Every image taken on a digital camera contains some degree of noise, or random variations of pixels. Mostly evident in low light images, noise can affect a photograph in the same way as a bad reception can affect a television set. It's distracting and while impossible to remove completely, can be reduced through the affective use of the Reduce Noise Filter in Photoshop Elements. In this tutorial I'll show you what noise is, and how to tackle it.
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In this video tutorial I’ll show you how to create a green tinted night vision effect similar to military cameras and night-shot mode on home recorders. All you need is a suitable image you want use to run the effect on and I’ll help you through the rest, adding noise and other elements that make the photo look like it was actually taken after night fall and using a night-shot camera.
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If you’re a photographer, or a regular user of the levels command in Photoshop, you’ll be familiar with a histogram. Photographers know how to read the tone of the shot from it, ensuring the right balance of shadows, midtones and highlights. Users of the levels command will tell of a similar use, but rather than it balancing out the tone before a photograph, they’ll tell an equally important story of using it once the photograph is taken and the image downloaded to their computer. Yes, the story of post processing.
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If you have a wide-angle lense you'll know all about the appeal of panoramas to make for spectacular photographs, luckily, you don't need any specialised kit to make your own. In this tutorial I'll show you how to use the photomerge command to create your own, and as you'll bear witness - it works rather well!
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Building perfect masks can be a rewarding experience, that's why in the this video I show you a couple of old but well-served techniques for masking in a banner, and ensuring everything else is firmly masked out. First I'll show you a way of selecting and thereby masking every opaque pixel on a layer - not just well, but exactly. In the second demonstration I'll show you how clipping masks work in Elements, something every modest user should know.
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Adding borders to a project is a common task in Photoshop. Often it can be done with relative ease; especially if the image is flat (meaning it contains one layer). Other times though, if the image has multiple layers that float and expand outside the boundaries it can be an altogether different story. Since both scenarios crop up from time to time I decided to write a solution to both, first the simple flattened image, then the more thought provoking layered file.
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Adjustment Layers permit you to make non-destructive colour adjustments, but what if you want to isolate those adjustments to a particular area of the image, maybe a friends hair, your pet's collar, the sky, the ground - or some raspberry jelly? Well then you have masks, a relatively easy but hugely powerful method of applying your adjustments where you want them. In this video I'll show you how they work, and we'll set about isolating the aforementioned jelly!
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Adjustment Layers in Photoshop Elements are independent and always editable layers of colour adjustment that can be applied to one or multiple layers in a composition. They're really easy to create and use, add very little to the overall file size, and ensure your adjustments remain forever editable inside the PSD format. In this video I'll show you the benefits of using a hue/saturation adjustment layer to change the colour of some jelly.
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The ninth and final part of our look at preferences in Photoshop Elements deals with the last two panels, namely plug-ins and type. The former gives us the ability to add an additional plug-ins folder to better manage custom third party applications that work inside Elements, and the latter changes options relating to the type tool.
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I've been using Photoshop for many years. I've written articles and recorded over 30 minutes of video on the subject of sharpening using the wealth of excellent sharpening techniques Adobe provide, so I figured I'm qualified to bring up one of the most negatively discussed and ubiquitously bemoaned tools in the existence of image editing, that's right - not just Photoshop but the whole image editing world - the Sharpen Tool. Here I plan to explain what its purpose is, what it really does do, and when and why it might come in useful.
What is the Sharpen Tool?
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