We’ve had quite a journey with this whole histogram and curves ordeal:

• How to Read Image Histograms
• Photo Editing With Histograms: 6 Basic Settings
• How Well Do You Know Your Curves?
• Photoshop Curves Video Tutorials
• Linear Curve Adjustments and Histograms
• Nonlinear Curve Adjustments and Histograms

And now I’d like to wrap things up with a few tips, tricks, and things to avoid when using curves. It’s a fairly simple tool once you begin to work with it and understand it, but there are a few non-obvious items worth pointing out.

photo credit: Fifi LePew

TIPS

We’ll start off with a few generic tips for working with curves, then we’ll move on to the some of the more detailed stuff.

• Always work with 16-bit images to avoid posterization.
• In Photoshop, utilize layers and adjustment layers for non destructive editing.
• Use the color channel adjustments to correct color cast.
• Start subtle in ACR/Lightroom (or with an adjustment layer in Photoshop), then bump it up or add another layer if you need more.
• In Photoshop, use a levels adjustment first rather than a linear curves adjustment, then go to curves for a wider range to work with.

TRICKS

photo credit: garethjmsaunders

Here are a few tricks for the ACR/Lightroom interface under the “Point” curve.

• Hold Ctrl and mouse over the image to see where the tones lay on the curve/histogram.
• Ctrl+click over the image to set an adjustment point on the curve.
• Ctrl+select adjustment points on the curve to delete them.
• Ctrl+Tab to move between adjustment points without using the mouse.
• Shift+select multiple existing adjustment points if you want to grab more than one at a time.
• Shift+click over the image to set your neutral point for white balance (this works outside of the curves dialog too).
• Shift+arrow keys to move selected adjustment points by 10 rather than 1.

And then we have a few general tricks:

• Use extreme curves adjustments to separate tones for creating masks. Then remove or turn off the adjustment layer once you have the mask. (tip via Niels Henriksen)
• Use curves in LAB mode on the lightness channel to minimize saturation effects of adjustments.
• Boost your saturation using LAB mode curves adjustments on the A&B channels.

photo credit: AlmazUK

THINGS TO AVOID

• Watch for vertical sections in your curve — that produces an extremely high contrast and you lose all midtone data in that area.
• Watch for horizontal sections in your curve — that produces zero contrast and you lose all midtone data in that area.
• Too many adjustment points will be difficult to manage, just use what you need.
• Avoid inverted slopes, they invert the tones. Can you roll a ball from the upper right point of the curve to the lower left (without relying on momentum)? If not, you’ve inverted a section of your curve.
• Don’t clip your shadows and highlights (unless that’s what you really want to do). Keep an eye on your histogram for this one.

I’m sure there are a few hundred other tips and tricks out there for using curves, but I don’t know them all and I couldn’t cover them in one article even if I did. These tips, combined with the previous articles linked at the top, should keep most of you busy for a while. And if you’re looking for more, here’s my final tip on the subject:

Experiment. Try things out, push buttons, make mistakes, and keep learning.

The other day, I was using a book template from The Album Cafe. I wanted to change the background colour scheme and didn’t know where to start but thought I’d try something that popped into my head and it worked a treat! So I wanted to share it with you lovely folks. It can work for anything – let me know how you use this method too!

1.} I started with the book page as completed if I wasn’t going to proceed with changing the graphics colours.

2.} Then go to layer > new fill layer > solid colour. No matter the colour it chooses in the beginning, just click ok

3.} In the layers palette, double click the layer colour and the dropper will appear. Use it to select colours from within your image to match to your background.

4.} Use the blend mode ‘color’

5.} Instantly, the layer underneath the fill layer changes. Pretty cool, huh?

P.S. Just for the record, I liked this better before I changed the colour – just using it to show you how

3-D is the biggest craze in Hollywood at the moment. Avatar, Toy Story 3, A Christmas Carol and even Nanny McPhee have gone (or are going) 3-D this year. So how can we harness this concept in our photography?

The most basic principal of three-dimensional art is a foreground/subject which stands out from the background in such a way that you can actually feel the space between them. Obviously, a picture is flat. But if you can edit it in a way to create that space, you can make the effect on it’s viewer memorable. The concept translates into the editing process simply: edit the subject and the background entirely independently of each other. The way in which I feel most successfully achieves that is to make a darker, richer background and a lighter subject.

1.} Choose an image carefully. Not just any image will do. Try to find one which already has a sense of space between the foreground and background. Some far off background action would be great. I chose one where the subjects were almost fully shown (not just their upper halves).

2.} I duplicated the image for safe measure. As I usually do for step 1 of my editing process, I separate the foreground from the background by using the quick selection tool  and typing ctrl+j to create a new layer. First, though, I feather the selection out in select > feather > 0.5 px.

3. } Start editing the background. I usually first duplicate the layer, use overlay or soft light blending mode and take it down to at least 50%. When it’s the way I want it, I then merge the background layers back into one and separate the sky from the rest of the photo so I can edit them separately.

4. To the grass, I applied Flypaper’s ‘Muscatel’ texture layer at hard light, 49%. I also used ‘algae’ at overlay 100% (before you run off to buy these wickedly ingenious textures, read to the bottom for a discount code!) Check out this before/after of the grass:

5.} For the sky, I opened an image from my skies folder (I keep a folder with impressive skies to use as replacements) and laid that over the background sky. I then used Flypaper’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ @ multiply 9%, ‘ming’ @ overlay 35%, ‘lavender skies’ @ multiply 35% and ‘algae’ @ overlay 16% and here it is after:

6.} Here’s the wow factor step. I used the ‘Colosseum Sienna’ and placed it over the top layer in the layers palette. I then type ctrl+g to clip it in so that it is glued onto the boys like this:

7.} Then hold onto your seats as you change it to overlay 100% because immediately, the boys pop out of the picture and into my office (ok I’m not that important…I’m writing this in bed). I wish I had a way to show you in mouse-over because they almost literally pop off the image.

8.} ‘Colusseum Sienna’ is a cracked texture and quite orangey on their skin, so I added a maximum gaussian blur and took down the saturation a notch.

Yesterday, I posted a poll asking “How Well Do You Know Your Curves?” and I’m seeing a slightly skewed response toward the “less experienced” side of things. That’s totally cool, and I’m glad so many of you chimed in to let me know!

As I gear up to post my next article on “processing via histograms” I’m coming to the conclusion that I should put up a bit of background info on the curve adjustment tool. This tool is deserving of a book just because of the flexibility and complexity that it encompasses… but I’m not going to write a book on this stuff. Instead, I’ve put together a few thoughts and screenshots followed by links to articles far more comprehensive than my own.

So let’s get started with curve adjustments, tones, ranges, slopes, color channels, and all the other associated fun stuff.

Keep in mind that this post is somewhat of a teaser intended to get you thinking about the topic at hand. Read it through, check out the images, and follow the links at the end. I’m hoping that you’ll have a better grasp of the curves tool by the time you’re finished.

WAIT… WHAT’S A CURVE?

If you’ve worked in Photoshop, The Gimp, Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, and many other pieces of photo editing software, you may have already used curves or at least seen them. It’s that box with a diagonal line through it, and you can usually manipulate that straight line into a curve through various methods.

A curve adjustment is a simple input-output tool that changes the tonal value of pixels by stretching or compressing portions of the histogram. So let’s say that you want all pixels with the tonal value of 190 to change to 200 (making the light tones lighter). The curve tool does this for you, but it also moves nearby tonal values to maintain a smooth appearance in the image.

Essentially, you need to know that as you move the curve down and to the right, tones will darken from their current values. Move the curve up and to the left, tones will lighten from their current values. A curve can have many bends and inflection points, so it is possible to apply different adjustments to different sections of the histogram.

THE INPUT/OUTPUT RELATIONSHIP

As I mentioned above, you can use the curve adjustment to designate tone transformations across the entire tonal range. If you want one section of tones to become brighter, you move the curve in one direction for that local area. If you want one section of tones to become darker, you move the curve in the other direction for that local area.

A side effect of curve adjustments is the increase and decrease of contrast for different tonal ranges in the image. The slope (or how steep the curve looks from left to right) determines how much contrast adjustment will be applied to that local area. A steep slope (closer to vertical than horizontal) will give you a higher contrast. A shallow slope (closer to horizontal than vertical) will give you a lower contrast. The interesting thing about the curve adjustment is that slopes changes will alway negate each other. So if you increase the slope in the midtones (thus increasing the contrast) with a traditional s-curve, you also decrease the slope in the highlights and shadows (thus decreasing the contrast).

Simple curve adjustments are applied to a combined rgb channel. Advanced curve adjustments can be applied to individual channels in any color space such as RGB, LAB, or CMYK. This type of thing gives you ultimate control of the tones for each color representation in your image across multiple color channels, but it can be difficult to visualize and control unless you have experience with the tool.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

To best understand curves, I would suggest starting out with grayscale images rather than color. Working with a single channel will be about three times more clear than working with three channels. This scenario will allow you to explore the relationship between input and output tones without having to worry about color effects.

If you have a good handle on how the curve tool works, try messing with the color channels in the RGB space to get a feel for how they work. It’s the same concept as with grayscale, but applied to each color (red, blue, green). You can also convert your image to LAB or CMYK color space and experiment with the curve adjustment.

Some time ago I wrote a post on batch resizing images in Photoshop and another on resizing in Lightroom.

One of our readers wrote to me recently explaining that he is using Photoshop Elements and that the resize feature in Photoshop does not work in Photoshop Elements. He is correct, but there is a way of batch resizing in Photoshop Elements and here’s how to do it.

Step 1

In Photoshop Elements, choose File > Process Multiple Files. This opens the Process Multiple Files dialog.

Here you can select which images to process. You can select either a folder of images, all opened files or you can click import and import images from an external device such as a camera card.

Typically, the best option will be to place all the images in a folder and process the files from that folder. To do this, click the Browse button opposite the Source box and choose the folder to process. Enable the Include All Subfolders checkbox if desired.

Step 2

Select the destination folder for the resized images (you can create one from this dialog), or, if desired, select Same as Source.

In the file naming area, select Rename Files if this is desired. You can then choose the naming convention such as typing a document name and the sequential numbering system to be used.

Step 3

In the image size area, select Resize Images as that’s what we came here to do.

Select Constrain Proportions as you will want your images to be resized in proportion and not skewed or distorted out of shape.

Now type the largest Width or Height to use for your resized images. If you enter 600 for the Width you will be unable to enter a value for the Height and vice versa. This is because you can only set one value – width or height (in this situation this resizing tool works differently to the corresponding tools in Photoshop and Lightroom).

So if you enter, for example, 600 as the Width all images will be sized so their width is 600 and their respective heights will be adjusted in proportion. Portrait images will be taller than 600 pixels and Landscape ones will be shorter.

Here too you should set the resolution for the images. If you plan to send your photos to an online sites for printing, you may want to match the resolution to what that site requires. For the web select 72 dpi.

Step 4

To convert the files to a different format or to compress them, from the File Type dropdown list, select the file format to use. For JPEG format images, you can choose Max, High, Medium or Low quality.

Step 5

You can also apply a Quick Fix to your images as you process them. These fixes include Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Color or Sharpen.

You can also apply Labels to your image such as adding a watermark or caption by configuring the options in the Labels area.

When you are done, click Ok to process the folder of files or the group of files that you had selected for processing.

Tip

If you want to resize images so their longest edge is a set value such as 600 then you will need to presort Landscape and Portrait images into separate folders and process them separately.

Post from: Digital Photography School – Photography Tips.

Batch Processing in Photoshop Elements

The ultimate battle ensues for the top drawer in my toolbox: presets versus actions. What’s the difference and what are the pros and cons according to Elizabeth?

First the basics: Presets are Lightroom’s way of applying many changes to a photo in one click. They can be made by you for a way in which you commonly treat a photo and would like to apply your own recipe in one click. Alternatively, they can be the recipes of other photographers which you purchase from them as .lrtemplate files to import into your lightroom catalogue of presets. Even better, some photographers give their presets away for free! Keep reading for those.

Photoshop’s one-click version are called actions and they work in the same way. Scroll through the effect names, choose one and click. You then see your photograph go through a makeover in a split-second. Again, you can record your own action sequences or buy them as .atn files from other photographers.

I prefer LR presets. I’m a control freak (big time) and I want to have complete, effortless control over every last pixel of my work. I appreciate the foundation that presets can lay in my editing process, but I never click once and move on. I always then play with the sliders to make every last element of my photo exactly what I want it to be. With actions, I feel that I lose control and unless the one click produces exactly what I had in mind (it never does), I don’t prefer to use them. The few times I’ve used actions, they always end up being from Florabella because she makes them work with a variety of layers which you can then tweak. But still, I don’t feel that I have enough control.

So what actions/presets do I love? My first love came from the ‘Lightroom Killer Tips’ website. Matt gives utterly amazing LR tutorials and gives his presets away for free. He even invented a preset extractor program which extracts LR setting from photos on Flickr and that is free as well. Genius! For actions, I use Florabella. She is the love of my textures life and also makes smashing actions. Another place for free actions and presets is CoffeeShop. For presets, my loves are Rebecca Lily and One Willow’s ‘Retro Candy’ presets with delicious names like ‘cotton candy’.

Photoshop CS4 RAW: Using Adobe Camera Raw, Bridge, and Photoshop to Get the Most out of Your Digital Camera by Mikkel Aaland
| Number Of Pages: 224 |  PDF | 20 Mb
The RAW file format is the uncompressed data file captured by a digital camera’s electronic sensor. When your camera saves an image in RAW format, settings like white balance, sharpening, contrast and saturation are not applied to the image but are saved instead in a separate header. Because RAW files remain virtually untouched by in-camera processing, they are essentially the digital equivalent to exposed but undeveloped film.
This makes RAW an increasingly popular format with amateur and professional digital photographers, because it affords greater flexibility and control during the editing process-if you know how to work with RAW files.

Most digital camera manufacturers supply their own software for converting RAW data, as do some third party vendors. Increasingly, however, the RAW converter of choice is a plug-in included in the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, the most popular and widely-used digital image editing tool in the world. Adobe Photoshop CS4 is emerging as the best place to edit RAW images, and the best way to master this new format is with Photoshop CS4 RAW.

An important book dedicated to working with RAW in Photoshop, this comprehensive guide features a unique design that helps readers grasp the subject through visual instruction and prompts. The entire RAW process is explored, from shooting to using the Adobe plug-in converter and new Bridge navigation software. The primary focus of Photoshop RAW is, as the title suggests, Photoshop editing technique: automating RAW workflow, correcting exposures, extending exposure range, manipulating grayscale and working with the new DNG (Digital Negative) open standard that Adobe supports.

Presented by photographer Mikkel Aaland, a pioneer of digital photography and author of eight books, including O’Reilly’s Photoshop for the Web and the award-winning Shooting Digital, Photoshop CS4 RAW investigates and instructs in an accessible visual style. Required reading for professionals and dedicated photo hobbyists alike.
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