name the group, click Create a Subgroup directly below the name field; (2) make a group active before clicking the New Group icon; and (3) drag an existing group into another group.

Tip: The best practice after adding a new asset to the library is to move it to the specific group. This is easy, fast, and very productive.

Q. I ’m a freelance graphic designer, and I often work with packaging design. My client work includes creating a lot of patterns, which takes a lot of time. If I make any mistake, I need to adjust everything manually. Is there any easier way of creating patterns in Photoshop?

A. Yes there is. In Photoshop, we now have a simple, stress-free way of creating a custom, unique pattern.

After creating a new document, go to View>Pattern Preview (this will place a checkmark next to

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Note: This will return all of your Photoshop preferences back to their defaults, including such things as custom keyboard shortcuts and menu customization. For more on preferences, including how to back up and restore them, click here.

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Pattern Preview in the menu to let you know it’s turned on).

Photoshop will give you a warning that Pattern Preview works best on smart objects. Click OK. Zoom out of your image, and then drag out a corner of the document window. You’ll see that Photoshop has created a rectangle in the document. The space inside the rectangle is your “canvas” to create any pattern you like, using any element(s) you like. You’ll see the pattern outside the rectangle. If you need to adjust your pattern, simply make changes to any element inside that rectangle space, and Photoshop will update the pattern as you make the changes.

To save the pattern, open the Patterns panel from the Window menu, and click the plus icon at the bottom of the panel. Give your pattern a name in the Pattern Name dialog, and click OK. If you want to create a pattern based on an image, open the Libraries panel (Window>Libraries), and click the plus icon at the bottom of the panel. In the pop-up menu, choose Extract from Image. Photoshop will display a dialog based on the Adobe Capture app for mobile devices.

You can create patterns, shapes, color themes, and gradients using this dialog. Patterns is selected by default, so choose the Pattern type you wish to create. Using the Image workspace on the right side of the dialog, you can adjust Scale and Rotation of the image. In the preview window at the bottom right, you can manually adjust the part of the image from which Photoshop is creating the pattern.

The whole process is live, so you’ll be able to preview how adjustments affect the pattern in real time.

When finished, click the Save to CC Libraries button.

Photoshop will save a new pattern in the open/active Creative Cloud Library.

Q. I just started using Photoshop on my iPad, and I’m still at the learning stage. My question is: “Can I invert a selection in Photoshop on the iPad?” A. Yes, you can invert a selection using the Command-Shift-I keyboard shortcut. If you don’t have a keyboard for your iPad, after the subject is selected, tap on the Invert icon in the tool panel that appears after you make a selection.

Q. Can I adjust the size of my active document in Photoshop on the iPad? A. Yes, you absolutely can. Tap on the gear icon at the top-right corner of the app, and then tap on the Image Size tab. 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.

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Transform Your Images into Paintings in Four Simple Steps | Review by Fernando Santos

“Is there a plug-in I can use to transform a photo into a painting?” is a question that’s asked frequently on the KelbyOne Community. The answer is yes, and Trulyscene Artbox by the German company, Picture Instruments, is probably the most recent choice for Photoshop on the market.

The Trulyscene Artbox plug-in won’t take much time to learn how to use and start getting results. Something you may not be accustomed to, however, is how you have to buy it: you have to do it on the Adobe Marketplace. While this may initially throw you off, in fact it’s very convenient. All you do is use the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app, go to the Marketplace, click on Plugins at the top, search for Trulyscene Artbox, and then pay $39. It’s convenient in that, wherever you’re using your Adobe subscription, you can manage your install on that computer from the Adobe Creative cloud desktop app. Installation is really fast, just a couple of minutes. Note: The plug-in can only be used with Adobe Photoshop version 22 or later.

The process is a breeze, with just four quick steps: • Step 1 is where you define your settings: your canvas size, border size, and border color.

• S tep 2 is when you identify your subject; however, you probably won’t need to do anything here, because the plug-in uses the power of Photoshop to

Company: Picture Instruments

Price: $39

Hot: Simple to use; inexpensive

Not: Limited options

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REVIEWS

Step One

Step Two

Step Three

find your subject automatically. You can always change it or refine it, if necessary.

• S tep 3 is where you select the effect you want.

Choose one of eight different brushes at your disposal, and then select the effect itself from six possible choices (for a total of 48 different combinations).

• Step 4 is essentially applying the effect and creating a new file.

It probably took you longer to read these four steps than it would to actually use the plug-in!

One thing that’s very interesting, compared to other similar plug-ins I’ve used, is that Trulyscene Artbox builds a large number of layers for you during the process, and those layers are not flattened at the end. This means that you can dive deeper into the file and tweak any possible effect that you may want to go in a different way! If you’re not an experienced Photoshop user, it may take you some time to identify what

and where to do your changes, but it’s all there at your disposal. Also, when you click to apply your chosen effect (Step 3), all the layers are rendered, and you’ll be able to change from one effect to another really quickly, just by clicking on the effect number: The plug-in will simply toggle the corresponding layers, so the new results show immediately.

Compared to other products on the market, you may find the available options somewhat limited; however, other plug-ins usually output just one new layer, while Trulyscene Artbox provides many layers.

Although I would enjoy having more options for the kind of effects generated by the Trulyscene Artbox plug-in, the results are pleasing and, at this price point, even if you use it just a couple of times to create a “painting” you like, it’s worth the investment. One final note: Keep in mind that not all images will produce awesome results. If it works really well on one image, but not on another, keep trying, because not all images make good “paintings,” and that’s not the plug-in’s fault. n

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Step Four

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Stash Master 13L 

Travel Cube That’s a Problem Solver and the Perfect Size | Review by Fernando Santos

All photographers know there’s no such thing as the perfect camera bag. If you’re like me, you already have too many camera bags, but you’re always looking for a new one, right? Well, the Stash Master 13L from Think Tank Photo may be the next one in your collection. Let me tell you why.

First, this is not your typical camera bag. The Stash Master 13L is a travel

Company: Think Tank Photo, Inc.

cube for your camera gear. You simply stash it inside a regular backpack, duffel bag, or even a roller, and it becomes a camera-friendly bag. It’s a great solution

Price: $65.75

when you need to have clothing, personal items, and also your camera gear, all in one bag.

The 13-liter camera cube is well built using quality materials, as you’d expect from a Think Tank Photo product. It includes two webbing loops to attach a shoulder strap (not included), it’s nicely padded, and the interior can be reconfigured P H O T O S H O P U S E R > AU G U S T 2 0 2 2

to your taste, using the included dividers. Interior dimensions are 11.8x11.8x7.1"

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WHD (30x30x18 cm), which is a perfect size so you can fit a pro gripped body and a few pro lenses. I tested it with my Canon EOS R6, battery grip, and the RF 100–500mm lens attached. I added the RF 70–200 F2.8L, the RF 15–35 F2.8, and the RF 24–70 F2.8L. That’s the entire F2.8 trifecta plus the large RF 100–500 lens, and there was still room for extra batteries and other small items. Many lenses will also fit in the upright position thanks to the generous bag depth.

As I said, the Think Tank Photo Stash Master 13L is not your regular camera bag, but you may want to have it as part of your bag collection, because sooner or later, you will need it n

Hot: Perfect size; lightweight; reasonable price; goodquality materials

Not:

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REVIEWS

SIRUI AM-284 Tripod 

A Budget-Friendly, Lightweight Carbon Fiber Travel Tripod | Review by Fernando Santos

Tripods are supposed to be strong, sturdy, and heavy, and that’s okay when you use them in the studio; however, traveling with a large and heavy tripod is very inconvenient.

Finding one that’s well built and sturdy, but also lightweight and small, seemed to be impossible.

I was pleasantly surprised with the SIRUI AM-284, a 2.69 lbs/1.2Kg carbon fiber

Company: SIRUI USA

tripod. The four-section legs provide a small collapsed size, but also a good size when fully extended. The legs are wider than usual at this price point: the top section has a

Price: $199.90

1.16"/29.4mm diameter and the narrower part is 0.7"/18.6mm. This model doesn’t have a central column. In my opinion, that’s a good thing, as it permits a lighter and more compact design—much appreciated on a travel tripod. The legs open/close with a twist-lock system that works well, and the overall construction is good.

Inside the box you’ll find a carrying bag and a set of spiked feet that you can use to replace the default rubber ones, if necessary. The one thing I didn’t like is the nonstandard thread size on the feet, which limits your choice in case you lose one, or want to

Hot: Convenient collapsed size; lightweight; good price/quality ratio

Not: Nonstandard feet thread size

replace the original ones.

The tripod collapses to just 17.5"/445mm long, with a diameter not wider than most lenses. Maximum height goes up to 47.2"/1,200mm. The legs lock at three different 2.5"/63.5mm from the ground. According to the specifications, the AM-284 can handle up to 33.1 lbs/15Kg, which is a lot more than I’m willing to carry when I am traveling!

Overall, the SIRUI AM-284 is a good-looking, solid-built tripod that should do its job not just for travel, but also for everyday use. n

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angles and, when wide open at the minimum height, your ballhead base will be just

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ALEX RUIZ

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Corel Painter 2023

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Fluid Paint and Blend Brushes a Boon for Image Artists | Review by Erik Vlietinck

As is tradition, Corel has released a new version of Painter entitled Painter 2023.

This version has new Paint Opacity controls in the property bar, a Color Selection control for Selection brushes, and Color Selection brushes. There’s a new overlay mode for selections and overlay presets, and a new selection panel and opacity threshold for marquee.

The most exciting feature for photographers and traditional painters will be Fluid Paint, and the associated brushes and paper, that allow you to gently build up paint, exactly as you’d do it with acrylic or oil paint and a canvas. Image artists, in particular, will like the Fluid and Blend variant, as these enable blending, glazing, and adding reflective light. By taking advantage of layer transparency, these brushes allow for opacity control and smoothness in brushstrokes, and most compelling is that they also incorporate randomness, which makes the results ultra-realistic.

A new color overlay improves the visibility of selected areas, which make them easier to see if you’re working with complex shapes and transparency. The new Selection panel allows feathering up to 2,000 pixels and creating complex selections with additive and subtractive keyboard shortcuts. The new panel recalls settings in-between sessions such as mode, color, anti-alias, and contiguous settings. You can also create a mask from a selection in a single step, which saves a lot of time.

One of the new features that’s well implemented is that you can select areas, based on color, using Selection brushes: it’s a combination of Magic Wand power with a brush approach. What I like about these is that you can easily adjust both color and brightness tolerance as your selected color as shown on a Munsell-type color wheel, and save your selection settings as a preset for the brush. n

Company: Corel Corporation

Price: $429 (Full); $229 (Upgrade); $199 (One-year subscription)

Hot: Fluid and Blend technology; selection brushes and panel; more realistic results than ever

Not:

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REVIEWS

Macro Photography: The Universe at Our Feet 

Don Komarechka | Review by Peter Bauer

This is an incredible resource for photographers who make or are considering making

Publisher: Don Komarechka Photography

macro images. You’ll find everything from a table showing the relationship between aperture and magnification to how best to use a Pringles’ can as a light source.

The author covers technical aspects, practical advice, and subjects somewhat tangential to macro photography. My favorite parts of the book (and perhaps the most instructional), however, are the many, many example images. Not only are

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they beautiful to see, they can be inspirational and thought-provoking. You’ll find

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chapters covering equipment, technical info (including aperture, focal length, distance from subject, and other such topics), composition, ultraviolet macro, controlling bokeh, and image editing. There are also specialized chapters on photographing snowflakes, soap bubbles, and working with water droplets. Other chapters discuss high-magnification macro, automated/high-resolution stacking, and stereoscopic 3D macro. The Masterclass chapter is certainly worth a careful read.

Pages: 383

Price: $ 32.99 (Kindle); $59.95 (hardcover)

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Adobe Photoshop 2021 for Beginners & Pros: The Concise Adobe Photoshop A–Z Mastery Guide for All Users 

REVIEWS

Publisher: Independently Published

Tech Demystified | Review by Peter Bauer

While this book has “2021” in the title, the content is applicable to the most recent Photoshop release. It’s a decent overview of Photoshop, but it falls short of providing a “mastery” of the program. Chapters include an introduction, a look at the

Pages: 266

Price: $6.99 (Kindle); $15 (paperback); $21 (hardcover)

interface (including saving files in various formats and a look at the Preferences), working with layers (with basic information on pixels and resolution), working with selections, keyboard shortcuts, color, and luminosity, “Drawing and Painting” (keying on gradients and the Color Pickers, with some info on shapes), and a pair of chapters that cover the meat of working with Photoshop. Chapter 9, entitled

dodging and burning, and several other image-adjustment techniques. Chapter 10 is an introduction to filters, blending modes, and Photomerge. There are also chapters introducing Camera Raw and a collection of “indispensable tips and tricks.” n

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“Simple Makeovers,” covers cropping, resizing, cloning and healing, auto corrections,

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COLIN SMITH

PHOTOSHOP TIPS Hi, everyone! It’s that time again for me to share some of my favorite Photoshop tips. I have a nice collection of fresh tips for you here. You know, those little paragraphs that save you hours of work.

How many of these are new to you?

GET MORE OUT OF YOUR BRUSHES

If you haven’t tried using texture brushes with the Brush tool (B), you really ought to give it a go. It’s so much fun to add textures, or create ragged edges. The key is not to make it look too repetitive. Here’s a trick to get the most out of a brush. Choose Window>Brush Settings.

Using the Scale, Angle, Flip X, and Flip Y options in the Brush Settings panel, you can make the same brush look much more random and do more with fewer brushes.

UP-TO-THE-SECOND PHOTOSHOP UPDATES

When there’s a Photoshop update, people often tell me they don’t see the update. New updates are listed in the Adobe Creative Cloud app, but they don’t always appear right away. From time to time, your CC app will ping the server and check for updates. If an update has been released, it won’t appear in the CC app until it has checked the cloud. Here’s how you can force it to check.

Open your Creative Cloud app. Near the top left you’ll see Updates. Click on that and you’ll see a list of the available updates. This isn’t the tip. At the top right you’ll see Check for Updates. Click that button and all the latest updates will appear.

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CLONE FLIPPED

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Sometimes when you’re retouching, Content-Aware Fill and the Healing Brush can’t give you the results you need. This is time to resort to the Clone Stamp (S). Many people don’t realize you can’t produce something out of thin air; you first need to find part of a photo to clone (or illustrate it from scratch, but that’s another story), and then Option-click (PC: Alt-click) to sample that area. Now when you paint, it will clone the area you sampled.

When you’re looking for something from which to clone, don’t forget you can also clone in reverse.

Go to Window>Clone Source to open the Clone Source options.

It’s not super obvious, but if you click the icon to the left of W it will cause the Clone Stamp to work

in mirror mode. This can often be useful when retouching a face; you can grab stuff from one side and clone it to the other.

CHANGE OPACITY OF FILTERS

Have you ever wanted to apply a filter, but partially transparent? Maybe you duplicate the layer, apply the filter, and then lower the Opacity of that top layer. Apart from making unnecessary layers and bloating your file size, there’s a more efficient and flexible way to do this.

Right-click on your layer in the Layers panel, and choose Convert to Smart Object. Apply the filter and it will now be a smart filter visible in the Layers panel. Double-click on the icon (it looks like two little sliders) that appears to the right of the filter name in the Layers panel. A dialog will pop up where you’ll see an Opacity slider, as well as the ability to change the blending Mode. This is much better, with way more options.

RESET SMART OBJECT TRANSFORMATIONS

Smart objects are wonderful. They enable you to work nondestructively, because they’re “containers.” You can apply filters and adjustments, and they remain fully editable. A huge advantage of smart objects is the ability to transform them. You can scale them up and down, rotate them, and even squish them, and your image won’t lose any quality. A newish addition is the ability to reset those transformations back to the original image. To do this, Right-click on the layer’s name in the Layers panel and choose Reset Transform.

WHY FILLED MASKS DON’T WORK PROPERLY

I’ve seen people make this mistake quite often, and I used to do it myself too. You have a layer mask, and you want to hide everything on that layer, so you fill the mask with black. Everything disappears and maybe you paint with white to reveal the areas that you want to be visible on that layer. Later on, you move some things, or you change your document size. Now, all of a sudden, an edge appears in your layer mask. Maybe you fill that area of the mask with black to hide it, but you always have to keep an eye on that area, because every time you change things, an edge may appear.

Here’s how to avoid this pain. Don’t fill the mask with black; instead, press Command-I (PC: Ctrl-I) to invert it.

Now you never have to worry about an edge appearing.

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KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

The first part of this tip is to memorize some Photoshop keyboard shortcuts. This will save you so much time in the long run. The second part is how to print out a chart of all the shortcuts in Photoshop. Start by choosing Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts, and then click on Summarize in the dialog that appears. Choose a location, click Save, and an HTML document will be created with all the shortcuts, including any custom ones you may have set. At this point you can open the document in a web browser, print it, and stick it on your wall; or the modern equivalent: save it as a PDF and put it on your mobile phone where you can memorize them.

CONTROL YOUR ANCHOR POINT

When you use Free Transform to rotate an object, it rotates around a pivot point. By default, the pivot point is in the center of the object, or the center of all the selected objects. You can change this pivot point to anywhere on the object, or even drag it outside the object. Press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) for Free Transform, and take a look at the top left of the Options Bar. You’ll see a small grid icon with nine squares. Make sure you check the box to the left of the icon and the pivot point will be enabled.

You can now drag the pivot point anywhere you like in the document. Now when you rotate the object, it will rotate around the new location of the pivot point. If you hold the Option (PC: Alt) key to scale the object from the center, it will scale from the new position of the pivot point.

You can actually click on one of the nine points on that grid icon to place the pivot point on the corners or sides.

USE LEVELS TO REDUCE CONTRAST

Have you ever used Levels (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels) and found the adjustment triangles can only increase contrast? As you move them, the darks become darker and lights become lighter. There are times when you may want to decrease the contrast, you know, lighten the darks, roll off the blacks, or darken the whites.

See the slider below the histogram in the Properties panel (Window>Properties) that says Output Levels?

Use those sliders to reduce contrast.

Levels may not have the full power of Curves, but they’re the best tool for adjusting some things like choking masks because they ’re so quick and simple. n

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The reason is simple. When you invert a mask, you make it a black mask; when you fill it, you’re only filling the visible area of the mask.

PHOTOSHOP TIPS

ALL IMAGES BY COLIN SMITH / PHOTSHOPCAFE.COM

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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