Adobe Tutorials

Learn how to employ my favorite tricks and techniques for Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw and more!

Photoshop Tutorials: Perfect Photo Suite 6 Plugins

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Jan 172012
 

Perfect Portrait

Recently, onOne Software announced a major upgrade to their collection of Photoshop plugins, called Perfect Photo Suite 6. Now at version 6.0.2, the suite includes major upgrades including Perfect Mask, Perfect Portrait, Perfect Layers (for Lightroom users), Focal Point 2, and more.

To share a few of the best features from my five favorite plugins, I teamed up with Peachpit.com to bring you some feature articles. The most recent of these is a demonstration of how easy it can be to smooth the rough edges of any portrait with Perfect Portait, a new product built from the ground up with people shooters in mind!

Simulated Aperture Controls in Bokeh 2 (legacy UI)

Bokeh Power – Focal Point 2

Focal Point 2 works a bit like Photoshop’s Lens Blur effect except that it’s easier to control the depth of field and/or produce a nice looking bokeh effect for your backgrounds. It provides you with on-preview controls for managing the scope and angle of the blur effects, as well as a detailed group of simulated lens aperture controls to control the look of the bokeh (plus an aperture preview which is something that’s not been a part of  Photoshop’s blur regimen).  Creating Lens Blur Effects with Bokeh 2 will show you how easy and fun it is to get started with this plugin and the powerful Focus Bug technology.

Continue reading »

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Lightroom Tutorial: Improved Tone Mapping in Lightroom 4

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Jan 122012
 

This quick look at the new Lightroom 4 beta explores the new tone mapping controls in the Basic panel (part of Process 2012). This improved process has also been used to enhance the Adjustment Brush workflow, which will be covered in the near future. When you ultimately upgrade your Lightroom 3 catalog in the final version of Lightroom 4, images that have never been edited in Lightroom will default to Process 2012, while those edited with earlier processes will give you the option of maintaining that status and using the old control methods, or upgrading to Process 2012.

NOTE: do not upgrade your catalog with a beta version of Lightroom. For now create new catalog, import some files as copies and experiment with those so that you don’t have to worry about your originals or your working catalog.

The major improvements to Process 2012 are:

  • Process 2012 replaces Recovery and Fill Light with Highlights and Shadows.
  • Process 2012 maps to the Histogram controller more intuitively.
  • All Tone controls start at 0 now.
  • More highlight detail recovery is possible.
  • Shadow detail recovery (while leaving inky tones intact) is also improved.
  • More pronounced Clarity impact enhances local contrast, can create faux HDR effect.

Here’s a quick video (sans audio – old mic recording rig is toast, new one on the way). Even with a tricky combination of tones / lighting situation, the values can be moved substantially without creating posterization or clipping issues. Any posterizing you might see here is a direct result of the video codec used to render the video, not Lightroom 4 beta. Tried my best to remove it but Screenflow is not perfect in this regard.  BTW no special effects: those cloud formations hanging over the ridges are the real deal. :)

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Aperture Tutorial: Working with the Viveza 2 Plugin

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Jan 032012
 

These days it’s common knowledge that you can extend the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom, by using 3rd party products called plugins. Plugins can serve many useful purposes, including the enhancement of black and white photographs, the inclusion of special effects like fog or tilt-shift focus, and powerful portrait retouching options.

Several of my recent articles and tips focus on the plugins made by Nik Software, onOneSoftware, and Topaz Labs, and how they are used to enhance Photoshop and Lightroom workflows. What you might not realize is, many of these same plugins are also compatible with Apple’s Aperture 3 software!

Aperture supports many plugin workflows

While Aperture 3 is a powerful tool for photographers, one of the minor drawbacks is that it has a limited set of localized adjustments. The good news is, you can add plugins like Viveza from Nik Software, to rapidly expand Aperture’s capabilities. You can apply your global raw edits in Aperture and then open a file (with those changes included) directly into Viveza, where you can apply localized edits using Nik’s U-Point masking technology. For example, you might want to touch up small areas of the sky, without impacting other parts of the scene that also contain blue pixels.

See how simple it can be to use plugins and localized edits within Aperture!

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Photoshop Tutorial: Selenium Toning with Topaz BW Effects

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Dec 272011
 

Another great way to extend the capabilities of Photoshop is to leverage the power of the BW Effects plugin from Topaz Labs.  You may not realize it, but even for purists, there are traditional darkroom processes that can be simulated in the digital realm, and with powerful impact.

Topaz BW Effects provides many options for creating and customizing black and white photos from your digital color originals. For this example we look at how shots with a lot of detail and soft backgrounds can be enhanced using Selenium toning and other effects. The process is quite intuitive and the results are excellent, especially if you need to fine-tune things for fine art printing!

Attention to details: Topaz BW Effect

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Lightroom Tutorial: Creative Focus with Topaz Lens Effects

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Dec 202011
 

Here’s another Lightroom technique, using the newly updated Lightroom plugin from Topaz Labs, Lens Effects 2.1. This update contains new filters like Fog Effects, Reflection Effects, and more.

To remind myself of more appealing climates and destinations than the midwestern U.S. in December, I recently wrote a tutorial for Lightroom Secrets that shows you how to draw the viewer’s eye to your subject using creative focus effects. You’ll see just how easy it is to create a round-trip workflow from Lightroom to Lens Effects and back, and quickly produce creative variations on your favorite shots! You’ll also learn how to integrate the full suite of Topaz plugins with Lightroom, using their Fusion conduit.

Topaz Labs Lens Effects

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Photoshop Tutorial: Scene Interpretation with Topaz Adjust 5

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Nov 292011
 

Recently Topaz Labs released a major update – Topaz Adjust 5 – to their suite of Photoshop plugins. Adjust 5 offers several useful improvements over version 4, including: many new presets; the ability to apply adjustments locally with new brush technology; a new transparency control; improved performance, and a new Finishing Touches tab to add vignettes and similar effects at the end of the creative process.

I will provide a detailed look at Adjust 5 as well as other plugins from Topaz Labs (and other developers) in the near future. To give you a taste, here is a quick tutorial I contributed to Dan Bailey’s photo blog recently, showing how simple it is to create new interpretations of a photograph using Adjust 5. Photoshop techniques like this are especially helpful with shots taken under low contrast lighting. Selective focus, local contrast adjustments, color adjustments are all discussed…

Working with Exposure Regions in Topaz Adjust 5

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Lightroom Tutorial: Getting Started with HDR Efex Pro

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Sep 062011
 

[Updated for 2012!]

Background: What is HDR?

High Dynamic Range (or HDR) photography has been a hot topic in photography circles the last year or two. There is a very real debate about whether it’s “good” or “bad” (as with most heated debates, I believe the answer is: “it depends”). For my part, I think HDR photography can and will play a significant role in the evolution of digital photography.

The usefulness of any software technique is usually predicated on staying true to the scene and the artistic intent of your picture. If you can manage that with HDR, you’ll be in good shape! No software tool –HDR options included– can fix a poorly executed photo, but they can make a good photograph better.

The most important part of HDR photography is capturing the series of bracketed exposures, the data from which can be merged together to make a single photograph. The reason for the bracketing is so you can capture all the tonal details in the scene, from brightest to darkest and everything between.

A good rule of thumb is to vary the exposures by one stop and take additional shots on either side of a 0EV exposure. For example you might want to capture the following exposure values for your scene if it has a wide range of tones: -2EV -1EV 0EV +1EV and +2EV. A more extreme example are scenes like a downtown street at sunset or dusk, where most of the light from the sky is gone but the street lights are on, creating a mix of dark shadow details and brightly lit specular details that come from the cars and storefronts in the scene.

Capturing that entire scene would be impossible with a single exposure, even using the best cameras available. The difference between the lightest and darkest tones is simply too great. That’s where HDR Efex Pro comes in!

Continue reading »

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Photoshop Tutorial: 32-bit HDR Toning in Photoshop CS5

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Aug 172011
 

What is HDR Toning?

The Merge to HDR Pro UI

A quick reminder: here is an example of the kind of tips you can get from Adobe Digital Imaging How-Tos…

HDR Toning is the process in Photoshop CS5 where you can create a 32-bit image from a series of exposures, and then use the new HDR Toning image adjustment to follow an HDR-like workflow. Normally if you tone map inside Merge to HDR Pro, the output must be 8 or 16-bit. This process offers a 32-bit alternative.

If you’re working in Photoshop right out of the gate, choose File > Automate > Merge to HDR Pro. If you’re working from Lightroom, select the bracketed exposures you want to use from the Grid view or Filmstrip, right-click, and choose Edit in > Merge to HDR Pro in Photoshop. If you go with the first option, this will open a dialog box for browsing and selecting your files, and for automatically aligning them. Typically I find that if I’ve photographed my scene using a tripod and trigger release, I can get a good alignment result.

Once the merge has begun, Photoshop may take a couple minutes—depending on the size of your original files, how many you are attempting to merge, and the speed of your system—to bring all the shots together into the Merge to HDR Pro interface (right). Most of the controls you see above are also included in the HDR Toning adjustment, which we will be covering shortly. They include:

  • Remove Ghosts: Uses the image (thumbnail) you choose as the basis for eliminating any blur caused by moving objects (for example, a tree branch moving in the wind).
  • Mode pop-ups: Allows you to decide if your output will be 8, 16, or 32-bit, and which tone mapping method to use. In all cases, I prefer either 16- or 32-bit Local Adaptation, as it provides the most flexibility.
  • Edge Glow: These sliders control the HDR “glow” and halo effects you may be familiar with from HDR web sites and galleries, by manipulating local contrast. These are most often the “culprit” when an HDR image looks “fake” or “illustrated”, rather than captured with a camera.
  • Tone and Detail: these sliders allow you to set the look of the overall exposure, tone down blown out highlights, open up shadows, and add detail or perceived sharpness.
  • Color: These two controls allow you to modify the global color saturation and presence.
  • Curve: Allows you to fine-tune the contrast beyond what the Tone and Detail controls can do.

The thumbnails at the bottom left of the window represent your HDR exposures. When using Remove Ghosts they can be selected individually to eliminate blur or unwanted movement. Continue reading »

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Photoshop Tutorial: Working with Silver Efex Pro 2

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Jul 012011
 

Silver Efex Pro 2

My most recent guest tutorial posted over at Dan Bailey’s photo blog, focuses on Silver Efex Pro 2 — Nik Software’s popular plugin for creating professional quality black and white photographs from your color originals. Compatible with both Lightroom and Photoshop (and even Aperture), Silver Efex Pro 2 offers a large selection of toning and detail options that give you complete control over the look of your picture.

UPDATED:

(This version of my Silver Efex Pro 2 tutorial provides clarification on a couple Contrast settings, whose behavior don’t closely match the official documentation, and corrects an “audio typo” where I referred to the plugin as Color Efex. Oops! It’s also shorter by a minute or two than the original overview)

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Photoshop Tutorial: Working with the Color Efex Pro 3 Plugin

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Jun 162011
 

Last month I posted a Photoshop tutorial at DanBaileyPhoto.com, and wanted to share that with you here. Color Efex Pro 3 is a powerful plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture that helps you to stylize your digital photos in more traditional and subtle ways, as compared to the typical set of “creative filters” you’ll find in other photo editing apps. It provides a wide range of color and tonal styling presets to choose from, and a deep set of controls to modify those presets and create the precise look you’re going for.

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Photoshop Tutorial: Using Parametric Curves in ACR 6

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
May 242011
 

Last month I posted a Photoshop tutorial over at TipSquirrel.com,  focused on the Parametric Curve function in ACR, that seemed to resonate with people. So as I do occasionally, I thought it would be good to revisit that here as well. If you need to improve the contrast of a raw file, Parametric Curves are a great way to simplify the process of making a traditional Curves adjustment. Instead of “guestimating” and placing your points along an abstract line, you can use special Histogram widgets to define which range of tones constitute the “highlights”, the “middle tones”, and the “shadows”. From there making your correction is just a matter of moving a few sliders!

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Lightroom Tutorial: Using Stacks to Streamline Your Workflow

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
May 202011
 

It’s a problem most photographers have faced more than once: you’ve got a subject or composition you’d like to focus on during a shoot, but because weather conditions and other variables change rapidly, you must continue to capture the subject until you get it just right. Sometimes you may have dozens or even hundreds of very similar shots, if you’re shooting “rapid fire”.

However, once you’re in the Lightroom 3 Library module, viewing dozens of thumbnails that all display the same composition can make scanning your collection of compositions more difficult. Enter Stacks! Stacks can be used for multiple photographic workflows (such as gathering shots for HDR or Panoramic photographs), so it’s definitely a trick worth knowing.

For this Lightroom 3 tutorial, I demonstrate how to collapse dozens of shots into a small space, so that the overall collection of subjects is more apparent, making an evaluation of your overall shoot more simple.

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Photoshop Tutorial: Creating Bezier Selections (Pen Tool)

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
May 132011
 

One of the Photoshop tools that scares people the most is using the Pen Tool to create Bezier paths, that you then convert into precise, contoured selections. But, it’s really pretty easy once you try it! Confusion often stems from the somewhat non-intuitive process of placing points along your subject’s edge, and then dragging the handle around to shape the connecting segments. But hopefully after watching this brief video tutorial, you’ll see how easy it can be!

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Photoshop Tutorial: Using the Replace Color Adjustment

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Apr 212011
 

Replace Color Adjustment

Last week on the Colortrails Facebook Page, a few of my followers voted unanimously that the next free Photoshop tutorial should focus on image adjustments, so that’s what’s in store for your Earth (Week) tutorial! Image Adjustments are probably the single most important collection of Photoshop editing capabilities from a photography perspective, both because they allow for precise edits, and because they are non-destructive in nature.

We’re going to take a look at the Replace Color adjustment layer, which is handy when a portion of the subject doesn’t quite fit within the range of colors you intended, and you need to make a quick and accurate fix. It performs a similar function to the Hue sliders from the HSL controls in Lightroom and ACR, except that it gives you more control over which pixels are modified, and like all adjustment layers it provides the option of a layer mask for further precision.

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Photoshop Tutorial: Understanding Alpha Channels

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Apr 122011
 

Alpha Channel. The phrase is enough to make some Photoshop users head to the nearest corner and curl up in the fetal position. It sounds more like nuclear physics than photography or creative process, doesn’t it? But alpha channels are a great help once you understand that they are just another type of selection!

They essentially serve the same purpose as a layer mask and look and work in pretty much the same way, as well, representing the selection as grayscale data. Both alpha channels and layer masks can be used to define the areas of your picture which should be protected or partially protected from specific edits, so they retain more of their original appearance. And like layer masks, alpha channels can also be saved with your document so that selections can be re-generated from them later.

But the best way to explain alpha channels is to show you a quick example of how I use them. Typically I use alpha channels when working with the Lens Blur filter, or the Content-Aware Scale command. We’ll take a look at the former option here. Continue reading »

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Lightroom Tutorial: Adding Style to Low Contrast Photos

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Apr 082011
 

Lightroom is a great tool for styling an image to match the scene. © Dan Moughamian, 2011

Working with Low Contrast

We’ve all encountered situations where we are forced to photograph in overcast light or other suboptimal environments, due to time restrictions on location. Afterward we often discover we like the subject matter or composition, but the light throws us.

However that’s not always a good reason to delete those shots! Hang on to the best ones and see if you can use Lightroom’s excellent raw editing tools to tweak the focus, contrast and colors in a way that accentuates the scene, rather than attempt to manufacture what wasn’t there.  My recent article at Lightroom Secrets shows you the way!

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Photoshop Tutorial: The Easy Way to Create Layer Masks

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Apr 042011
 

Layer Mask Tweaks via Refine Edge

As photographers one of the most important things we can do with Photoshop is learn how to quickly utilize the power of layer masks, especially with our adjustment layers. Layer masks allow us to localize the changes we make, so that a specific adjustment or even a specific filter or painting operation only affects one precise region of the image while maintaining appearances elsewhere.

For example: you may want to brighten up or saturate a person’s shirt, but no other part of the frame. Or you may want to change the shade of blue in the sky without changing the color character of other portions of the image. To see how easily you can accomplish this, head over to my tutorial at Dan Bailey’s photography blog.

As part of this process we’ll also take a look at the Refine Edge command, which can make our selections even more precise without a lot of manual tweaking. (You can learn more about adjustment layers and layer mask techniques in my Photoshop book from Adobe Press.)

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Photoshop Tutorial: Creating Soft Focus Vignettes

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Mar 252011
 

Smart Filter + Box Blur + Layer Mask = Fun Photo Effect!

This tutorial covers a blurring technique that focuses the viewer’s attention on the central region of your picture, but unlike a crop or standard vignette, it does not do so by removing, or darkening the edges of the frame.

This technique tends to work best on shots where there is homogenous texture around the bottom and sides of the image so that seeing through the blur does not create  streaks or distracting elements. The best part is you can accomplish this technique in  5 easy steps, and it will work in both Photoshop CS4 and CS5.

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Photoshop Tutorial: Retouching with the Spot Healing Brush (Content-Aware)

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Mar 112011
 

One of my favorite Photoshop retouching techniques is to fix up unwanted glitches in my photographs with the Patch tool. However Patching on its own can have limits as you try to work around areas of high contrast texture. Sometimes additional steps such as cloning and then patching are required to create a natural looking texture and avoid odd looking blurs or bright spots.

Enter the Spot Healing Brush and the new Content-Aware mode in CS5. This feature allows the Spot Healing Brush to examine the areas of texture around your targeted glitch, and intelligently fill in with texture that has both accurate tone and color. The trick is to make your brush stroke wide enough to cover the edge of the object you’re removing, and to include some of the surrounding or connecting texture. Below you can see the difference between the standard Proximity Match mode and Content-Aware. No contest in many cases! (Or at least I’ve found that to be the case more often than not.)

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Photoshop Tutorial: Photoshop User Feature Article

 Posted by Dan Moughamian
Feb 282011
 

Earlier this month was the first time one of my feature articles was published in Photoshop User Magazine; it was quite an honor! This Photoshop article focuses on what many of us are facing right now: a transition in weather and environment from winter to spring, and how we can get the most from our cameras in less-than-ideal lighting and color conditions.Also included are tips for processing raw images in Lightroom and ACR, and a quick path to using Merge to HDR Pro as a way to preserve very subtle details like those found in snow scenes. Many thanks to NAPP for this great opportunity; it was an honor and I hope to work with them again this year to bring you guys more articles and tips.

NOTE: The PDF may take a few extra seconds to load so that you can view it inline. Note also that the images have been compressed for the web. Thanks for your patience!

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