After running your images through overall color and tonal corrections, you’ll want to continue finishing off your nature photos by adding edits. I’ve always recommended that everything you do in Photoshop be part of a workflow, and editing nature photos isn’t any different. You still need to stick to a rigid process to help you obtain consistent quality results.
The image-editing workflow is very much like the overall-correction workflow I described earlier. Image edits are made in a step-by-step sequence of best practices. Unlike the procedure for overall color and tonal corrections, however, you do have the freedom to mix up the order of your edits a bit. For the sake of consistency, I recommend you make edits in individual steps.
1. Plan your edits. After you complete overall corrections, evaluate your image to determine what type of edits are needed, if any. Common types of edits to plan for include dodging and burning, removing spots with the Spot Healing brush or the Clone Stamp, and retouching using other tools, such as the Paintbrush. I’ll review editing tools in this tutorial.
2. Create separate layers for each edit. After you evaluate an image, and then decide that you need to perform additional editing, as a best practice, you need to create separate layers for each edit. That way you can delete layers in which edits just didn’t do the job, without affecting other image-editing layers.
To create a new layer, press Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E on a PC or Command+ Shift+Option+E on a Mac to merge a copy of all visible layers into a new target layer. How ‘bout them keystrokes!
By combining all the previous layers into the new layer, you’re essentially merging all the adjustment layers and other edits you’ve made so far.
Additionally, you will want to give the layer a proper name. For example, if you’re creating a new layer to use the Spot Healing brush to remove spots on your image, give the layer a descriptive name, such as “Reduce Noise.” Double-click the layer name in the Layers palette and type in a new name, as in the example shown in Figure 12.1.
Figure 12.1 Name your editing layers with descriptions of what was performed on that layer. It will help give you a reference of what actions you’ve performed on
your images.
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After you’ve created your first editing layer and combined all the visible layers into that layer, you can simply duplicate the new layer for whatever new edit you want to perform next.
3. Edit your image. Now that you have a fresh, newly merged layer to work on, you’re ready to use Dodge, Burn, the Spot Healing brush, filters, or any other type of edit you want.
As a reminder, keep each edit to its own layer. If you start off by dodging and burning, and then you decide you want to apply the Reduce Noise filter as your next step, create a new layer first by choosing Layer, Duplicate Layer.
Common Editing Tools
Most of the tools you’ll use for editing will either be provided in the Toolbox or in filters. Filters are effects that you can add to your image, such as a blur, a lens correction, or an artistic change to the image. Either way, edits are not considered corrections; they are additions to (or subtractions from) your images.
When editing nature photos, the most common tools you’ll use will be the various selection tools Photoshop offers, the Healing brushes, the Paintbrush, the Dodge and Burn tools, and the Eraser tool. All these tools are easily available in the Toolbox, while filters are located in the Filter menu. (I’ll show you how to apply filters in the next chapter.) In the next few sections, you’ll take a look at some of the more popular tools used by nature photographers.
Selection Tools
If you’re editing photos that look just fine for the most part, often you’ll want to make edits (or overall color and tonal adjustments) only to certain parts of them. I’ll often make adjustments only to the sky portion of an image during the editing process. Photoshop offers a variety of tools to make selections from defined, editable areas within an image. When you make a selection in Photoshop, you can then edit only that part of the image, without changing the rest. Getting familiar with selections is necessary if you want to edit your individual
images with consistent quality.
Selecting only certain parts of your images and editing only those selected parts using the tools covered in this chapter gives you great creative control. You can replace a dull background with a vibrant color, darken a bright sky (see Figure 12.2), brighten a dark sky, and selectively sharpen or blur a part of your image to get the desired effects.
Before selection and adjustment:
After selecting the sky only, and then darkening:
The Magic Wand Tool
The Magic Wand tool is probably the most popular selection tool used to make the most common selections in photos. I often use the Magic Wand to select areas of an image that are similar in color if I want to make color or tonal changes to only the selected areas.
The steps to making selections are as follows:
1. Create a new layer. You know the drill: Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E on the PC or Shift+Command+Alt+E on the Mac
2. Select the part of the image you want to modify using the Magic Wand tool. As you know by now, I often use the Magic Wand tool to select backgrounds in images that I want to change. I can lighten or darken the background, replace the background with parts from another image, or blur the background.
Whichever adjustment I want to use, I have to separate the subject from the background before I make my edits.
The Magic Wand tool (see Figure 12.3) works best when the area you’re selecting is one color (or close to one color) and has distinct boundaries from the remaining areas.
The Magic Wand tool also works well as a way to select the subject of an image instead of the background.
Select the background, and then choose Select, Inverse to swap the selections for the rest of the image.
The Feather setting is important when you’re making selections. The Feather setting determines how many pixels will be “blended” along the border of the selection you make. The amount of feathering determines how sharp or smooth the edges of the selection are. For the image in Figure 12.3, I applied a Feather radius of two pixels by choosing Select, Feather (Ctrl+Alt+D on the PC or Command+Option+D on the Mac), and then typing 2 in the Feather Radius field in the Feather Selection window.
3. Apply corrections to the image. For the sunrise photo, I adjusted the tone and contrast of the sky without adjusting color and tone for the rest of the image. For the lake, I simply chose Select, Inverse, and then chose Image, Adjustments. Figure 12.4 shows the results.
The Lasso and Magnetic Lasso Tools
I use the Magic Wand tool for many of the selections I make in images in Photoshop, but there are more cool selection tools to choose from. The three lasso tools (see the Toolbox in Figure 12.5) are used to create finer selections in your image. Each has its own characteristics and function. The three lasso tools include:
■ Lasso tool. This tool is used for freeform drawing of selections. You can use this tool to edit distinct areas in the image, which you draw around using the Lasso tool.
■ Magnetic Lasso tool. This tool is used to trace more complex shapes. The selection marquee (the dotted line surrounding your selection, also called the “marching ants”) snaps to the selection like metal to a magnet.
■ Polygonal Lasso tool. This tool is used for drawing straight edges of a selection. The Polygonal Lasso tool is great for making selections when the areas to select are shapes that have straight lines (such as boxes, rectangles, and triangles).
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You can always remove a selection if you want to start over by choosing Select, Deselect or by clicking Ctrl+D on the PC or Command+D on the Mac. Additionally, ending one selection and starting another automatically will deselect the first selection.
To add to a selection, hold down the Shift key and continue in a different location in the image. You can even change tools while you’re at it! To remove a portion of your selection, press the Alt key (Option on a Mac) and use any of the selection tools to outline areas you don’t want selected.
Selection Options
When you make selections with any tools, options are available to make your selections more precise. Figure 12.6 shows the Select menu, which provides functionality to help you work with selections.
The most commonly used options in the Select menu include:
■ All. When you select All, you select the entire layer that’s active. You can also press Ctrl+A on the PC or Command+A on the Mac to select the entire image.
■ Deselect. Choose Deselect to remove the selection outline you have made. When making selections, you often have to deselect to start over when your selections don’t come out right—hey, it happens! You can also press Ctrl+D on the PC or Command+D on the Mac to deselect a selection outline.
■ Inverse. Sometimes you will want to select an area that’s just tough to select.
If you’re lucky, the rest of the image might be easier to select. In that case, select the easier area, and then choose Select, Inverse or press Ctrl+Shift+I on the PC or Command+Shift+I on the Mac. The Inverse command reverses your selection, selecting the previously unselected portion of your image.
■ Feather. As I’ve mentioned previously, a feather of two or three pixels provides a smooth, realistic edge for your selections in many photos. Experiment with setting the feature to different numbers of pixels until you find the right setting for your photo. To feather a selection, choose Select, Feather or press Ctrl+Alt+D on the PC or Command+Option+D on the Mac.
■ Grow. The Grow command increases the contiguous areas of your selection to include areas that are similar in color. To grow a selection, choose Select, Grow.
■ Similar. The Similar command increases your selection to include all like colors of the current selection, regardless of their place in the image. To expand a noncontiguous selection with similar colors, choose Select, Similar.
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If you’ve used the Magic Wand to create your selection, you can change the Tolerance level after you’ve made the selection, and it will affect the number of pixels that Grow and Similar will add to the selection. In other words, if you had a tolerance of 16 when you made the original selection and then you clicked Grow, you’d get a tolerance of 16 added to the selection. Changing the number to 64 will select a larger spectrum when Grow is used. With that, you can go back and forth (using the Undo command), modifying the tolerance level until you get exactly the pixels you want
Before you can use the Select commands, you must have actual selections made in your image. Selections can be cumbersome, but with practice you can become more proficient. I suggest you practice using the three lasso tools, and especially the Magic Wand tool, and then experiment using the Feather, Grow, and Similar commands to fine-tune your selections. Selections are one of the most challenging tasks to master in Photoshop, and the best way to get proficient with selections is to become comfortable with each type of selection and the
commands to customize those selections.
Dodging and Burning
When I start to put the final touches on my images, some of the first edits I perform are dodging and burning. This is an old technique that dates back to the old film and darkroom days of photography. Dodging and burning allowed me to darken or lighten certain areas of a print to my liking by either reducing or increasing exposure to certain parts of the print. You can do the same thing in Photoshop using the Dodge and Burn tools, shown in Figure 12.7.
Dodging is a technique you use when you want to lighten a certain area of an image; burning is a technique you use when you want to darken a certain area of an image. Whether you’re working on landscapes or still lifes, evaluate your images to see whether areas need to be dodged or burned. Figure 12.8 shows an image with a lot of contrast and colors that are a little too bright. Shooting fall colors in ideal conditions (on an overcast day, after a rainstorm) can bring out the colors, but it can also produce oversaturated colors, especially reds and magentas. After my evaluation, I decided to lighten up some of the dark areas in the background, and to tone down some of the oversaturated red and magenta areas of the image.
The Sponge tool is useful when you want to make slight color-saturation adjustments to an area. For example, you can decrease the color saturation of a certain area in which the red might be too bright or “blown out,” giving an unnatural look to the photo. The Sponge tool can also come in handy to help bring out-of-gamut areas of your image back into a color range that your printer can handle.
I often use the Dodge and Burn tools to fine-tune my images when there’s a little too much contrast between the light and dark areas. Figure 12.9 shows the image before my edits, and then after I applied some dodging and burning.
Using the Paintbrush
The Paintbrush tool will be one of your most-used tools in the Toolbox. The Paintbrush is as simple as its name; it’s a paintbrush! Not only can you specify colors and the opacity (how much of the edit is visible, based on a scale of one to 100 percent) of those colors, but you can also use it to “paint” in other effects you add to your image when you use it with layer masks. (I’ll provide more information on layer masks later in this chapter, in the “Layer Masks to Selectively Correct Images” section.) In addition to the Paintbrush tool, the Pencil and the Color Replacement tools are also commonly used to “paint” in changes to your photos. Figure 12.10 shows the Paintbrush tool and its flyout menu.
Numerous Paintbrush sizes, tips, and modes are available on the Option bar, as well as in the Brushes palette (choose Window, Brushes or simply press the F5 key), as shown in Figure 12.11. They’re useful with many Photoshop image-editing techniques, allowing you to customize your brush types and various settings.
Using the Healing Brushes
One of the downfalls (the only one I can think of) to using a digital SLR is the possibility of dust getting onto your image sensor. It has happened to me on a few occasions, usually when I’m changing lenses. For users of compact digital cameras, dust spots aren’t really possible because the lens is built into the camera. Another source of dust or scratches on images is related to scanned negatives or transparencies. Many of us have huge photo libraries from years of shooting the old “analog” way. Those shots are still as valuable today as yesterday, but when you’re scanning, it’s always possible to scan some specks of dust too. That’s where the Healing brushes come in to help.
Some of the neatest editing tools that Photoshop offers are the Healing brush tools.
The flyout menu shown in Figure 12.12 includes four Healing brush tools that enable you to correct minor details. Use the Healing brush tool to sample a selection of pixels, and then paint those selected pixels to other areas. It’s a great way to retouch areas of your images! The Spot Healing brush, new in CS2, is even easier to use. Simply select the Spot Healing brush and start painting areas to retouch; the brush samples surrounding pixels itself, without you having to make a selection.
The Patch tool works like the Healing brush, except you’re actually making a selection of an area (just Alt+click on the PC or Option+click on the Mac) to use for painting in the selected pixels.
When using the Healing Brushes, there are three options: Source, Destination, and Transparent. If Source is selected, the selected shape can be moved around the image, and the area beneath the selection (the source area) will fill the area that was selected (the destination area). Choose the Destination option, and it’s more like a copy and paste function, because the selection area becomes the source area and its contents are moved to the new spot in your document—the destination area. When the Transparent option is selected, it works in conjunction with the other two options, and the result is a transparent overlay of the selected area of the image. You cannot control the amount of transparency, but you can continually add to the selection to create some interesting effects.
The Clone Stamp Tool
The Clone Stamp tool is the equivalent of a rubber stamp, like the kind they use at the tax office. It allows you to sample part of an image (that you want to clone) and apply that sample elsewhere in the image by painting it with the Clone Stamp brush. All Paintbrush tips work with the Clone Stamp tool, so it’s a great retouching alternative.
One of its special versions, the Pattern Stamp tool, recreates patterns from the cloned selection and applies them to other parts of your images. Figure 12.13 shows the Clone Stamp tool flyout menu.
The Eraser Tool
The Eraser tool is the digital equivalent of those little pink erasers at the ends of pencils. Remember using those?
You can erase pixels as you move the Eraser brush over them, changing the behavior of the brush specified by using the choices on the Option bar.
Use the Background Eraser tool to remove the effects of overall image adjustments made to only certain areas or layers of the image. To erase all similar pixels within a layer, use the Magic Eraser tool. Among the tools shown in Figure 12.14 (in the flyout menu) are the Background Eraser and the Magic Eraser.
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If you use Adobe Photoshop Elements instead of Photoshop, the Eraser tool is a great way to selectively remove effects or filters you might add to an image without the aid of layer masks. (More on those later.) Elements does not offer layer masks, which are an advanced editing technique, but if you add effects to an image and you only want a part of the image to have those effects, you can use the Eraser tool to erase whatever parts of the effect you don’t want.
Layer Masks to Selectively Correct Images
One of the more advanced features of Photoshop that separates it from any other image editor on the market is layer masks. These specialized layers let you hide or expose specific parts of a layer by painting the portions you want to hide, emphasize, or expose using the Paintbrush tool. I often use layer masks in my editing to selectively apply blurs, sharpening, or color and tonal corrections to an image. For instance, I might have a landscape photo in which I want to darken the sky and add contrast using Curves, but I don’t want to add those changes to the foreground of the image. In that case, I go ahead and make the adjustments to the image, but then create a layer mask that hides the changes. I then use the Paintbrush to paint in the changes only to the sky portion of the image.
You can use layer masks for:
■ Selective blurs. You can create a layer in a landscape to blur or soften part of the subject. (This is a portrait-editing technique.) You might not want the entire image blurred, but by using a layer mask, you can paint in the blur effect to only the areas you want.
■ Selective overall (color or tonal) adjustments. You can create a layer mask to selectively paint in the effects of an overall adjustment. This is a great trick to use for retouching nature photographs selectively.
■ Selectively darkening a background. You can darken the entire image using the Hue/Saturation Lightness slider to the level at which the background is darkened to your liking. Create a layer mask, and then paint back in the areas that you don’t want darkened!
The following steps give you a detailed example of using layer masks in nature images, showing you how to use one to hide the sharp portions of a blurred image, and then selectively paint back in the parts of the image you want to remain sharp. You can apply many such effects and filters, and then use layer masks to selectively paint in the effects.
To apply a selective effect (in this case, a blur) to an image using a layer mask, follow these steps:
1. Create a layer to apply the effect to. Don’t forget to give descriptive names to your layers when you create them. You can change the layer name by clicking the name in the Layers palette and typing in the new text.
2. Blur the image by choosing Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur. I want to add a lot of blur to this image, so I am using a setting over 38, as shown in Figure 12.15.
3. Create a layer mask. Choose Layer, Layer Mask. Choose the Reveal All option in the flyout menu to fill the layer with white, allowing the effects of the layer adjustment to show through. Choosing the Hide All option in the flyout menu paints the layer with black to hide the effects of the Gaussian blur layer adjustment. For this example, I’ve chosen Reveal All.
As a friendly warning, I suggest that you do not use the Add Layer Mask button in the Layers palette; you can’t choose the Reveal or Hide options that way.
The Reveal All option lets the effects of the Gaussian Blur continue to show in the image, as shown in Figure 12.16. Choose this option to paint the areas to hide the Gaussian Blur effect. Choosing the Hide All option hides the Gaussian Blur effect, allowing you to use a Paintbrush tool to paint in the areas of the image where you want the Gaussian Blur effect.
4. Click the Paintbrush tool in the Photoshop Toolbox. Press D to set the foreground color to white and the background color to black. The D key always changes these back to the Photoshop default colors (hence the D): white for foreground and black for background. Press X to reverse these colors. Using black as the foreground color in the Reveal All mode paints away the layer mask; using white as the foreground color paints the layer mask back in. You can also paint with shades of gray to get toned-down effects.
5. Lower the opacity. Lower the opacity to around 20 percent in the Opacity field on the Option bar. Lowering the opacity reduces the “strength” of your painting, resulting in a more realistic transition between the masked and the painted areas of the layer. You can increase the painting effect every time you click and hold the mouse, and then paint more.
6. Paint in the portion of the image you want to remain in focus. Painting areas of the image hides the Gaussian blur and reveals the sharper image behind the Gaussian blur mask, leaving the unpainted areas still blurred. Painting reveals the sharper details of the chosen parts of the flower, but leaves (no pun intended!) a softened look for the rest of the foliage, as shown in Figure 12.17.
To selectively sharpen an image, use the same approach you used to blur the image: Create a layer and merge the previous layers. Sharpen the entire image and create a layer mask to hide the sharpening. Paint the areas you want to sharpen, and that’s it! Don’t forget, using layer masks works great when you’re adding Artistic filters to your images, such as the Graphic Pen or the Charcoal filter. I’ll cover more on filters in the next chapter.
Summary
Applying edits to your nature images is one of the last steps you take before getting your image ready for output. The most important thing to remember when making edits to your images is to continue on with a workflow where you left off making color and tonal adjustments. Just remember to create a separate layer for each type of edit (such as dodging and burning, blurring, or retouching using the Paintbrush tool), and name that layer for future reference.
There are other types of edits you can make to your nature images, such as converting an image from color to black and white, adding an Artistic filter, or stitching multiple images together in a panorama, which I’ll cover in the next chapter. There’s more editing fun to come!
The image-editing workflow is very much like the overall-correction workflow I described earlier. Image edits are made in a step-by-step sequence of best practices. Unlike the procedure for overall color and tonal corrections, however, you do have the freedom to mix up the order of your edits a bit. For the sake of consistency, I recommend you make edits in individual steps.
1. Plan your edits. After you complete overall corrections, evaluate your image to determine what type of edits are needed, if any. Common types of edits to plan for include dodging and burning, removing spots with the Spot Healing brush or the Clone Stamp, and retouching using other tools, such as the Paintbrush. I’ll review editing tools in this tutorial.
2. Create separate layers for each edit. After you evaluate an image, and then decide that you need to perform additional editing, as a best practice, you need to create separate layers for each edit. That way you can delete layers in which edits just didn’t do the job, without affecting other image-editing layers.
To create a new layer, press Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E on a PC or Command+ Shift+Option+E on a Mac to merge a copy of all visible layers into a new target layer. How ‘bout them keystrokes!
By combining all the previous layers into the new layer, you’re essentially merging all the adjustment layers and other edits you’ve made so far.
Additionally, you will want to give the layer a proper name. For example, if you’re creating a new layer to use the Spot Healing brush to remove spots on your image, give the layer a descriptive name, such as “Reduce Noise.” Double-click the layer name in the Layers palette and type in a new name, as in the example shown in Figure 12.1.
Figure 12.1 Name your editing layers with descriptions of what was performed on that layer. It will help give you a reference of what actions you’ve performed on
your images.
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After you’ve created your first editing layer and combined all the visible layers into that layer, you can simply duplicate the new layer for whatever new edit you want to perform next.
3. Edit your image. Now that you have a fresh, newly merged layer to work on, you’re ready to use Dodge, Burn, the Spot Healing brush, filters, or any other type of edit you want.
As a reminder, keep each edit to its own layer. If you start off by dodging and burning, and then you decide you want to apply the Reduce Noise filter as your next step, create a new layer first by choosing Layer, Duplicate Layer.
Common Editing Tools
Most of the tools you’ll use for editing will either be provided in the Toolbox or in filters. Filters are effects that you can add to your image, such as a blur, a lens correction, or an artistic change to the image. Either way, edits are not considered corrections; they are additions to (or subtractions from) your images.
When editing nature photos, the most common tools you’ll use will be the various selection tools Photoshop offers, the Healing brushes, the Paintbrush, the Dodge and Burn tools, and the Eraser tool. All these tools are easily available in the Toolbox, while filters are located in the Filter menu. (I’ll show you how to apply filters in the next chapter.) In the next few sections, you’ll take a look at some of the more popular tools used by nature photographers.
Selection Tools
If you’re editing photos that look just fine for the most part, often you’ll want to make edits (or overall color and tonal adjustments) only to certain parts of them. I’ll often make adjustments only to the sky portion of an image during the editing process. Photoshop offers a variety of tools to make selections from defined, editable areas within an image. When you make a selection in Photoshop, you can then edit only that part of the image, without changing the rest. Getting familiar with selections is necessary if you want to edit your individual
images with consistent quality.
Selecting only certain parts of your images and editing only those selected parts using the tools covered in this chapter gives you great creative control. You can replace a dull background with a vibrant color, darken a bright sky (see Figure 12.2), brighten a dark sky, and selectively sharpen or blur a part of your image to get the desired effects.
Before selection and adjustment:
After selecting the sky only, and then darkening:
The Magic Wand Tool
The Magic Wand tool is probably the most popular selection tool used to make the most common selections in photos. I often use the Magic Wand to select areas of an image that are similar in color if I want to make color or tonal changes to only the selected areas.
The steps to making selections are as follows:
1. Create a new layer. You know the drill: Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E on the PC or Shift+Command+Alt+E on the Mac
2. Select the part of the image you want to modify using the Magic Wand tool. As you know by now, I often use the Magic Wand tool to select backgrounds in images that I want to change. I can lighten or darken the background, replace the background with parts from another image, or blur the background.
Whichever adjustment I want to use, I have to separate the subject from the background before I make my edits.
The Magic Wand tool (see Figure 12.3) works best when the area you’re selecting is one color (or close to one color) and has distinct boundaries from the remaining areas.
The Magic Wand tool also works well as a way to select the subject of an image instead of the background.
Select the background, and then choose Select, Inverse to swap the selections for the rest of the image.
The Feather setting is important when you’re making selections. The Feather setting determines how many pixels will be “blended” along the border of the selection you make. The amount of feathering determines how sharp or smooth the edges of the selection are. For the image in Figure 12.3, I applied a Feather radius of two pixels by choosing Select, Feather (Ctrl+Alt+D on the PC or Command+Option+D on the Mac), and then typing 2 in the Feather Radius field in the Feather Selection window.
3. Apply corrections to the image. For the sunrise photo, I adjusted the tone and contrast of the sky without adjusting color and tone for the rest of the image. For the lake, I simply chose Select, Inverse, and then chose Image, Adjustments. Figure 12.4 shows the results.
The Lasso and Magnetic Lasso Tools
I use the Magic Wand tool for many of the selections I make in images in Photoshop, but there are more cool selection tools to choose from. The three lasso tools (see the Toolbox in Figure 12.5) are used to create finer selections in your image. Each has its own characteristics and function. The three lasso tools include:
■ Lasso tool. This tool is used for freeform drawing of selections. You can use this tool to edit distinct areas in the image, which you draw around using the Lasso tool.
■ Magnetic Lasso tool. This tool is used to trace more complex shapes. The selection marquee (the dotted line surrounding your selection, also called the “marching ants”) snaps to the selection like metal to a magnet.
■ Polygonal Lasso tool. This tool is used for drawing straight edges of a selection. The Polygonal Lasso tool is great for making selections when the areas to select are shapes that have straight lines (such as boxes, rectangles, and triangles).
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You can always remove a selection if you want to start over by choosing Select, Deselect or by clicking Ctrl+D on the PC or Command+D on the Mac. Additionally, ending one selection and starting another automatically will deselect the first selection.
To add to a selection, hold down the Shift key and continue in a different location in the image. You can even change tools while you’re at it! To remove a portion of your selection, press the Alt key (Option on a Mac) and use any of the selection tools to outline areas you don’t want selected.
Selection Options
When you make selections with any tools, options are available to make your selections more precise. Figure 12.6 shows the Select menu, which provides functionality to help you work with selections.
The most commonly used options in the Select menu include:
■ All. When you select All, you select the entire layer that’s active. You can also press Ctrl+A on the PC or Command+A on the Mac to select the entire image.
■ Deselect. Choose Deselect to remove the selection outline you have made. When making selections, you often have to deselect to start over when your selections don’t come out right—hey, it happens! You can also press Ctrl+D on the PC or Command+D on the Mac to deselect a selection outline.
■ Inverse. Sometimes you will want to select an area that’s just tough to select.
If you’re lucky, the rest of the image might be easier to select. In that case, select the easier area, and then choose Select, Inverse or press Ctrl+Shift+I on the PC or Command+Shift+I on the Mac. The Inverse command reverses your selection, selecting the previously unselected portion of your image.
■ Feather. As I’ve mentioned previously, a feather of two or three pixels provides a smooth, realistic edge for your selections in many photos. Experiment with setting the feature to different numbers of pixels until you find the right setting for your photo. To feather a selection, choose Select, Feather or press Ctrl+Alt+D on the PC or Command+Option+D on the Mac.
■ Grow. The Grow command increases the contiguous areas of your selection to include areas that are similar in color. To grow a selection, choose Select, Grow.
■ Similar. The Similar command increases your selection to include all like colors of the current selection, regardless of their place in the image. To expand a noncontiguous selection with similar colors, choose Select, Similar.
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If you’ve used the Magic Wand to create your selection, you can change the Tolerance level after you’ve made the selection, and it will affect the number of pixels that Grow and Similar will add to the selection. In other words, if you had a tolerance of 16 when you made the original selection and then you clicked Grow, you’d get a tolerance of 16 added to the selection. Changing the number to 64 will select a larger spectrum when Grow is used. With that, you can go back and forth (using the Undo command), modifying the tolerance level until you get exactly the pixels you want
Before you can use the Select commands, you must have actual selections made in your image. Selections can be cumbersome, but with practice you can become more proficient. I suggest you practice using the three lasso tools, and especially the Magic Wand tool, and then experiment using the Feather, Grow, and Similar commands to fine-tune your selections. Selections are one of the most challenging tasks to master in Photoshop, and the best way to get proficient with selections is to become comfortable with each type of selection and the
commands to customize those selections.
Dodging and Burning
When I start to put the final touches on my images, some of the first edits I perform are dodging and burning. This is an old technique that dates back to the old film and darkroom days of photography. Dodging and burning allowed me to darken or lighten certain areas of a print to my liking by either reducing or increasing exposure to certain parts of the print. You can do the same thing in Photoshop using the Dodge and Burn tools, shown in Figure 12.7.
Dodging is a technique you use when you want to lighten a certain area of an image; burning is a technique you use when you want to darken a certain area of an image. Whether you’re working on landscapes or still lifes, evaluate your images to see whether areas need to be dodged or burned. Figure 12.8 shows an image with a lot of contrast and colors that are a little too bright. Shooting fall colors in ideal conditions (on an overcast day, after a rainstorm) can bring out the colors, but it can also produce oversaturated colors, especially reds and magentas. After my evaluation, I decided to lighten up some of the dark areas in the background, and to tone down some of the oversaturated red and magenta areas of the image.
The Sponge tool is useful when you want to make slight color-saturation adjustments to an area. For example, you can decrease the color saturation of a certain area in which the red might be too bright or “blown out,” giving an unnatural look to the photo. The Sponge tool can also come in handy to help bring out-of-gamut areas of your image back into a color range that your printer can handle.
I often use the Dodge and Burn tools to fine-tune my images when there’s a little too much contrast between the light and dark areas. Figure 12.9 shows the image before my edits, and then after I applied some dodging and burning.
Using the Paintbrush
The Paintbrush tool will be one of your most-used tools in the Toolbox. The Paintbrush is as simple as its name; it’s a paintbrush! Not only can you specify colors and the opacity (how much of the edit is visible, based on a scale of one to 100 percent) of those colors, but you can also use it to “paint” in other effects you add to your image when you use it with layer masks. (I’ll provide more information on layer masks later in this chapter, in the “Layer Masks to Selectively Correct Images” section.) In addition to the Paintbrush tool, the Pencil and the Color Replacement tools are also commonly used to “paint” in changes to your photos. Figure 12.10 shows the Paintbrush tool and its flyout menu.
Numerous Paintbrush sizes, tips, and modes are available on the Option bar, as well as in the Brushes palette (choose Window, Brushes or simply press the F5 key), as shown in Figure 12.11. They’re useful with many Photoshop image-editing techniques, allowing you to customize your brush types and various settings.
Using the Healing Brushes
One of the downfalls (the only one I can think of) to using a digital SLR is the possibility of dust getting onto your image sensor. It has happened to me on a few occasions, usually when I’m changing lenses. For users of compact digital cameras, dust spots aren’t really possible because the lens is built into the camera. Another source of dust or scratches on images is related to scanned negatives or transparencies. Many of us have huge photo libraries from years of shooting the old “analog” way. Those shots are still as valuable today as yesterday, but when you’re scanning, it’s always possible to scan some specks of dust too. That’s where the Healing brushes come in to help.
Some of the neatest editing tools that Photoshop offers are the Healing brush tools.
The flyout menu shown in Figure 12.12 includes four Healing brush tools that enable you to correct minor details. Use the Healing brush tool to sample a selection of pixels, and then paint those selected pixels to other areas. It’s a great way to retouch areas of your images! The Spot Healing brush, new in CS2, is even easier to use. Simply select the Spot Healing brush and start painting areas to retouch; the brush samples surrounding pixels itself, without you having to make a selection.
The Patch tool works like the Healing brush, except you’re actually making a selection of an area (just Alt+click on the PC or Option+click on the Mac) to use for painting in the selected pixels.
When using the Healing Brushes, there are three options: Source, Destination, and Transparent. If Source is selected, the selected shape can be moved around the image, and the area beneath the selection (the source area) will fill the area that was selected (the destination area). Choose the Destination option, and it’s more like a copy and paste function, because the selection area becomes the source area and its contents are moved to the new spot in your document—the destination area. When the Transparent option is selected, it works in conjunction with the other two options, and the result is a transparent overlay of the selected area of the image. You cannot control the amount of transparency, but you can continually add to the selection to create some interesting effects.
The Clone Stamp Tool
The Clone Stamp tool is the equivalent of a rubber stamp, like the kind they use at the tax office. It allows you to sample part of an image (that you want to clone) and apply that sample elsewhere in the image by painting it with the Clone Stamp brush. All Paintbrush tips work with the Clone Stamp tool, so it’s a great retouching alternative.
One of its special versions, the Pattern Stamp tool, recreates patterns from the cloned selection and applies them to other parts of your images. Figure 12.13 shows the Clone Stamp tool flyout menu.
The Eraser Tool
The Eraser tool is the digital equivalent of those little pink erasers at the ends of pencils. Remember using those?
You can erase pixels as you move the Eraser brush over them, changing the behavior of the brush specified by using the choices on the Option bar.
Use the Background Eraser tool to remove the effects of overall image adjustments made to only certain areas or layers of the image. To erase all similar pixels within a layer, use the Magic Eraser tool. Among the tools shown in Figure 12.14 (in the flyout menu) are the Background Eraser and the Magic Eraser.
TIP
If you use Adobe Photoshop Elements instead of Photoshop, the Eraser tool is a great way to selectively remove effects or filters you might add to an image without the aid of layer masks. (More on those later.) Elements does not offer layer masks, which are an advanced editing technique, but if you add effects to an image and you only want a part of the image to have those effects, you can use the Eraser tool to erase whatever parts of the effect you don’t want.
Layer Masks to Selectively Correct Images
One of the more advanced features of Photoshop that separates it from any other image editor on the market is layer masks. These specialized layers let you hide or expose specific parts of a layer by painting the portions you want to hide, emphasize, or expose using the Paintbrush tool. I often use layer masks in my editing to selectively apply blurs, sharpening, or color and tonal corrections to an image. For instance, I might have a landscape photo in which I want to darken the sky and add contrast using Curves, but I don’t want to add those changes to the foreground of the image. In that case, I go ahead and make the adjustments to the image, but then create a layer mask that hides the changes. I then use the Paintbrush to paint in the changes only to the sky portion of the image.
You can use layer masks for:
■ Selective blurs. You can create a layer in a landscape to blur or soften part of the subject. (This is a portrait-editing technique.) You might not want the entire image blurred, but by using a layer mask, you can paint in the blur effect to only the areas you want.
■ Selective overall (color or tonal) adjustments. You can create a layer mask to selectively paint in the effects of an overall adjustment. This is a great trick to use for retouching nature photographs selectively.
■ Selectively darkening a background. You can darken the entire image using the Hue/Saturation Lightness slider to the level at which the background is darkened to your liking. Create a layer mask, and then paint back in the areas that you don’t want darkened!
The following steps give you a detailed example of using layer masks in nature images, showing you how to use one to hide the sharp portions of a blurred image, and then selectively paint back in the parts of the image you want to remain sharp. You can apply many such effects and filters, and then use layer masks to selectively paint in the effects.
To apply a selective effect (in this case, a blur) to an image using a layer mask, follow these steps:
1. Create a layer to apply the effect to. Don’t forget to give descriptive names to your layers when you create them. You can change the layer name by clicking the name in the Layers palette and typing in the new text.
2. Blur the image by choosing Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur. I want to add a lot of blur to this image, so I am using a setting over 38, as shown in Figure 12.15.
3. Create a layer mask. Choose Layer, Layer Mask. Choose the Reveal All option in the flyout menu to fill the layer with white, allowing the effects of the layer adjustment to show through. Choosing the Hide All option in the flyout menu paints the layer with black to hide the effects of the Gaussian blur layer adjustment. For this example, I’ve chosen Reveal All.
As a friendly warning, I suggest that you do not use the Add Layer Mask button in the Layers palette; you can’t choose the Reveal or Hide options that way.
The Reveal All option lets the effects of the Gaussian Blur continue to show in the image, as shown in Figure 12.16. Choose this option to paint the areas to hide the Gaussian Blur effect. Choosing the Hide All option hides the Gaussian Blur effect, allowing you to use a Paintbrush tool to paint in the areas of the image where you want the Gaussian Blur effect.
4. Click the Paintbrush tool in the Photoshop Toolbox. Press D to set the foreground color to white and the background color to black. The D key always changes these back to the Photoshop default colors (hence the D): white for foreground and black for background. Press X to reverse these colors. Using black as the foreground color in the Reveal All mode paints away the layer mask; using white as the foreground color paints the layer mask back in. You can also paint with shades of gray to get toned-down effects.
5. Lower the opacity. Lower the opacity to around 20 percent in the Opacity field on the Option bar. Lowering the opacity reduces the “strength” of your painting, resulting in a more realistic transition between the masked and the painted areas of the layer. You can increase the painting effect every time you click and hold the mouse, and then paint more.
6. Paint in the portion of the image you want to remain in focus. Painting areas of the image hides the Gaussian blur and reveals the sharper image behind the Gaussian blur mask, leaving the unpainted areas still blurred. Painting reveals the sharper details of the chosen parts of the flower, but leaves (no pun intended!) a softened look for the rest of the foliage, as shown in Figure 12.17.
To selectively sharpen an image, use the same approach you used to blur the image: Create a layer and merge the previous layers. Sharpen the entire image and create a layer mask to hide the sharpening. Paint the areas you want to sharpen, and that’s it! Don’t forget, using layer masks works great when you’re adding Artistic filters to your images, such as the Graphic Pen or the Charcoal filter. I’ll cover more on filters in the next chapter.
Summary
Applying edits to your nature images is one of the last steps you take before getting your image ready for output. The most important thing to remember when making edits to your images is to continue on with a workflow where you left off making color and tonal adjustments. Just remember to create a separate layer for each type of edit (such as dodging and burning, blurring, or retouching using the Paintbrush tool), and name that layer for future reference.
There are other types of edits you can make to your nature images, such as converting an image from color to black and white, adding an Artistic filter, or stitching multiple images together in a panorama, which I’ll cover in the next chapter. There’s more editing fun to come!
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