Photoshop Tutorials Blog » Photo Retouching

Posterizing Images Video Tutorial

Dimitris — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:43:13 +0000

I guess we are on a roll posting about the latest free video tutorials from Watcandlearnphotoshop. Free however is nice . Their latest free video tutorial show how to posterize an image using Photoshop, a simple but nice tutorial that basically explains how the Poster Edges filter works.

Turning your images into illustrations isn’t as difficult as you might think. In this video tutorial, you’ll learn how to make your images look cartoonish in just one simple step.

Watch the tutorial

Black and White Photos – Photoshop Video Tutorial

Dimitris — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 19:10:59 +0000

Watch and Learn Photoshop has released another one of their free Photoshop video tutorials. This tutorial describes some nice techniques that you can use to turn your photos to black and white using adjustment layers. These techniques work much better than just desaturating or turning your image to Grayscale mode and the final outcome is much more customizable.

Here is the description of the tutorial according to Watch and Learn Photoshop.

How many of you just convert your images from RGB to grayscale when you want to create a black and white image? How many of you turn to your Hue/Saturation adjustments and completely desaturate the image? Well, in this video, you’ll learn how to take control of your black and white images in a much more effective way.

You can watch this free Photoshop Training video here

Contrast Mask Photoshop Tutorial

Dimitris — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 10:56:54 +0000

Contrast masking is a technique used to correct photos that because of the high dynamic range some of it’s areas appear underexposed while the rest of the image appears overexposed. With this technique we are able to reveal details both from the underexposed areas and the overexposed areas. This technique isn’t something new, traditional photographers used to apply the equivalent of this technique in the dark room for quite sometime now while the digital version of this technique is also used by a lot of photographers for years. However, I have found that most digital photographers ignore this extremely useful technique so I decided to write this tutorial.

Lets start by opening our image. I am going to use this photo taken at Stockholm with a small compact digital camera.

You can see that the left side of the photo is underexposed, while the building is slightly overexposed.

Now we are going to duplicate the photo layer. Go to Layer->Duplicate Layer (Ctrl+J)

The next step is to desaturate the new layer we just created. Go to Image->Adjustments->Desaturate (Ctrl+Shift+U). Now you should have something like this.

Inverting the duplicate layer is our next step. Go to Image->Adjustments->Invert (Ctrl+I)

Set the blending mode of the layer to Overlay and you should get something like this.

As you can see a lot of details that weren’t previously visible are now visible. However our image looks strange, so we are going to do one final thing.

Go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and apply a gaussian blur. For this step there is no golden rule about the value of the radius of the gaussian blur that works best, you should experiment with the settings. For different images I have seen values from 10 up to more than 100 work. For this image I used a value of 60. You can also play with the opacity of the duplicate layer to achieve your desired result.

And here is my final result.

Technorati Tags: photo, retouching, contrast, mask, photoshop, tutorial, restoration

Dreamy Duotone effect

Dimitris — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 09:53:44 +0000

With this tutorial I am going to show you a way to turn a photo into a dreamy duotone image using Adobe Photoshop.

1. Open the image you want to apply this effect. I am going to start with this stock photo.

2. Go to ” Image” -> “Mode” and select “Greyscale”. A message will pop up asking you if you want to discard color information, click OK and continue.

3. Go again at “Image” -> “Mode” but this time select “Duotone”. Select colors depending on the toning that you want to give to your photo. My setting for this tutorial where:

Which produces this slightly blue toned result.

4. Now for the dreamy effect we are going to use the popular method of blurring.
Duplicate your layer (Ctrl-J) and on the top layer apply a Gaussian blur (Fiter->Blur->Gaussian Blur). The optimum radius depends on the size and the detail of your photo and the effect you want to achieve so expirement with the settings. For this tutorial I used a radius of 50pixels. Set the layer mode to “Overlay” and we are finished.
All that is left to do now is merging the layers and changing the image mode back to RGB (Image->Mode->RGB Color)

Here is my final result

Technorati Tags: Photo, duotone, dreamy, effect, photoshop, tutorial

Sharpening images using the high pass filter

Dimitris — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 21:30:53 +0000

Most people when they want to sharpen their images with photoshop they use the USM (Unsharp Mask filter), however there is another powerful photoshop filter that in my opinion does a better job.

I am going to start with a closeup of a flower that I took handheld

Here is a 100%crop of the picture before using this technique

Let’s start
1) Open the photo you want to sharpen and make sure you are viewing it at 100%
2) Duplicate the background layer by hitting Ctrl+J or just go to Layer-> Duplicate Layer
3) Now it’s time to apply the High Pass filter at the duplicate layer. Go to Filter-> Other -> High Pass. I usually use a radius somewhere between 9 and 12. In this case I used a radius of 11.5

Now your image should look like this.

Change the duplicate layer mode to either overlay,soft light or hard light. Play with the blending modes and the opacity (I usually use values from 30 to 70% ) of the duplicate layer until you are happy with the result

In this case I used Soft light and an opacity of 60%
Here is a side by side comparison of the original versus the modified

Original ————————————————>Modified

Technorati Tags: Photoshop, tutorial, sharpen, high pass, filter,