photoshop

sample poster designs

2011-03-01T01:19:00.000-08:00

photoshop backgrounds

2011-03-01T01:08:00.000-08:00

Adobe Moved The 'Show Tool Tips' Option In Photoshop CS3

2011-03-01T00:36:00.000-08:00

Adobe Moved The 'Show Tool Tips' Option In Photoshop CS3

Adobe made some drastic changes to the user interface in Photoshop CS3, leaving many long-time Photoshop users feeling like beginners again. But whether you really are new to Photoshop or just a little confused about where everything is in Photoshop CS3, having the Tool Tips option enabled is a great way to help you find what you're looking for. With Tool Tips enabled, which it is by default, Photoshop pops up either the name or a brief description of the various user interface items as you hover your mouse over them. While Tool Tips can certainly be helpful, they can also be annoying to anyone who no longer needs them. Fortunately, we can easily turn the Tool Tips on or off from within Photoshop's Preferences.

If you've upgraded to Photoshop CS3 from a previous version of Photoshop and you knew where to find the "Show Tool Tips" option before, you'll find that Adobe has moved it in CS3. They've added a new section to Photoshop's Preferences called Interface, and the "Show Tool Tips" option has been moved to the new section. Go up to the Edit (Win) / Photoshop (Mac) menu at the top of the screen, choose Preferences, and then choose Interface. You'll find the Show Tool Tips option near the top of the dialog box in the "General" section. Click inside the checkbox to the left of the option's name to show or hide the Tool Tips. With the checkmark visible, the Tool Tips are enabled. When the checkmark is not visible, the Tool Tips are disabled:

Photoshop Tips: The "Show Tool Tips" option has been moved to the new "Interface" section of Photoshop CS3's Preferences.

Click OK to exit out of the dialog box when you're done. If you're using Photoshop CS2 or earlier, check out our Photoshop CS2 tip for the option's original location.

Making Layer Styles Conform To Layer Masks

2011-03-01T00:30:00.000-08:00

Making Layer Styles Conform To Layer Masks

If you like to play around with Photoshop's Layer Styles, sooner or later you'll run into this problem. If you try to apply a mask to a layer that uses Layer Styles, you won't get what you expect, unless you expect your Layer Styles to be all messed up.

Here's a simple text effect I created using Layer Styles:

A text effect created using Layer Styles in Photoshop.

I'm going to apply a simple black-to-white gradient to the text's layer mask so that the text will appear to gradually fade away as you get closer to the bottom. We can see the gradient I applied in the layer mask thumbnail in the Layers palette:

Photoshop's Layers palette showing the black-to-white gradient in the text's layer mask thumbnail.

We should see the text gradually fading out from top to bottom, but instead, we get this:

The unexpected result of applying the layer mask to the text.

Not exactly what I was looking for. The reason is that by default, masks don't have the same effect on Layer Styles as they do on the layers themselves, but we can change that. All you need to do is click on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, just as if you were going to apply a Layer Style, but rather than choosing "Drop Shadow" or "Stroke", choose the option at the very top, Blending Options. This will bring up the Layer Style dialog box set to the Blending Options.

If you look in the Advanced Blending options in the middle, you'll see an option called Layer Mask Hides Effects. Click inside the checkbox to the left of it to select it:

Select the "Layer Mask Hides Effect" option in the Advanced Blending options.

Now your Layer Styles will behave as you expected.

Here's my same text effect with the mask applied after checking that option:

The Layer Styles are now behaving as expected with the mask.

I don't know why that option isn't turned on by default, but it isn't, so make sure you enable it and your Layer Styles and masks will work together as you'd expect them to in Photoshop.

Adding More Canvas Space With The Crop Tool In Photoshop

2011-03-01T00:29:00.000-08:00

Adding More Canvas Space With The Crop Tool In Photoshop

If you ever find yourself needing more canvas space around your image, you can always go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, select Canvas Size, and then add more space using the Canvas Size dialog box, but that's the long, clunky way of doing it. There's an easier way, using Photoshop's Crop Tool.

I have an image open here:

And I want to add some extra canvas space around the image. To do that, I'm going to grab my Crop Tool from the Tools palette:

Select the Crop Tool from the Tools palette.

I could also press C on my keyboard to quickly select it. Then, with the Crop Tool selected, I'm going to drag a selection around the entire image, starting just outside the top left corner and dragging all the way down to just outside the bottom right corner. You'll see the "marching ants" around the entire image:

Select the entire image with the Crop tool.

When you release your mouse, you'll see a transform box and handles around the image, as if you had selected it with the Free Transform command. Hold down Shift+Alt (Win) / Shift+Option (Mac) and drag out any of the corner handles to add space around the image. Holding Shift constrains the width and height proportions, and holding Alt/Option resizes the selection from the center. If you need to resize just the left and right side, drag out one of the side handles while holding Alt (Win) / Option (Mac). To resize the top and bottom, drag out either the top or bottom handle, again while holding Alt/Option:

Drag out the handles to add space around the image.

When you're happy with the amount of space you've added around the sides, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to accept the transformation and Photoshop will turn that extra space into canvas space, filling it with white or whatever happens to be your background color:

Press Enter / Return when you're done. Photoshop converts the extra space into canvas space and fills it with your current background color.

Switch Adjustment Layers From One Type To Another

2011-03-01T00:28:00.000-08:00

Switch Adjustment Layers From One Type To Another

You've added an Adjustment Layer to your image. Let's say you've added a Levels Adjustment Layer. Maybe you've even taken the time to mask out some of the areas that the Levels Adjustment Layer is affecting in the image, and now you're thinking "You know, I bet a Curves Adjustment Layer would work better here, but I've already made this mask on Levels. I don't want to have to redo it. I wish there was some way I could just switch Levels for Curves".

Fortunately, there is!

Here's my Layers palette. We can see that above my Background layer, I have a Levels Adjustment Layer, complete with a layer mask that I've created:

Photoshop's Layers palette showing the Levels Adjustment Layer.

To change it to a different type of Adjustment Layer, all I have to do is go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, selectChange Layer Content, and then choose whichever type of Adjustment Layer I want to replace it with. I'm going to choose Curves.

Now back in my Layers palette, I can see that my Levels Adjustment Layer has become a Curves Adjustment Layer, just like that! And best of all, the layer mask I had created is still there. No need to redo it:

The original Levels Adjustment Layer is now a Curves Adjustment Layer.

Again, to change one type of Adjustment Layer to another at any time, simply make sure the Adjustment Layer is selected in the Layers palette, then go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, choose Change Layer Content, and then select whichever type you want to change it to.

Turn Photoshop's Font Preview Off To Improve Performance

2011-03-01T00:27:00.000-08:00

Turn Photoshop's Font Preview Off To Improve Performance

Many Photoshop users, especially designers, share the attitude that when it comes to fonts, you can never have too many installed on your computer. You won't get any arguments from me, but you may get one from Photoshop. Having too many fonts installed on your system can cause performance problems with Photoshop. In Photoshop CS2, Adobe introduced a new Font Preview feature which, as the name implies, allows you to see a preview of what each font looks like when choosing a font in the Options Bar:

Photoshop Tips: A preview of what each font looks like appears to the right of the font names.

One way to potentially improve Photoshop's performance is by turning this font preview off. To do that, go up to the Edit (Win) /Photoshop (Mac) menu at the top of the screen, choose Preferences, and then choose Type. There aren't many options in the Type section, but the one at the very bottom is Font Preview Size. You'll see a checkbox to the left of the option's name. Click inside the checkbox to enable or disable the font preview. With the checkbox visible, the font preview is enabled. With the checkbox not visible, the font preview is disabled:

Photoshop Tips: Uncheck the "Font Preview Size" option in Photoshop's Preferences to turn off the font preview.

You'll find that you can't access the Font Preview Size selection box to the right of the option's name while font preview is disabled, which of course doesn't really matter since you can't see the font previews at that point anyway.

save And Re-Use Text As A Custom Shape

2011-03-01T00:26:00.000-08:00

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll learn how to save and re-use text as a custom shape. Let's say you've arranged some text for use as a simple logo, which means there's a good chance you'll need to re-use it again and again, but you don't want to have to recreate it from scratch every time. Wouldn't it be great if you could just save the logo somehow and then access it whenever you need it? Fortunately, you can, and Photoshop makes it easy thanks to custom shapes!

Step 1: Create Your Logo

Before we can save our logo, we first need to create it. I've gone ahead and designed a simple logo using a combination of Helvetica Neue UltraLight and Regular fonts, with white as my text color, as we can see in my document window:

Add and arrange your text.

If we look in the Layers panel, we see that my text is, in fact, text because it's sitting on a type layer, indicated by the capital letter T in the layer's preview thumbnail:

Photoshop automatically places text on its own type layer in the Layers panel.

Step 2: Convert The Text Into A Shape

Even though it didn't take me a whole lot of time or effort to create this particular logo, I still don't want to have to recreate it every time I need to use it, so I'll save it as a custom shape. Before I can do that, though, I first need to convert the text into a regular shape. It will still look like text, but once it's been converted into a shape, it will no longer be editable, so make sure you have everything spelled correctly before you proceed.

When you're ready, with your type layer selected in the Layers panel, go up to the Layer menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen, choose Type, and then choose Convert to Shape:

Go to Layer > Type > Convert to Shape.

Nothing will seem to have happened to the text in the document window, but if we look again in the Layers panel, we see that the type layer has now become a shape layer:

It still looks like text, but the Layers panel tells us it's now a shape.

Step 3: Save The Shape As A Custom Shape

Now that our text is a shape, we can save it as a custom shape. Go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Define Custom Shape:

Go to Edit > Define Custom Shape.

Photoshop will pop open a dialog box asking you to give the custom shape a name. I'll name mine "logo":

Give the new custom shape a descriptive name.

Click OK in the top right corner of the dialog box to close out of it, and that's all there is to it! Your logo is now saved as a custom shape!

Step 4: Select The Custom Shape Whenever You Need It

The next time you need the logo, just select the Custom Shape Tool from the Tools panel. By default, it's hiding behind the Rectangle Tool, so click on the Rectangle Tool and hold your mouse button down for a second or two until a fly-out menu appears, then choose the Custom Shape Tool from the bottom of the list:

Click and hold on the Rectangle Tool, then select the Custom Shape Tool from the fly-out menu.

With the Custom Shape Tool selected, go up to the Options Bar at the top of the screen and click on the shape preview thumbnail, which shows us the currently selected shape:

Click on the shape preview thumbnail in the Options Bar.

A shape selection box will appear displaying small thumbnails of your available custom shapes. The shape you just saved will appear at the very bottom of the list. If you have Show Tool Tips enabled in Photoshop's Preferences (it's enabled by default), you'll see the name of your shape (whatever you named it a moment ago) appear when you hover your mouse over its thumbnail. Click on the thumbnail to select it:

Click on the logo's thumbnail to select it.

With the logo selected, choose the color you want it to appear in by clicking on the color swatch to the right of the word Color in the Options Bar:

Click on the color swatch to choose a color for the logo.

This brings up Photoshop's Color Picker. I'll choose a different color this time. Let's go with red:

Select the color you want from the Color Picker.

Click OK to exit out of the Color Picker when you're done. Then, to add the logo to the new document (I've already opened a new document with a black background), first make sure the Shape Layers option is selected in the Options Bar:

Make sure Shape Layers is selected (the left icon), not Paths (middle icon) or Pixels (right icon).

Then, simply click inside the document and, with your mouse button held down, drag out the shape to whatever size you need. Hold down your Shift key as you drag to constrain the proportions of the logo so you don't distort the look of it. As you're dragging, all you'll initially see is a thin outline (known as a path) of the text:

Photoshop only displays an outline of the shape while you're dragging it out.

When you release your mouse button, Photoshop fills the shape with the color you selected in the Options Bar a moment ago, and your text is instantly added to the new document:

Just like that, the text re-appears with its original formatting.

And there we have it!

Photoshop Text Tips, Tricks And Keyboard Shortcuts

2011-03-01T00:25:00.000-08:00

In this Photoshop tips & tricks tutorial, we're going to look at some handy tricks and keyboard shortcuts for working with Photoshop text. We'll be looking at things like how to quickly select words, lines and paragraphs, how to easily switch between fonts, how to quickly access bold and italic font styles, leading, tracking and kerning, resizing, aligning and justifying text, and more!

Selecting All Text On A Type Layer

Here's some sample text that I borrowed from our tutorial on image pixels:

Photoshop Text Tips: Some sample text.

All of this text is on a single Type layer in the Layers palette. To select all the text on a Type layer, simply double-click directly on the Type layer's thumbnail:

Photoshop Text Tips: Double-click directly on the Type layer's thumbnail (the "T") to select all text on the layer at once.

How To Select All Text Layers At Once

2011-03-01T00:24:00.000-08:00

How To Select All Text Layers At Once

I went a long time without knowing this trick, and the moment I stumbled upon it, I suddenly wished I could go back and relive all the time I'd wasted selecting multiple text layers one at a time in my Photoshop documents.

Here I have a document open with six layers - the Background layer on the bottom and then five text layers above it:

Photoshop Tips and Tricks: Photoshop's Layers palette showing the Background layer and five text layers above it.

This is just a simple example, but you could run into situations where you have hundreds of layers, with text layers scattered here, there and everywhere throughout the Layers palette. And let's say you needed to select all of them at once. Rather than scrolling through the Layers palette and selecting them one at a time, all you need to do is select one of them, then go up to the Select menuat the top of the screen and choose Similar Layers. And just like that, all of your text layers throughout the document will be selected:

Photoshop Tips and Tricks: After choosing "Similar Layers" from the "Select" menu, all text layers are selected.

This doesn't only work with text layers. Select > Similar Layers will work on whichever type of layer you currently have selected.

Turn Your Mouse Wheel Into The Zoom Tool In Photoshop!

2011-03-01T00:23:00.000-08:00

Turn Your Mouse Wheel Into The Zoom Tool In Photoshop!

Tired of always selecting Photoshop's Zoom Tool from the Toolbar whenever you need to zoom in or out of your photos in the document window? You could use the handy keyboard shortcut for quickly accessing the Zoom Tool, which is Ctrl+spacebar (Win) /Command+spacebar (Mac) to zoom in, or Alt+spacebar (Win) / Option+spacebar (Mac) to zoom out, but there's an even faster way. Just use the scroll wheel on your mouse!

You'll find the option for enabling or disabling this feature in Photoshop's Preferences. Go up to the Edit (Win) / Photoshop (Mac) menu at the top of the screen, choose Preferences, and then choose General. You'll see an option called Zoom with Scroll Wheel in the center of the Preferences dialog box. Click inside the checkbox to the left of the option's name to enable or disable the option:

Photoshop Tips: Enable or disable zooming with the scroll wheel in Photoshop's Preferences.

Even if the option is disabled in Photoshop's Preferences, you can still zoom in and out with your mouse wheel. Simply hold down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key, then use the mouse wheel!

Showing More Than 10 Recent Files In Photoshop

2011-03-01T00:22:00.000-08:00

Showing More Than 10 Recent Files In Photoshop

By default, when you go up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choose Recent Files, Photoshop only shows you the last 10 files you've opened. Photoshop actually keeps track of the last 30 files you've opened, but it only shows you the 10 most recent.

We can change that though and have Photoshop show us all 30 recent files if we want by pressing Ctrl+K (Win) / Command+K(Mac) and bringing up Photoshop's Preferences dialog box.

When the dialog box appears, press Next to move to the File Handling preferences, and the option at the very bottom says Recent file list contains. The default value is 10. Change it to 30 or some number between 0 and 30 depending on how many you wish to view, and then click OK to exit out of the dialog box.

Photoshop's "File Handling" preferences.

If you go back up to the File menu and back to Open Recent, you'll now see 30 recent files instead of 10 (assuming you've opened at least 30 files in Photoshop) or however many you set in the File Handling preferences.

Tired Of That Default Gray Pasteboard? Make It Any Color You Like!

2011-03-01T00:05:00.000-08:00

Tired Of That Default Gray Pasteboard? Make It Any Color You Like!

Here's something that definitely qualifies as more of a trick than an actual Photoshop tip, but if you're tired of your pasteboard (the blank area all around your photo) being that default gray color, you can actually change it and make it any color you like! Keep in mind that you'll want the pasteboard color to be gray when doing any serious work on your images, but if you just want to have some fun or play a trick on someone else, here's how to change the pasteboard color.

First, select Photoshop's Paint Bucket Tool from the Tools palette. By default, it's hiding behind the Gradient Tool, so you'll need to click and hold on the Gradient Tool for a second or two until a fly-out menu appears, then select the Paint Bucket Tool from the fly-out menu:

Photoshop Tips: Select the Paint Bucket Tool.

Next, click on the Foreground color swatch in the Tools palette:

Photoshop Tips: Click on the Foreground color swatch.

This brings up Photoshop's Color Picker. Select whichever color you want to use for the pasteboard. I'll choose a shade of red. Again, this is just for fun, not for serious Photoshop work:

Photoshop Tips: Select a new color with the Color Picker.

Click OK once you've chosen a color to exit out of the Color Picker. Move your mouse cursor into the pasteboard area, hold down your Shift key, and click on the pasteboard. Instantly, the pasteboard changes to the new color:

Need More Undo's In Photoshop? Just Add More History States!

2011-03-01T00:03:00.000-08:00

Need More Undo's In Photoshop? Just Add More History States!

If you find that Photoshop's default number of Undo steps is rarely enough, there's a couple of things you can do. One is to rethink how you're working on your images in Photoshop so you don't need so many Undo steps all the time. The other is to simply add more Undo steps, which you can do by adding more History States. If you're using Photoshop CS2 or earlier, go up to the Edit (Win) /Photoshop (Mac) menu at the top of the screen, choose Preferences, and then choose General. You'll see an option near the top of the dialog box called History States. Simply type in the number of History States you need. Here, I've increased mine to 30:

Photoshop Tips: Change the number of History States in Photoshop's Preferences.

Something important to keep in mind is that the more History States you add, the more memory you'll need in your computer. If you find Photoshop slowing down and having a tough time keeping up with you while you're working on your photos, you'll probably need to either reduce the number of History States or add more memory to your computer.

Reset The Preferences When You Start Up photoshop

2011-03-01T00:02:00.000-08:00

Reset The Preferences When You Start Up photoshopPhotoshop may be the world's most popular and powerful image editor, but like most things in life, especially computer-related things, it's not perfect. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, Photoshop can start acting funny on you. One common cause has to do with Photoshop's Preferences. Sometimes, they can get messed up. Fortunately, Adobe makes it easy to reset the preferences if we need to.

If Photoshop is already open on your screen, close out of it. Then hold down Shift+Ctrl+Alt (Win) / Shift+Command+Option (Mac) on your keyboard and start Photoshop back up. The very first thing you'll see is a dialog box that pops up asking if you want to delete the existing Preferences file (which it calls the "Settings" file):

Photoshop Tips: Hold down Shift+Ctrl+Alt (Win) / Shift+Command+Option (Mac) when you start up Photoshop to reset the preferences.

To reset Photoshop Preferences to the defaults, click Yes in the dialog box. The existing Preferences file will be scrapped and a brand new one will be created.

Image Resolution And Print Quality

2011-02-28T23:41:00.000-08:00

In this Photoshop tutorial, we're going to look at how image resolution affects print quality.

Have you ever downloaded an image from the internet and then printed it, only to get results that were, well, less than you expected? The image looked great on your computer screen, but when you printed it, it either printed at the size of a postage stamp or it printed at a decent size but looked blurry or "blocky"? The culprit is image resolution.

Actually, that's not really fair to say. Image resolution didn't purposely set out to make your life miserable when you printed your internet photo. The problem was simply that most photos on the internet have very small pixel dimensions, usually in the neighborhood of 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high, or even smaller, and that's because images don't need to be very large in order to appear at a decent size and good quality on your computer screen, and also because smaller images download much faster on websites than larger images do (which is a whole other topic that we don't need to get into here).

So what can you do to make photos you download off the internet appear just as high quality when printed as photos you took yourself with your digital camera? The answer - absolutely nothing. There simply are not enough pixels in most internet images to allow them to print at high quality, at least not without printing them at the size of a postage stamp, that is. Let's find out why.

Want an easier way to follow along with our tutorials? Download them as printable PDFs!

First of all, let's get off the topic of downloading images from the internet, since we really shouldn't be doing that anyway without permission from the copyright owner, and look at image resolution in general. I cover it in much more detail in the Image Resolution, Pixel Dimensions and Document Size tutorial, but let's do a short recap.

The term "image resolution" means how many of your image's pixels will fit inside each inch of paper when printed. Obviously, since your photo has a fixed number of pixels, the more of them you squeeze inside each inch of paper, the smaller the image will appear on the paper. Likewise, the fewer pixels you print per inch, the larger the image will appear on paper. The number of pixels that will be printed per inch is known as the resolution of the image, or "image resolution". Image resolution has everything to do with printing your image. It has nothing to do with how your image appears on your computer screen, which is why images you download off the internet usually appear much larger and higher quality on your screen than they do when you print them.

Let's use a photo as an example:

An unflattering photo of a horse.

I can't help but laugh every time I see this photo of a horse I took while driving around the countryside one day. Normally this horse stands proud, powerful, full of grace and dignity, yet I seem to have caught him in a rather unflattering moment. He's standing on a bit of a strange angle, he has a piece of straw dangling from his hair, and he seems to be in the middle of chewing his food. Either that, or he's desperately trying to crack a smile for me. In either case, since this guy is already embarrassed, as am I for having taken this wonderful photo, let's use this image as an example.

First, let's look at what Photoshop can tell us about the current size of this photo. I'll go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen and choose Image Size, which brings up the appropriately-named Image Size dialog box:

The Image Size dialog box shows us the current size of the photo.

The Image Size dialog box is divided into two main sections, Pixel Dimensions at the top and Document Size directly below it. The Pixel Dimensions section tells us how many pixels are in our image. The Document Size section tells us how large the image will appear on paper if we print it. If we look at the Pixel Dimensions section, we can see that this photo has a width of 1200 pixels and a height of 800 pixels. That may sound like a lot of pixels (1200 x 800 = 960,000 pixels!), and it certainly would be if we were displaying this image on a computer screen. In fact, at 1200 x 800, it may be too large to fit entirely on your screen! But just because it looks nice and big on the screen doesn't necessarily mean it will print nice and big, at least not with any degree of quality. Let's take a closer look at what the Document Size section is telling us:

The Document Size sections tells us how large or small the photo will print based on a specific resolution.

The Document Size section of the Image Size dialog box tells us two things - what the current resolution of our image is, and how large or small the image will appear if we print it based on that resolution. Currently, our resolution value is set to 72 pixels/inch, which means that out of the 1200 pixels that make up our photo from left to right (the width), 72 of them will print inside each inch of paper, and out of the 800 pixels that make up the image from top to bottom (the height), 72 of them will print inside each inch of paper. The value in the Resolution box is for both width and height, not the total number of pixels that will print. In other words, for every square inch of paper, 72 pixels from our image will be printed from left to right and 72 pixels will be printed from top to bottom. The total number of pixels printed in every square inch of paper would then be, in this case anyway, 72 x 72 (72 pixels for the width times 72 pixels for the height), which gives us 5184 pixels!

Let's do some simple math ourselves to make sure that the width and height being shown to us in the Document Size section is correct. We know from the Pixel Dimensions section that we have 1200 pixels from left to right in our image and 800 pixels from top to bottom. Our print resolution is currently set to 72 pixels/inch, so to figure out how large our image will be when printed, all we need to do is divide the number of pixels from left to right by 72, which will give us our print width, and the number of pixels from top to bottom by 72, which will give us our print height. Let's do that:

1200 pixels wide divided by 72 pixels per inch = 16.667 inches
800 pixels high divided by 72 pixels per inch = 11.111 inches

Based on our own simple calculations, at a resolution of 72 pixels/inch (ppi for short), our image would be 16.667 inches wide by 11.111 inches high when printed. And if we look at the Document Size section once again:

Confirming the print size shown in the Document Size section.

That's exactly what it says! Wow, a 1200 x 800 pixel photo is large enough for an 11 x 14 inch print, with a little extra to spare! That's great!

Sadly, no. If only life were that simple.

The fact is, 72 pixels/inch is not enough to give us sharp, good quality, professional looking images when printed. It's not even close. To give you an idea of what I mean, here's a rough approximation of how the photo would look on paper if we tried to print it at a resolution of 72 pixels/inch. You'll have to use your imagination a bit here and try to imagine this at 11 x 16 inches:

The photo as it would appear on paper when printed at only 72 pixels/inch.

Doesn't exactly look good, does it? The problem is that at 72 pixels/inch, the image information is being spread out too far on the paper for the photo to appear sharp and detailed, sort of like spreading too little peanut butter over too much toast. The photo now appears soft, dull and generally unappealing. We don't see this problem on a computer screen because computer monitors are generally referred to as low resolution devices. Even a photo with relatively small pixel dimensions, like 640 x 480, will look great on a computer screen. Printers, however, are high resolution devices, and if you want your photos to appear sharp and detailed when printed, you'll need a resolution much higher than 72 pixels/inch.

So how high of a resolution value do you need for professional quality printing? The generally accepted value is 300 pixels/inch. Printing an image at a resolution of 300 pixels/inch squeezes the pixels in close enough together to keep everything looking sharp. In fact, 300 is usually a bit more than you need. You can often get by with a resolution of 240 pixels/inch without noticing any loss of image quality. The professional standard, though, is 300 pixels/inch.

Let's take our same image then at 1200 pixels wide by 800 pixels high, change our resolution from 72 pixels/inch to 300 pixels/inch, and see what we get. Here's the Image Size dialog box again showing the new resolution of 300 pixels/inch. Notice in the Pixel Dimensions section at the top that we still have 1200 pixels for the width and 800 pixels for the height. The only thing that's changed is our resolution, from 72 to 300:

The print resolution has been changed to 300 pixels/inch.

With our resolution now increased from 72 to 300 pixels/inch, this means that out of the 1200 pixels that make up our image from left to right, 300 of them will now print inside every inch of paper, and out of the 800 pixels contained in our image from top to bottom, 300 of them will now print inside every inch of paper. Naturally, with so many more pixels squeezing into each inch of paper, we'd expect the photo to print much smaller, and sure enough, the Document Size section is now showing that our photo will print at a size of only 4 inches wide by 2.667 inches high:

The photo will now print at a much smaller size than before.

Where did those new width and height values come from? Again, some simple math is all we need:

1200 pixels wide divided by 300 pixels per inch = 4 inches
800 pixels high divided by 300 pixels per inch = 2.667 inches

The photo will now print much smaller than it would at a resolution of 72 pixels/inch, but what we lose in physical size, we more than make up for in image quality. At 300 pixels/inch (or even 240 pixels/inch), we'd enjoy sharp, detailed, professional quality print results:

Higher print resolutions result in smaller photos but much better image quality.

Of course, most people don't print their photos at weird sizes like 4 x 2.667, so how do we make sure we're going to get professional quality print results with more standard print sizes like 4 x 6? An excellent question, and the answer comes to us once again through some boring yet simple math.

Let's say you've taken some photos of your recent family vacation using your digital camera and you want to print out some 4 x 6's on your printer. We know now that in order to achieve professional quality prints, we need set the resolution of our images to a minimum of 240 pixels/inch, although 300 pixels per inch is the official standard. Let's look at both of these resolution values though to see how large of an image, in pixels, we'll need out of the camera in order to print 4 x 6's with good image quality. First, let's look at 240 pixels per inch:

To figure out how large, in pixels, our images need to be in order to print 4 x 6's at professional quality, all we need to do is multiply 240 x 4 for the width, and then 240 x 6 for the height (or vice versa depending on if your photo is in landscape or portrait mode). Let's do that:

240 pixels per inch x 4 inches wide = 960 pixels
240 pixels per inch x 6 inches high = 1440 pixels

Based on our math, we can see that in order to print a digital photo as a 4 x 6 at 240 pixels/inch resolution, which should give us excellent quality, our photo's pixel dimensions need to beat least 960 x 1440. We can see exactly how many pixels that is by multiplying 960 by 1440, which gives us 1,382,400 pixels. Let's round that up to 1.4 million pixels. That may sound like a lot of pixels but it really isn't, not when you consider that 1.4 million is the minimum number of pixels you'd need to print good quality 4 x 6 photos using the minimum resolution we can use to achieve good quality, which is 240 pixels/inch. The good news at least is that these days, most digital cameras on the market are 5MP ("mega pixels", or "millions of pixels") and higher, so they'd have no trouble printing good quality 4 x 6's even using 300 pixels/inch for the resolution.

Of course, we haven't actually looked at how many pixels we'd need to print professional quality 4 x 6's at 300 pixels/inch, so let's do that now. We'll use the same simple formula as above, where we'll multiply 300 by 4 and then 300 by 6 to give us the pixel dimensions we'll need:

300 pixels per inch x 4 inches wide = 1200 pixels
300 pixels per inch x 6 inches high = 1800 pixels

Let's do one more quick calculation to see how many pixels we need in total:

1200 pixels wide times 1800 pixels high = 2,160,000

So, in order to print a photo as a 4 x 6 using the professional standard of 300 pixels/inch for resolution, our photo needs to be 1200 pixels wide by 1800 pixels high (or vice versa), which means we'll need a total of 2,160,000 pixels, which again should be no problem for most digital cameras on the market today which are 5MP and higher.

What if you have a photo you absolutely love and feel it deserves an 8 x 10 print rather than a 4 x 6? How large of an image in pixels do we need to print a good quality 8 x 10? The answer is as easy as when we needed to find out how large of an image we'd need for a 4 x 6. All we need to do is multiply the resolution value in pixels by the width in inches and do the same thing for the height. Let's first use 240 pixels per inch as our resolution:

240 pixels per inch x 8 inches wide = 1920 pixels
240 pixels per inch x 10 inches wide = 2400 pixels
Total number of pixels = 1920 pixels wide x 2400 pixels high = 4,608,000 pixels

From our little bit of math, we can see that in order to print a photo at good quality as an 8 x 10, our photo needs to be 1920 pixels wide by 2400 pixels high (or vice versa), for a total of approximately 4.6 million pixels. Now we're starting to push the limits of lower end digital cameras. A 4MP digital camera wouldn't capture quite enough pixels to be able to print an image at 8 x 10 at 240 pixels/inch resolution. It would fall about 600,000 pixels short. You could still print an 8 x 10 image of course, but you most likely wouldn't get professional looking results.

Let's do the same calculations for an 8 x 10 at 300 pixels/inch resolution:

300 pixels per inch x 8 inches wide = 2400 pixels
300 pixels per inch x 10 inches wide = 3000 pixels
Total number of pixels = 2400 pixels wide x 3000 pixels high = 7,200,000 pixels

Now we're really pushing the limits as far as digital cameras currently on the market. In order to be able to print a photo as an 8 x 10 using the 300 pixels/inch resolution standard, our photo needs to be 2400 pixels wide by 3000 pixels high (or vice versa), for a total of 7.2 million pixels! Now that's a lot of pixels! This means you need at least a 7.2MP digital camera in order to be able to print your photos as 8 x 10's and still get true, professional quality prints. Of course, keep in mind that most photos require at least a little cropping, which means you'll need to start with even more pixels. If you know you're going to be printing a lot of photos as 8 x 10's, investing in a good quality 8 MP or higher camera is highly recommended.

And there we have it!

mage Quality: Image Resolution, Pixel Dimensions and Document Size

2011-02-28T23:38:00.000-08:00

Pixel Dimensions

Here's a photo I took one day while strolling through a park. I saw this little guy (or girl, who knows) posing for me on the flowers and happened to have my camera handy. My camera, by the way, is an 8MP camera, and the reason why I'm telling you this will be explained shortly.

Obviously, the photo you're seeing above is a much smaller version of the photo, since the actual-size version would be too large to fit on the screen. Let's pretend though for the sake of this lesson that we're working with the full size version of the photo. In order to see exactly how large the photo is, once we have it open inside Photoshop, we can simply go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen and choose Image Size from the list of options, which will bring up Photoshop's Image Size dialog box, as shown below.

The Image Size dialog box can seem a bit frightening and confusing, but it's not meant to be and really, it's quite simple. It's divided into two sections, Pixel Dimensions and Document Size. For the moment, let's ignore the Document Size part and focus only on Pixel Dimensions.

The term "pixel dimensions" here, to me, is confusing because it sounds like we're talking about the dimensions of each individual pixel, and that's not the case. What Photoshop is really telling us is the width and height of our image in pixels. In other words, how many pixels are in our image from left to right, and how many pixels are in our image from top to bottom. It's also telling us one other important piece of information which is the file size of our image. The dimensions and file size shown here are of the full size version of the photo above (the insect on the flower) before I resized it to something more suitable for a web page. So here, Photoshop is telling me that my photo has a width of 3456 pixels and a height of 2304 pixels. In other words, it contains 3456 pixels from left to right, and 2304 pixels from top to bottom. To find out exactly how many pixels I have in my photo then, I can simply multiply the width times the height, which in this case is 3456 x 2304, which gives me a grand total of 7,962,624 pixels. That's a whole lot of pixels.

Remember earlier when I mentioned that the camera I used to take this photo was an 8MP camera? Well, the "MP" stands for "mega pixel", and "mega" means "million", so "8MP" means 8 million pixels. This means that when I take a photo with my digital camera, the photo will be made up of 8 million pixels (approximately, anyway). If you have a 5MP camera, your photos will be made up of 5 million pixels. 4MP cameras give you photos made up of 4 million pixels, and so on. So if we take a look again at what the Pixel Dimensions section of the Image Size dialog box is telling us about my photo above, it's saying that my photo has dimensions of 3456 pixels wide by 2304 pixels high, for a total of 7,962,624 pixels, which is pretty darn close to 8 million, and that's why my camera can be sold as an 8MP camera.

So that's what the first part of the Image Size dialog box is telling us - the width and height of our image in pixels. So far so good. Let's take a look now at the second part of the dialog box, "Document Size" which is where we really start to make sense of image resolution.

RGB and Color Channels in Photoshop Explained

2011-02-28T23:36:00.000-08:00

Did you know that Photoshop is color blind?

When I say "color blind", I don't mean it has a little trouble distinguishing between certain shades of green and purple. I mean it's completely and totally blind when it comes to color. All Photoshop sees is black and white. Well, black, white, and a lot of shades of gray in between, but that's it. The world's most powerful image editor, an industry standard among photographers, designers, and virtually all creative professionals, capable of producing millions, even billions of colors has no idea what color is.

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You may be looking at a photo you took on your last vacation of the crystal blue waters on the ocean, but all Photoshop sees is a gray ocean. Did you manage to snap a picture of a rainbow arching across the sky after a summer evening storm? Photoshop sees it as a beautiful assortment of shades of gray. And that famous pot of gold at the end of it? To Photoshop, it's a big ol' pot of gray.

Don't feel sorry for Photoshop though. It's perfectly happy in its colorless world. In fact, the only reason it shows us our images in color at all is because we as human beings expect to see them in color. We wouldn't know what to think if everything was appearing in black and white. But not Photoshop. To it, life just couldn't be sweeter than in black, white and gray.

Alright, so if Photoshop doesn't have a clue what color is, and all it knows and sees is black, white and gray, how does it manage to show our images in color? I mean, here's an image I have open in Photoshop:

An photo open in a document window in Photoshop.

Obviously, this little guy (or girl) is in color. In fact, I don't think birds come much more colorful than this. But it's not just the bird. The leaves in the background are in color. The piece of wood the bird is standing on is in color. The whole thing is in color! And this image is open in Photoshop, so how can it be that Photoshop doesn't see color? And if it really doesn't see color, how is Photoshop doing such a great job of showing us something it doesn't see?

To answer that question, we need to look at a couple of things. One is color modes and the other is color channels. They're both related to each other in a big way, so once you understand the first one, color modes, the second one, color channels, makes a lot more sense.

Benefits Of Working With 16-Bit Images In Photoshop

2011-02-28T23:30:00.000-08:00

What Does The Term "8-Bit" Mean?

You may have heard the terms 8-bit and 16-bit before, but what do they mean? Whenever you take a picture with a digital camera and save it in the JPEG format, you're creating a standard "8-bit" image. The JPEG format has been around for a long time and as digital photography and even Photoshop itself continue to advance, the limitations of the JPEG format are becoming more and more apparent. For one thing, there's no way to save a JPEG file as 16-bit because the format doesn't support 16-bit. If it's a JPEG image (with the extension ".jpg"), it's an 8-bit image. But what does that mean, "8-bit"?

If you read our tutorial RGB and Color Channels Explained, you know that every color in a digital image is made up of some combination of the three primary colors of light - red, green and blue:

It doesn't matter what color you're looking at on your screen. It's being made up of some combination of those three colors. You may be thinking, "That's impossible! There's millions of colors in my image. How can you create millions of colors out of just red, green and blue?"

Good question. The answer is, by using multiple shades of red, green and blue! The more shades of each color you have to work with and mix together, the more colors you can create. If all you had was pure red, pure green, and pure blue, the most you could create would be seven different colors, including white if you mixed all three together:

You could also include an eigth color in there as well, black, which you would get if you completely removed red, green, and blue.

But what if you had, say, 256 shades of red, 256 shades of green, and 256 shades of blue? If you do the the math, 256 times 256 times 256 equals roughly 16.8 million. That's 16.8 million colors you can now create! And that's exactly what you get with an 8-bit image - 256 shades of red, 256 shades of green, and 256 shades of blue, giving you the millions of possible colors you usually see in a digital photo:

Where does the number 256 come from? Well, 1-bit equals 2. When you move beyond 1-bit, you find its value using the expression "2 to the exponent (however many bits there are)". So, for example, to find the value of 2-bits, you would calculate "2 to the exponent 2", or "2 x 2", which equals 4. So 2-bits equals 4.

A 4-bit image would be "2 to the exponent 4", or "2 x 2 x 2 x 2", which gives us 16. So 4-bits equals 16.

We do the same thing for an 8-bit image, which would be "2 to the exponent 8", or "2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2", which gives us 256. That's where the number 256 comes from.

Don't worry if you found that confusing, or even worse, boring. It all has to do with how computers work. Just remember that when you save an image as a JPEG, you're saving it as an 8-bit image, which gives you 256 shades each of red, green, and blue, for a total of 16.8 million possible colors.

Now, 16.8 million colors may seem like a lot. But as they say, nothing is big or small except by comparison, and when you compare it with how many possible colors we can have in a 16-bit image, well, as they also sometimes say, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Seeing The Difference With JPEG Compression

2011-02-28T23:29:00.000-08:00

It's a fact of life when it comes to working with digital photos and images. Sometimes, we need to compress them to make our file sizes smaller, especially if we're emailing them to a client or to family members, or posting them on a website. Since the jpeg file format is still the format of choice for digital photos, even though it's been around for more than 15 years, compressing images usually means using jpeg compression, which does a great job of reducing the file size. Unfortunately, it also reduces image quality, although it's not always easy to see what sort of negative impact the compression is having on the image, especially when viewing it on a computer monitor. But thanks to Photoshop and one of its rarely-used blending modes, the horrors of jpeg compression become strikingly clear.

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To see exactly what's happening to our images, we'll use Photoshop's Difference layer blend mode. The Difference blend mode gets its name from the fact that it looks for differences between two layers. Any areas in both layers that are exactly the same appear as pure black, while areas that are different in some way appear as strange colors. The Difference blend mode isn't used very often outside of the special effects world, but it does a great job of showing us how much garbage (yes, I said garbage) we're adding to our jpeg images when we compress them. Now, this isn't to say that we all need to stop compressing our photos. In a perfect world, sure, but that's just not realistic. It does help, though, for us to see and understand what's happening to our images, especially for those of us who, up until now, have been convinced there's no difference in image quality between a compressed and uncompressed digital photo.

Here, I have two document windows open in Photoshop, each one containing what appears to be the same image:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Two document windows open in Photoshop, each displaying a copy of the same photo.

But are they really the same image? Appearances can be deceiving, especially on a computer screen. The truth is, they're not the same. The one on the right is the original, uncompressed photo, as if it was downloaded directly from a digital camera. The one on the left is a copy of the photo saved in Photoshop at 60% image quality, which is a fairly typical setting. This means that the image on the left has been compressed.

I realize it's a little difficult to tell in the screenshot above, but if you were to look at both of these images on my screen in Photoshop, you'd have trouble telling which one is compressed and which one isn't. If we were to print them, the differences would become clear, but on a computer screen, which has a much lower resolution than a printed image would have, the differences are not so easy to spot. At least, not without using Photoshop's Difference blend mode to help us out.

I said a moment ago that the Difference blend mode looks for differences between two layers, and that any areas between the two layers that are exactly the same appear as pure black. Let's put this to the test. I'm going to select my original, uncompressed photo, and I'm going to duplicate its Background layer in the Layers palette by pressing Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). I now have two layers in the Layers palette - the original Background layer on the bottom and a copy of the Background layer, which Photoshop has named "Layer 1", above it:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: The Layers palette for the original, uncompressed photo showing the Background layer and the copy of the Background layer above it.

Since "Layer 1" is a copy of the Background layer, both layers should be identical. We can use the Difference blend mode to prove that they are. I'm going to go up to the blend mode option at the top of the Layers palette and change the blend mode for "Layer 1" from "Normal" to Difference:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Changing the blend mode of "Layer 1" to "Difference".

With "Layer 1" set to the Difference blend mode, if I look at the image in the document window, I see that the entire image is now filled with solid black, which is the Difference blend mode's way of telling me that both layers are in fact identical:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: The image is now completely filled with solid black, indicating that both "Layer 1" and the Background layer are identical in every way.

Let's take things even further to be absolutely certain that all we're seeing now in the image is nothing but pure black. To do that, we'll use a Levels adjustment layer. I'm going to click on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Clicking the "New Adjustment Layer" icon at the bottom of the Layers palette in Photoshop.

Then I'll choose Levels from the list of adjustment layers that appears:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Clicking the "New Adjustment Layer" icon at the bottom of the Layers palette in Photoshop.

This brings up the Levels dialog box. I can use the Histogram in the center of the dialog box to see exactly what tonal information is being displayed in my image. If every single pixel in the image is displaying pure black, which should be the case if both of my layers are identical, then all I should see in my Histogram is a single vertical bar on the far left, which just happens to be exactly what I'm seeing:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: The Histogram in the center of the Levels dialog box is displaying a single vertical bar on the far left, telling me that every pixel in my image is pure black.

The Histogram confirms that there are currently no other colors being displayed in my image except pure black, which means that "Layer 1" and the Background layer are 100% identical. So far, so good. We've now proven what most of us already knew, that when we make a copy of a layer, the copy is identical in every way to the original. Exciting stuff, right? Let's move on.

I'm going to click the Cancel button in the top right corner of the Levels dialog box to exit out of it for now, and I'm going to delete "Layer 1" from my Layers palette by clicking on it and dragging it down on to the trash bin icon:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Dragging "Layer 1" down on to the trash bin icon at the bottom of the Layers palette to delete it.

I'm now left with just my original Background layer once again:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: The Layers palette showing the original Background layer.

Now let's see what happens when we use the exact same method to compare the uncompressed version of the photo with the compressed version of it. As I mentioned, it's not easy to see any differences between them simply by looking at them on the computer screen, but let's find out what the Difference blend mode has to say about it. With each version of my photo open in its own document window, I'm going to click inside the compressed version's document window (the one on the left) with my Move Tool and drag the image into the uncompressed version's document window (the one on the right):

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Using the Move Tool and dragging the compressed version of the image on the left into the uncompressed version's document window on the right.

Since both images have exactly the same pixel dimensions (width and height), I'm going to hold down my Shift key and then release my mouse button, which will align the two images perfectly inside the document window:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Both images are now aligned perfectly one above the other in the same document window.

If I look in my Layers palette, I can see that I now have two layers once again. The uncompressed version of the image is on the Background layer, and the version that was saved at 60% image quality is now above it on "Layer 1":

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: The Layers palette showing the uncompressed version on the Background layer and the compressed version on "Layer 1".

I'm going to once again change the blend mode of "Layer 1" from "Normal" to "Difference":

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Changing the blend mode of "Layer 1" to "Difference".

And now, with the blend mode of "Layer 1" set to "Difference", if there truly is no difference between the compressed and uncompressed versions of the photo, I should be seeing nothing but pure black when I look at my image in the document window:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: The document window after changing the blend mode of "Layer 1" (the compressed version of the photo) to "Difference".

Hmm. Can you see all that faint noise in the image above? It will depend on how you have your monitor set up. You may just be seeing black, but I can see on my screen that it's definitely not pure black like it was before when we were comparing the Background layer with an identical copy of it. There's something else there, and that "something else" is telling us that the compressed and uncompressed versions of the photo are not the same. But just how different are they? Does jpeg compression really make that much of a difference?

Let's use a Levels adjustment layer once again and let the Histogram answer that question for us. I'll click on the New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and choose Levels from the list:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Selecting a "Levels" adjustment layer in the Layers palette.

This again opens the Levels dialog box. Recall from last time that the Histogram displayed a single vertical bar on the far left, which told us that there was absolutely nothing else in our image except pure black. This time, we're seeing something a bit different:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: The Histogram is no longer just a single vertical bar.

There seems to be a lot more going on this time on the far left of the Histogram, which confirms that my eyes weren't playing tricks on me. There's definitely something else there in the image. The single vertical bar has been replaced by a larger area of black, which means the image itself now contains more than just pure black, and that means there's areas in the two versions of the photo that are no longer identical.

So what's different about them? Simple - garbage. By compressing one version of the image, we've taken the pure, untouched image information and added a whole lot of garbage to it. Noise, junk, call it what you like. The bottom line is, we've damaged the photo. How much garbage did the jpeg compression add? It may not look like much just yet, and it's still hard to see in the image itself, so I'm going to click on the small, white slider on the bottom right of the Histogram and drag it all the way over to the left until it's under the spot where the black slope begins:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: Dragging the white slider from the bottom right of the Histogram over to the left to the point where the black slope begins.

Without getting into a lengthy discussion of how the Levels dialog box works, what I've just done is taken all that faint noise in the image and made it much brighter so we can see it more easily. Remember, any strange colors you see represent areas that are different between the original, uncompressed version of the photo and the version that was saved with jpeg compression:

JPEG Compression and Image Quality: The noise is now much more visible in the image.

Not a pretty sight, is it? Now that we can see things more easily, all of those weird colors represent all the damage we've done to the image by compressing it. The image is now filled with what are commonly referred to as "compression artifacts", which is just a fancy way of saying "we took your perfectly good image information and messed it all up". Compressing a jpeg image can greatly reduce your file size, but as the Difference blend mode is showing us, it can also greatly reduce image quality. Again, it's not always easy to see how much damage your image has suffered by looking at it on your computer screen, but you'll definitely notice the difference when printing in high resolution.

So now that we've seen how much damage we can do to a digital photo by compressing it, what can we do about it? Unfortunately, not much. The jpeg format is still your best bet for saving digital photos, and when file size is an issue, we really have no choice but to compress them. If you're working on a project for the web, you can usually get away with quite a bit of compression before image quality becomes an issue, but if your project is going to print, you'll want to use the original, uncompressed images whenever possible.

And there we have it!

Perspective Correction In Photoshop - Keystoning

2011-02-28T23:27:00.000-08:00

Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

Before we do anything else, we should first make a copy of the original image which is sitting on the Background layer in the Layers palette. This is to avoid doing any damage to the original in case we need it later. To duplicate the Background layer, go up to theLayer menu at the top of the screen, choose New and then choose Layer via Copy. Or, to save time, simply use the handy keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). Either way tells Photoshop to make a copy of the Background layer for us, and if we look in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have two layers. The original Background layer is on the bottom, and a copy of the layer, which Photoshop automatically named "Layer 1", is sitting directly above it:

Duplicate the Background layer to avoid damaging the original image.

Step 2: Open The Lens Correction Filter

Now that we're working on a copy of the image, let's bring up the Lens Correction filter by going up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choosing Distort and then choosing Lens Correction:

Go to Filter > Distort > Lens Correction.

Step 3: Straighten The Image If Needed

Photoshop's large Lens Correction dialog box appears, with a few tools along the left, a large preview area in the middle and several options for correcting lens problems along the right. Before we fix our keystoning problem, we should take care of a couple of other potential problems first which will the make it easier for us to fix the keystoning. To start with, let's make sure the image is straight. We can do that using the Straighten Tool, which is the second tool from the top on the left side of the dialog box. Click on it to select it. Then simply click and drag across something in the image that should be straight, either horizontally or vertically. I'm going to click across the roof on the left side of the building in my photo. When you release your mouse button, Photoshop will rotate the image inside the preview area to straighten it (assuming it was crooked). If you find that the grid is making it difficult to see what you're doing, you can turn it off temporarily by unchecking the Show Grid option at the bottom of the dialog box:

Click and drag with the Straighten Tool across something in the image that should be straight.

If you need to zoom in on the image, press Ctrl++ (Win) / Command++ (Mac), or to zoom out, press Ctrl+- (Win) / Command+-(Mac). If, while zoomed in, you need to move the image around inside the preview area, simply hold down your spacebar which gives you temporary access to the Hand Tool, then click and drag the image to move it.

Step 4: Fix Any Barrel Or Pincushion Distortion

Sometimes a photo can suffer from what's called barrel distortion where the image appears to bulge out from its center as if it's being wrapped around a sphere, or from pincushion distortion, the exact opposite problem where it appears to be pinched in towards the center. Not all images have one of these problems but if yours does, it's best to correct it before attempting to fix the keystoning. There's a couple of different ways to do this. One is to click on the Remove Distortion Tool, which is the top tool on the left of the dialog box, then simply click and drag inside the image with your mouse. Drag towards the center of the image to correct any barrel distortion, or drag away from the center to correct any pincushioning:

Click on the Remove Distortion Tool, then click and drag inside the image to remove barrelling or pincushioning if needed.

You can accomplish the same thing with the Remove Distortion slider at the top of the column on the right. Drag the slider towards the left to correct pincushioning, or drag it to the right to correct barrelling. Regardless of the method you choose, make sure you don't drag too far otherwise you'll end up causing the opposite problem that you're correcting. You'll probably find the grid helpful when trying to fix these problems, so check the Show Grid option at the bottom of the dialog box to turn it back on if you turned it off in the previous step:

Drag the Remove Distortion slider towards the left to correct pincushioning or the right to correct barrelling.

If you've gone too far and need to reset the image, just enter value of 0 into the Remove Distortion input box directly above the slider.

Now that we've made sure the image is straight and we've removed any distortion, let's fix our keystoning problem. We'll do that next!

dual view

2011-02-28T23:22:00.000-08:00

Have you ever found yourself zoomed in close to a specific area in a photo, maybe brightening someone's eyes or whitening their teeth, or you may have been panning around an image looking for minor skin blemishes or dust marks on an antique photo, and you're having trouble judging how effective your edits really are because you're too close to the image? Wouldn't it be great if you could see the entire photo as you're working no matter how zoomed in you are? Sure, you could always zoom in to make a few edits, zoom out to the 100% view size to judge the results, zoom back in to make a few more edits, zoom out, back and forth, on and on, but who wants to do that, especially when there's a much better and easier way! Just open the same image in a second document window!

Here's a photo I currently have open in Photoshop. I'm using Photoshop CS4 here but this tip works with any version:

The original image open in Photoshop.

Let's say I wanted to work on the woman's eyes, either lightening them or changing their color. I'll need to zoom in on her eyes, so I'll grab the Zoom Tool from the Tools palette and drag a rectangular selection around her eyes. When I release my mouse button, Photoshop zooms in on the area I selected:

Drag a selection with the Zoom Tool around the area you need to zoom in on.

The problem is, I'd still like to be able to see the rest of the photo as I'm working so I can get a better sense of how the changes I'm making are impacting the overall image. As I mentioned, I could zoom in and out as I'm working, but a much better solution would be to open a second view of the image in a separate document window. To do that, simply go up to the Window menu at the top of the screen and choose Arrange. You'll see an option called New Window for, followed by the name of the image you currently have open. In my case, the name of my image is "knitted_cap.jpg", so my option shows up as "New Window for knitted_cap.jpg":

Go to Window > Arrange > New Window for (insert the name of your image here).

This opens the exact same image in a second document window. If you're working in Photoshop CS4 as I am here, the default behavior of Photoshop CS4 is to open new windows as a series of tabbed documents. Go up to the new Application Bar at the top of the screen, click on the Arrange Documents icon, then click on the 2 Up two column document layout:

In Photoshop CS4, select the "2 Up" two column layout from the Arrange Documents option.

In Photoshop CS3 and earlier, choosing "Window > Arrange > New Window for (name of your image)" opens the image in a second floating document window. To place the document windows side by side each other, simply click on the tab area at the top of the document windows and drag them into position. Or, go up to the Window menu, choose Arrange, and then choose Tile Vertically:

In Photoshop CS3 or earlier, go to Window > Arrange > Tile Vertically.

Whichever version of Photoshop you're using, you should now see both document windows side by side showing the exact same image. The only difference is that both windows are set to a different zoom level:

Two views at two different zoom levels of the exact same photo.

Many people get tricked here into thinking that they've just opened a second copy of the image, but we actually have the exact same image appearing in both document windows. We've given ourselves two separate views of the same image, but it is the same image in both document windows. If you think of how your eyes work, each eye sees an object from a different angle but both eyes are seeing the same object. With our document windows, each one is showing us a different view of the image but it's the same image in both windows.

Since both windows are showing the same photo, anything you do in one of them will be instantly reflected in the other. As a quick example, I'll desaturate the image by going up to the Image menu, choosing Adjustments, and then choosing Desaturate:

Desaturating the image is a quick way to convert a photo to black and white, although certainly not the best way.

This instantly removes all color from the image, leaving me with a black and white photo. Notice that regardless of which document window I had selected, both windows are showing the desaturated version, and that's because both are showing the exact same photo:

Anything you do in one document window instantly appears in the other.

Just for fun, I'll grab Photoshop's History Brush from the Tools palette (I could also press the letter Y on my keyboard to select it with the shortcut):

Selecting the History Brush from the Tools palette.

The History Brush is like Photoshop's version of a time machine, allowing us to paint previous history states back in to the image. For example, I can restore the original color of the woman's cap by painting over it with the History Brush. I'll select the document window on the left (the zoomed in view) and begin painting over her cap with the brush. Even though I'm painting in the document window on the left, both document windows are showing the results of what I'm doing:

The History Brush paints previous history states back in to the image.

Hopefully you now have a sense of just how useful this dual view mode can be when editing images, and the nice thing is, it doesn't require an expensive dual monitor setup. Simply open the image in a second document window, do all of your editing work in the original window, zooming and panning as needed, and leave the second window set to either the Actual Pixels or Fit on Screenview modes, both of which can be accessed from the View menu at the top of the screen. Be sure to check out our full Zooming and Panning in Photoshop tutorial in our Photoshop Basics section for lots more information on how to navigate around images in Photoshop.

And there we have it!

colour replacement tool

2011-02-28T23:18:00.000-08:00

In a previous tutorial, we looked at the Background Eraser and why it's one of the best tools in Photoshop for removing unwanted areas of an image. In this tutorial, we'll learn all about the Color Replacement Tool and how it enables us to change the color of an object in a photo without a lot of fuss or hassle. You may be wondering what on earth a tool for erasing backgrounds has to do with a tool for changing colors, and the answer is, a lot! Both of these tools use the exact same technology for detecting the pixels in the image that need to be changed. The only difference is that one of them deletes pixels entirely, the other simply changes their color. In fact, they're so similar that if you've already read through the Background Eraser tutorial and understand how its various options work, learning about the Color Replacement Tool will seem a lot like déjà vu.

The Color Replacement Tool is not the most professional way to change colors in an image and won't always give you the results you need, but it usually works well for simple tasks and it's such an easy tool to use that it's worth giving it a try before moving on to more advanced and time consuming methods.

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Selecting The Color Replacement Tool

The Color Replacement Tool was first introduced in Photoshop CS, and if you're using Photoshop CS or CS2, you'll find the Color Replacement Tool nested under the Healing Brush in the Tools palette. To access it, click and hold your mouse button down on the Healing Brush until a fly-out menu appears, then select the Color Replacement Tool from the menu.

In Photoshop CS3, Adobe changed things around a bit and moved the Color Replacement Tool in with the regular Brush Tool, so if you're using Photoshop CS3 or CS4 (which is what I'm using here), click and hold your mouse button down on the Brush Tool, then select the Color Replacement Tool from the fly-out menu:

In Photoshop CS3 and CS4, the Color Replacement Tool is nested under the Brush Tool. In CS and CS2, it's under the Healing Brush.

With the Color Replacement Tool selected, your mouse cursor will change into a circle with a small target symbol in the center of it. As I mentioned, if you're familiar with the Background Eraser, this will look very familiar to you since both tools use the exact same cursor:

The Color Replacement Tool's cursor is made up of a simple circle with a target symbol in the middle, just like the Background Eraser.

You can adjust the size of the circle directly from your keyboard using the bracket keys, which are found to the right of the letter P on most keyboards. Press the left bracket key ( [ ) to make the circle smaller or the right bracket key ( ] ) to make it larger. To change the hardness of the brush edges, just add the Shift key. Press Shift+left bracket ( [ ) to make the edges softer orShift+right bracket ( ] ) to make them harder.

How The Color Replacement Tool Works

As you drag the Color Replacement Tool over your image, Photoshop continuously samples the color that's directly under the target symbol in the center of the tool's cursor. This is the color that will be replaced, and it will be replaced with your current Foreground color. Any pixels that fall within the larger circle surrounding the target symbol that match the color being replaced will have their color changed. For example, if you pass the target symbol over an area of blue in your photo and your Foreground color is set to red, any blue pixels that the larger circle passes over will be changed to red. There's some options we can set in the Options Bar to alter the behavior of the tool (which we'll look at shortly), but essentially, that's how it works.

You can see what your Foreground color is currently set to by looking at the Foreground color swatch near the bottom of the Tools palette. By default, it's set to black:

Black is the default Foreground color, but it's probably not the color you'll want to use.

To change the Foreground color, simply click directly on the color swatch, then choose a new color from the Color Picker. I'll choose a green color, just for fun. Click OK to close out of the Color Picker when you're done:

Use the Color Picker to choose a new Foreground color.

If I look again in my Tools palette, I see that the Foreground color swatch has changed to the new color. If I paint on an image with the Color Replacement Tool at this point, whichever color I drag the target symbol over will be replaced with green:

The newly chosen color appears in the color swatch.

As an example, here's a photo of a young girl holding a balloon:

The girl looks happy, but the balloon looks blue.

She may look happy with her blue balloon, but what she really wanted was a green balloon. As luck would have it, I just happen to have my Foreground color currently set to green, so let's see what we can do for her. With the Color Replacement Tool selected, I'll move the target symbol over the blue balloon in the image and click my mouse button. As soon as I click, two things happen. First, Photoshop samples the blue color under the target symbol so it knows which color to replace. Then, any blue pixels that fall within the larger circle surrounding the target symbol immediately change to green, since green is now my Foreground color:

Photoshop samples the blue color and replaces all blue pixels within the circle with green.

To change the rest of the balloon to green, I just need to keep my mouse button held down and continue dragging the Color Replacement Tool over the remaining blue areas. As long as I keep the target symbol over the blue balloon and don't stray off into other areas of the image, which would cause Photoshop to sample a different color, only the blue color will be replaced with green:

Keeping the target symbol over the blue area as I paint.

If I accidentally move the target symbol outside of the balloon and over the yellow wall behind it, Photoshop samples the color of the wall and begins changing it to green as well:

By moving the target symbol outside of the balloon, Photoshop starts replacing other colors with green.

If this happens, simply undo the last step by pressing Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac), or undo multiple steps by pressingCtrl+Alt+Z (Win) / Command+Option+Z (Mac) as many times as needed, then continue on.

Tolerance

Everything seems to be going smoothly as I paint over the balloon until I get to the edges. If you look closely, you can see some faint blue fringing that the Color Replacement Tool is having trouble with:

Some of the original blue color remains along the edges of the balloon.

I mentioned a few moments ago that there are several options available to us in the Options Bar for altering the behavior of the Color Replacement Tool, and one of these options is Tolerance. The Tolerance setting determines how different a color can be from the sampled color for Photoshop to replace it with the Foreground color. The default value is 30%, which is a good starting point. Unfortunately, it's not quite high enough in this case for Photoshop to be able to include the shade of blue right along the edges of the balloon.

I'll increase my Tolerance value to 50%, which will allow the Color Replacement Tool to affect a wider range of colors:

Increasing the Tolerance setting in the Options Bar.

With a higher Tolerance value entered, I'll undo my last step and try again. This time, as I move along the edge of the balloon, the Color Replacement Tool is able to remove the blue fringing:

The blue along the edge of the balloon has been successfully changed to green.

I'll finish painting over the remaining areas as our once blue balloon is magically transformed into green thanks to the Color Replacement Tool and a little boost in the Tolerance value:

The Color Replacement Tool was able to change the balloon's color with little effort.

Sampling Colors From The Image
In the above example, I randomly chose a new color for the balloon from Photoshop's Color Picker, but I could just as easily have selected a color directly from the photo itself. To do that, with the Color Replacement Tool active, hold down your Alt (Win) / Option(Mac) key, which will temporarily switch you to the Eyedropper Tool (you'll see your cursor change into an eyedropper). Click on an area of the photo that contains the color you want to use. Photoshop will sample that color and make it your Foreground color. I'll click on the pinkish-red top she's wearing:

Hold down Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) and click on an area of the photo to sample a color.

If I look at the Foreground color swatch in the Tools palette, I see that the color I clicked on has become my Foreground color:

The sampled color appears in the Foreground color swatch.

With the color sampled directly from the image, I can paint over the balloon once again with the Color Replacement Tool to change its color:

The green balloon, originally blue, is now red.

Notice that even though we've essentially painted a color over top of the balloon, it retained its shiny, reflective appearance. If we had simply grabbed the regular Brush Tool and painted over it, the balloon would look like nothing more than a flat surface with no life to it. So how was the Color Replacement Tool able to keep the balloon's texture and reflections? For the answer to that, we need to look at more of the options in the Options Bar, which we'll do next!

erasing backgroung image

2011-02-28T23:14:00.000-08:00

In this Photoshop tutorial, we look at the Background Eraser Tool and how we can use it to easily remove background areas of an image. The Background Eraser is especially useful with photos that contain lots of fine detail along the edges between the foreground and background, like, for example, if you want to erase the sky in an image without first having to select all of the trees below it.

Don't let the name fool you, though. The Background Eraser really has nothing to do with erasing backgrounds, since Photoshop has no way of knowing what's considered the background in a photo and what isn't. It can just as easily be used to erase any part of an image, and that's because the Background Eraser is really a color eraser. It samples colors as you drag the tool over them and erases only those colors, leaving all other colors untouched. So if your sky is blue and your trees are green, the Background Eraser can easily erase the blue sky while leaving the green trees alone, at least until someone comes along and cuts them down, which makes it all the more important to protect them in your image.

The Background Eraser is, without a doubt, one of the best tools in Photoshop for removing unwanted areas of a photo, but it's not perfect and it does have one serious drawback. As an eraser tool, it physically deletes pixels from the image, which means they're gone for good, so you'll definitely want to either duplicate your Background layer first before erasing any pixels or work on a separate copy of your image.

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Selecting The Background Eraser

By default, the Background Eraser is hiding behind Photoshop's regular Eraser Tool in the Tools palette. To select it, click and hold your mouse button down on the Eraser Tool until a small fly-out menu appears, then select the Background Eraser Tool from the menu:

The Background Eraser can be found nested under the regular Eraser Tool in the Tools palette.

With the Background Eraser selected, your mouse cursor will change into a circle with a small crosshair in the center of it:

The Background Eraser's cursor is made up of a simple circle with a crosshair in the middle.

You can adjust the size of the circle directly from your keyboard just as you can with Photoshop's other brush tools. Press the left bracket key ( [ ) to make the circle smaller or the right bracket key ( ] ) to make it larger. You can also adjust the hardness of the edges by adding the Shift key. Press Shift+left bracket ( [ ) to make the edges softer or Shift+right bracket ( ] ) to make them harder. In general, you'll want to use hard edges with the Background Eraser, since soft edges can leave many background artifacts behind.

How The Background Eraser Works

Before we look at a real-world example of the Background Eraser in action, let's take a more basic look at how it works. Here's a simple image made up of nothing more than a few blue and green vertical columns:

Another Photoshop masterpiece.

If we take a quick look over at the Layers palette, we see that the image is sitting on the Background layer, which is usually the case when we first open an image in Photoshop:

The original image on the Background layer.

Let's say I want to erase the blue column in the middle of the image. The way the Background Eraser works (by default, anyway) is that Photoshop samples the color that's directly underneath the small target symbol in the center of the circle. The larger circle surrounding the target symbol represents the area where Photoshop will erase pixels. Any pixels inside the circle that match the color of the pixel directly under the target symbol will be erased.

To erase the blue center column, I'll move the circle into the blue area, making sure that the target symbol in the center of the circle is directly over the blue color I want to erase. When I click my mouse button, Photoshop will sample the blue color under the target symbol and then erase all of the blue pixels that fall within the larger circle:

Photoshop erases all of the pixels inside the circle that are the same color as the pixel under the target symbol in the center.

To erase more of the blue column, I just need to continue holding my mouse button down while I drag the Background Eraser over more of the area I want to erase. Notice that even though the circle sometimes extends into one of the green columns on either side of the blue column, they remain untouched since those pixels are not the same color as the color I'm erasing. This makes it easy to get right up along the edges of the area I want to erase. As long as I keep the small target symbol inside the blue area, Photoshop will only erase blue pixels:

You can move the circle into other colors in the image without erasing them as long as you keep the target symbol away from them.

If I accidentally move the target symbol over one of the green columns, though, Photoshop will sample the green color and start erasing green pixels:

Moving the target symbol over a new color causes Photoshop to change the color that it's erasing.

If you do make a mistake like this, simply press Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) to undo it. If you need to undo multiple steps, press Ctrl+Alt+Z (Win) / Command+Option+Z (Mac) repeatedly.

The Background Layer
Notice the checkerboard pattern that appears in place of the areas I've erased. That's Photoshop's way of representing transparency on a layer, which, if you're familiar with Photoshop, may have you wondering what's going on here. A moment ago, we saw that my image was sitting on the Background layer. Photoshop treats Background layers differently from normal layers, with different rules for what we can and can't do with them. One of the things we can't do is erase pixels on them, since transparency is not allowed on a Background layer (after all, it's the background, and not being able to see through it is part of what makes it a background). How, then, did I manage to erase the pixels? Is there some sort of "Extra Strength" setting for the Background Eraser we haven't looked at yet?

Nope. What's happened is that Photoshop assumed I knew what I doing (not always the best assumption to make) and, rather than tossing up an error message complaining that I can't delete pixels on a Background layer, automatically converted the Background layer into a regular layer, which it named "Layer 0". This isn't anything terribly important, but it's still good to know what's going on:

When using the Background Eraser on the Background layer, Photoshop converts it to a normal layer.

Here's an example of the Background Eraser in action. As I make my way around the tree in the photo, the Background Eraser has little trouble erasing the blue sky while leaving the tree itself untouched, as long as I keep the target symbol over the sky and away from the tree:

Even though the Background Eraser extends into the tree, only the blue sky is erased.

However, if I slip and move the target symbol over the green color in the tree, Photoshop starts erasing the tree, in which case I'd need to undo the last step and try again:

Photoshop has no idea what the sky or a tree is. It cares only about the color under the target symbol.

So far, we know that Photoshop samples the color directly under the target symbol in the center of the Background Eraser's cursor, then it erases any pixels of that same color that fall within the larger circle. We also know that if we move the target symbol over a different color as we're dragging the Background Eraser around, Photoshop will sample the new color and use it as the color it should be erasing. What we've just described here is the default behavior of the Background Eraser, but it's not the only way the tool can behave. So how do we change things? We do that using the settings and options found in the Options Bar, which we'll look at next!

changing an eye colour

2011-02-28T23:11:00.000-08:00

In this Photoshop photo retouching tutorial, we'll learn a very simple technique for changing someone's eye color in a photo using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer! Of course, there's no shortage of ways to change colors in an image with Photoshop, but whether you know which color you want to use or just want to play around and experiment, a Hue/Saturation image adjustment makes changing eye color easy, fast and fun!

Here's the image I'll be using:

The original image.

Let's get started!

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Step 1: Zoom In On The Eyes

Before we begin, let's make it easier to see what we're doing by zooming in on the eyes in the photo. Select the Zoom Tool from the Tools palette, or press the letter Z on your keyboard to select it with the shortcut:

Select the Zoom Tool.

With the Zoom Tool selected, click and drag out a selection box around the eyes. This is the area we'll be zooming in to:

Drag out a selection box around the eyes.

Release your mouse button, and Photoshop fills the document window with the area you selected:

Photoshop zooms in on the selected area.

Step 2: Select The Lasso Tool

Next, we need to select the eyes so we're not affecting any other areas of the image. For that, we'll use the Lasso Tool. Select the Lasso Tool from the Tools palette, or press the letter L on your keyboard to quickly select it with the shortcut:

Select the Lasso Tool.

Step 3: Draw Selections Around The Eyes

With the Lasso Tool selected, drag a selection around one of the eyes. Don't worry if your selection outline isn't perfect since we'll clean things up later. Once you have the first eye selected, hold down your Shift key and draw a selection around the other eye. Holding down the Shift key will add the new selection to the previous one, allowing us to select both eyes at once:

Select the first eye, then hold down Shift and select the other.

We don't need the pupils in the center of the eyes selected, so let's remove them from the selection. Hold down your Alt (Win) /Option (Mac) key and drag around each pupil with the Lasso Tool. This will remove them from the selection, leaving us with only the colored area selected. Again, don't worry about being overly precise for now:

Hold down Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) and drag around the pupils to deselect them.

Step 4: Add A Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer

With the eyes now selected, we're ready to change their color! For that, we'll use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Click on theNew Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette (it's the circle split diagonally between black and white), then selectHue/Saturation from the list of adjustment layers that appears:

Click on the New Adjustment Layer icon and choose Hue/Saturation from the list.

Step 5: Select The "Colorize" Option

If you're using Photoshop CS4 as I am here, the options and controls for the Hue/Saturation dialog box will appear inside theAdjustments Panel which is new to CS4. In Photoshop CS3 and earlier, a Hue/Saturation dialog box will appear on your screen. Select the Colorize option by clicking inside its checkbox:

Select "Colorize".

As soon as you select Colorize, you'll see the eyes change color in the document window:

The eyes instantly change color.

Step 6: Adjust The Hue, Saturation And Lightness

To change the color, simply adjust the Hue, Saturation and Lightness options by dragging their sliders left or right. Hue will change the basic color, Saturation changes the saturation of the color, and Lightness affects the overall brightness. Be careful not to drag the Saturation or Lightness sliders too far to the right, though, since things can quickly become unnatural looking. The image in the document window will continually update as you move the sliders so you can see a live preview of the changes:

Dial in the color you want with the Hue, Saturation and Lightness sliders.

When you're happy with the new color of the eyes, click OK to exit out of the Hue/Saturation dialog box (Photoshop CS4 users can leave the Adjustments Panel open since there's no need to close it). Here's my image after changing the woman's eyes from blue to green:

The Hue/Saturation adjustment makes it easy to select any color you want for the eyes.