Photoshop

[wocket wod]

I don't know if it's taboo or not but I am playing with some of my photo's on

photoshop and not having a huge amount of success mainly cause I get lost in

the minefield of options does anyone have some simple answers (for a

simpleten) on the use of photoshop.

Wocket Wod

[leopoldstotch]

Get a how-to book on photoshop. Helps clear the mine-field quite a lot.

[Norma Desmond]

Start out simple, using level adjustments, contrast, color control. If you want your photos to

look like photos and not software-manipulated graphics you can avoid a lot of things

photoshop has to offer, because they're more about gimmicks than substituting for what you

can do in a darkroom. Learn your history brush early because it will enable you to effect just

a portion of a photo with whatever you are doing and not the entire photo. Also, shadows

and highlights is an excellent tool for bringing back some detail in heavily shadowed areas

that you might have lost. Good luck. Take it slow. The online "help" function is also good for

starters in reading about the various tools and options.

[ellis_vener_photography]

First think about what you want to do and write it down. It always helps to have a goal in mind.

[stormchaser]

The most important thing you can do is adjust levels. Then it's usually pretty easy to remove distracting elements by blurring them out or using the stamp tool.

[RobertChura]

Scott Kelby has a great book about common PS techniques

[Brian]

<P>Rod, in your post you say "I am playing..." and "not having a huge amount of success". As Ellis's reply suggests, you have to know where you're going in order to get there. You need to have an idea of what you want to fix in an image and then read the manual or whatever to find out how to do that.</P><P>Photoshop is an incredibly powerful program but it's just software. You have to decide your goals.</P>

[szrimaging]

Another thing that has worked for me is backwards engineering photos/techniques. Sometimes it can be done, others, I don't quite make it. But it has definitely helped in learning the power of the tools.

[4ndy]

What do you term 'success' Are we now allowed to use Photoshop and still be good photographers.

I am an IT teacher and teach Photoshop amongst other things. I think we are - my students say to me " ah, but if you didn't have Photoshop you wouldn't be able to do that!"

"True I say - but we do. If we didn't have cameras we wouldn't be able to take photos in the first place - but we do!"

 

Discuss

 

Andy<div></div>

[dbcooper]

There are sone nice beginner PS tutorials at Ken Rockwell's website (kenrockwell.com)

[Spearhead]

"Three beach Huts and a Lamp Post" is a good example of what not to do with Photoshop. The look is dim and lifeless, and the histogram is terrible.

 

For a beginner, I recommend books by Scott Kelby and Katrin Eismann. You can learn quite a bit, just by picking up a few techniques. Bt you do have to know what a good photograph looks like.

[timzeipekis]

I like to think of photoshop, as a fine tuning device with my images. I try to get the most out of the image in the original capture, make adjustments in Camera Raw or lightroom, and then finishing touches,such as sharpening in photoshop. I found "Outdoor Photographer's Landscape and Nature Photography with Photoshop CS2" by Rob Sheppard very helpful.