Photo Editing Tips

Filters

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Editing is one important part of digital photography. It has been part of film photography for nearly 150 years. And many tools were created to further advance our techniques into rendering the perfect image for our specific need. Whether be it for personal use or for professional sorts. With the help of photo editing tools, the otherwise dull and uninteresting photo that you may have taken can turn into something that would almost be a masterpiece. How would you like that? Like for example when you take a photo of a building, when you look at it, it seems to be leaning or crooked. This is a phenomenon called perspective distortion. You can easily correct it with Photoshop using Filter, Correct Camera Distortion and then adjust Vertical Perspective. Try it out now.

Some of the tips for Photoshop CS3

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Drawing straight lines without using the line tool
Choose one of the available tools for drawing a line except line tool (Eraser tool, pencil tool, brush tool, etc) and then hold the shift key while dragging the pointer horizontally or vertically.

Drawing straight lines using the brush tool
While the brush tool is selected, click where you want to start the first point to be at. Then hold the shift key and click to the other point where you want your line to end. You may also use this technique mostly to other tools like highlight tool and eraser tool.

Tips at creating shapes
To start drawing from the center, hold alt while dragging. To create perfect shapes of a square, a circle, or when you are using the polygon tool, hold shift while dragging. If you are using any of tools for drawing like the brush tool, or line tool, and you want to move what you are drawing, hold the spacebar and drag it to where you want your drawing placed.

Closing multiple windows of Photoshop
Hold shift while going to the file menu and choose close.

Applying Effects on Images

When you open Adobe Photoshop, you are bound to try out all the things you can do with your photos. This includes checking out the various effects on the source file itself. They are not easy to apply if you don’t know the actual use of each effect. You really have to play around with them as much as possible to get the best output you can get.

For a work to be art, there should be a message, a feeling, a reason the artist made the work because he or she wanted to say something, even if how I interpret the statement is different than what the artist meant.

Photography Can Bring Out the Artist In You

While many of us end up staring at pictures blankly, you can do a lot of artistic output on them if you think about it. The controversy about whether photography is art is one that has been raging in the art world for a long time and we are not likely to totally solve it here.

But it can be an important decision you have to make if you are considering a career in photography with the goal of producing quality art works. Now the primary objection to whether photography is art sometimes is that a photograph is often a realistic depiction of a moment taken with a machine and some would say that “anybody can take a picture.”

Recover the Original Images

As far as editing images are concerned, you will encounter problems as far as accidentally saving them to the one you are editing. Software can easily reclaim lost or missing photographs from various cases of accidental losses of data. There are utilities that can help to demonstrate whole recovery process in an easy to use and interactive way.

There are a lot of them out there and you just have to pick the right one. Once you do, rest assured you no longer have to worry about the original file that you erroneously edited. Any software that can recover images can make sure of that.

Easy on the Image Edges

At times, you will find yourself editing pictures like crazy to enhance the raw photo that you had taken with your usual digital camera. While you are bound to check out the various image enhancers such as the mosaic and motion blur, do remember that you have to preserve the image as a whole.

Many people become emphatic about modifying pictures that they end up ruining the whole shot. While they can always revert it, it would be wise to save it under a different file name so that you can always have the original photo if you decide to discard everything without saving it along the way.

Ulead Photo Express’ smart select and blur tool.

Ulead has a very user-friendly interface compared to the other advanced photo editors. It doesn’t follow thought that photos edited using Ulead won’t produce quality photos—in fact, Ulead can have the same quality outputs, minus the migraine (I told you, it’s user-friendly!).

Ulead Photo Express has this special tool called smart select. It actually acts like Adobe’s lasso tool but what’s good about this is that, it detects the edges of a subject in a photo without complexity. You just click on the edge of the photo subject you want to cut, and trace it like you’re making an outline. You can smudge the area using the blur tool to remove the sharp edges. These effects’ transparency can also be adjusted from 100% to 0% so that you could achieve that perfect edited picture you always wanted.

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Creating smoke without fire

Open your image.

Create a new layer above the image. Press D to set foreground and background colors to black and white respectively. Color theis whole layer black.
Go to menu. Choose filter , render, then . Be sure that the clouds cover the entire layer.

Go to the layers palette and click the script-like “f” icon. Choosing blending options. A pop-up will appear. At the bottom of the pop-up are two sliders. Go to the top slider (under “Blend it”). Hold the alt key down and click on the left black triangle. The triangle should split up. Adjust the right half so that the black background disappears. It should look like this:

Create a mask on the layers palette. Be sure to work on the mask itself. Clean unwanted “smoke” using the brush tool with black as color.

Now you’re done!

Time and space warp

1. Open image.

2. Create new image with the same size and resolution as the first one.

3. Set Image mode to Grayscale.

4. Go to Tools palette. Choose Gradient Fill and click the Gradient Editor. Adjust the settings to the following:
Gradient type: solid
Smoothness :100%

5. Adjust the colors (those square boxes) so that they alternate black and white. The more stripes there are, the more waves you�ll get.

6. Apply gradient to blank image.

7. Go to menu bar and click Filter then Distort then Twirl. Adjust the settings: Angle: -450

8. Save as PSD.

9. Go back to the original image. Name that Layer 1.

10. Duplicate the layer. It will be Layer 1 copy

11. Create a new layer and paste your second image there. Name that Layer 2. Move this layer in between Layer 1 and Layer 1 copy.

12. Go to Layer 1 copy.

13. Click on Filter then Distort then Displace. When asked about the displacement map, choose the PSD you just saved a while ago.

14. Adjust the settings:
V Stretch 50
Stretch to fit
Repeat edge pixels

15. Apply Layer mask to Layer 1 copy. Click on the Layer mask. Make sure that the foreground is black and the background is white.

16. Use a soft-edged brush and paint over the mask. Experiment. Use black to conceal and white to reveal.

17. Adjust the second image to fit. You may use Smudge and Burn tools to polish the effects.