Credit the folks at Adobe Systems for not sitting on their laurels with the release of Photoshop CS5, which marks version 12 of this venerable giant. With more than 20 years as the de facto image-editing program, Adobe has continued pushing the world’s reigning heavyweight leader. Timeless features like unsharp masking, the Clone Stamp tool, layers, and layer effects that might have become flabby and worn from lack of serious competition have improved steadily. Today, barely an image that appears in print or on screen can be found that hasn’t been touched at some point in its life by Photoshop. Whether it’s removing an unsavory color cast, restoring damaged photos, correcting perspective, or giving a model flawless skin, no other piece of software has become such an essential and ubiquitous part of society than Photoshop.
Photoshop CS4 wowed the digital-imaging world with a remarkable feature called Content-Aware Scaling, which, for example, allows designers to stretch or shrink an image’s background without distorting the happy family in the foreground. It’s an impressive feature, albeit one we seldom use. That was in 2008, so when Photoshop CS5 introduced Content-Aware Fill, our initial response was ho-hum, but after using it for a while now, we’ve become quite impressed and use it often to almost magically remove items from images with little or no evidence they ever existed. And unlike other Photoshop features like Levels or Curves that can be found in other programs, Content-Aware Fill is a Photoshop exclusive.
Figure 13a shows a panorama of San Francisco stitched seamlessly together in Photoshop from three photographs using Photoshop’s Photomerge and Auto-Blend features. An unfortunate by-product of this stitching process is the number of pixels that must be cropped out to produce a rectangular panorama (Figure 13b).
Rather than cut image data out, now you can use Content-Aware Fill to add missing data in.
After a few minutes of churning and grinding, the image will be miraculously repaired (Figure 13d).
Tip
Try this easy shortcut to invoke the Fill dialog box. While holding the Shift key, tap the Delete or Backspace key.
Content-Aware Fill can also be used in conjunction with the Spot Healing Brush tool . Figure 13e shows a lovely scene that’s unfortunately riddled with power lines and wires. With Content-Aware Fill and the Spot Healing Brush tool, we can salvage this image.
Borrowing a cup or two of technology from Adobe After Effects, one of Photoshop CS5’s more mind-bending new additions is Puppet Warp. By creating a mesh around a shape or area, Puppet Warp uses control points to isolate or distort parts of an image. Depending on your needs, Puppet Warp can subtly transform shapes like a woman’s waist or hair, or radically distort one’s arms or legs. Unlike the Liquify feature, Photoshop’s other major pixel-pusher, Puppet Warp avoids a complicated interface of buttons and sliders in favor of an easier approach. Users simply click to place what are known as pins on the object to be warped.
Underlying the pins is a mesh that comes in three flavors: Fewer Points, Normal, and More Points (Figure 14a). These settings control the density of points that can be placed on an image. Controlling the elasticity of the mesh is a Mode menu whose choices include Rigid, Normal, and Distort.
While many of the Puppet Warp demos you’ll see tend to showcase the silly side of warping images and objects, Puppet Warp also has a highly useful place, among more serious transforming and distorting tools. Here, we’ll take a look at both.
We want to warp our purple cat but not its background, so we need to make a selection around the cat using the Quick Selection tool . Paint over the cat until you have a decent selection. If you go too far, hold down Option (Alt) and click to subtract from the selection (Figure 14b).
Once you’ve refined your selection in Refine Edge or Quick Mask, press Command-J (Ctrl-J) to move the purple cat to its own layer. We no longer need the original background layer, so feel free to drag it to the Layer trash (Figure 14c).
Next, place a new background behind the cat, and drag the layer to the bottom of the layer stack. To allow changes to the warp afterward, we suggest converting the cat layer to a Smart Object. To do this, target the cat layer and choose Layer > Smart Object > Convert to Smart Object.
Click to target the layer with the purple cat and select Edit > Puppet Warp. Make sure to click the Show Mesh check box in the options bar to view the underlying grid. If you find the mesh annoying, you can always hide it later on. Click to place a range of pins similar to those in Figure 14d.
Each pin you place acts like an anchor to hold the image in position as well as a hinge around which other pixels can pivot or bend. Selected pins are indicated by a center black dot and can be moved, rotated, or deleted (Figure 14e). Hold Option (Alt) to move outside the dot and reveal a small circle. Dragging the circle clockwise or counterclockwise lets you rotate pixels around the center point. Deselected pins (those with no dot in the center) act as control points to nail or glue corresponding pixels in place, preventing them from moving.
Experiment with the purple cat until you’re happy with the warp effect. Be careful, because too much warping with too few pins will give away the effect by stretching your pixels. When done, commit to the change by pressing Return (Enter) or clicking the Check icon in the options bar (Figure 14f).
Fanciful though the cat image is, Puppet Warp is also a serious tool for fixing more conventional images. Take a look at the photo of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome (Figure 14g). Notice how the church is distorted, due to the lens of the point-and-shoot camera. By applying a few rows of strategically placed pins over the image, we’re able to correct problems of perspective and parallax.
Using ruler guides helps to not only see the distortion, but also aid in correcting the problem. For this image, the Mode menu was set to Rigid, which helps prevent objects like the Basilica from flexing too much when warping, as in Figure 14h.
In every new version of Photoshop there’s always one or two features that alone justify the cost of upgrading. In Photoshop CS5 one of those features is the Refine Mask tool, which makes quick work out of creating masks and silhouettes. Although introduced with Photoshop CS3, it took until the CS5 version to fully prove its worth.
See Figure 15a. This photo of thriller author Shane Briant was taken on a hazy day in New York. We’ll use Refine Edge to remove the photo’s boring background and replace it with a beautiful landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area.
How does your mask look? Are most of the hairs visible without a discernible halo around them? If any large areas are hidden by your layer mask (like the collar, for example), Option (Alt) click on the mask thumbnail to make it visible. From there, choose any standard brush of your choice and paint with white to reveal pixels in the photo, or black to conceal visible pixels.
When you’re done, Option (Alt) click to hide the mask and take another look at your mask. If you’re still not satisfied with your work, open the Masks panel and click the Mask Edge button (Figure 15d) to reopen the Refine Edge dialog.
To place a new background behind the silhouette, select File > Place, Copy/Paste, or drag and drop. Drag the image below the image you masked and take a look. If you’re still not satisfied, click once on the layer mask thumbnail and choose the Mask Edge button in the Masks panel to return to the Refine Edge dialog. When you’re done, your image should look like ours, Figure 15e.
In support of legitimate High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, Photoshop CS5 has made significant technical advances to aid photographers who want to work with such images. Its new HDR Pro features take a great leap forward compared to earlier releases of the software. As if this weren’t enough, Photoshop CS5 also gives a sly wink to those who are interested in producing faux HDR images, rather than the true item itself, via the HDR Toning command (Image > Adjustments > HDR Toning).
In this tip we’ll experiment with a few eye-catching faux HDR effects, plus explain how to use the HDR Toning feature to produce truly beautiful images.
When working with Photoshop’s HDR Toning command, be aware that the feature works on flattened images only. This means that using HDR Toning on a layered file or even a Smart Object will result in the file being flattened.
With your flattened image selected, choose Image > Adjustments > HDR Toning. Depending on the way you work and the expectations you have for your image, you can choose to work either by freely experimenting with the presets, sliders, and curves, or taking some time to learn a bit first about how each control behaves. Although we don’t discourage users from diving in and having fun, what follows is an annotated screen capture that includes callouts explaining the parts and menus that make up the HDR Toning dialog (Figure 16a).
Of course, one could easily stop here, after choosing a preset or following a few minutes of wild experimentation. However, by stacking your HDR toned image with its original, you can blend the two for an interesting effect. For example, Figure 16b is the result of a layered Photoshop file composited from the original tree silhouette image on the bottom and the version we created using HDR Toning on top. To align both images, select both layers and choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers.
Once the images are layered on top of each other (Figure 16c), experiment by applying varying blend modes to the topmost image (with the Move tool selected and the layer targeted, cycle through the list of blend modes by using the keyboard shortcut Shift+plus). Luminosity was used on the top layer. Remember to also play with the layer’s opacity slider to further control the overall effect.
As with most effects, when used alone they tend to call unwanted attention to themselves. A better way is to combine those effects with the original image to produce a more pleasing overall result.
To do so, first make a copy of the layer to which you intend to apply your effects. Apply your chosen effect. Afterward, stack the affected layer above the original, unaffected layer. Use the Opacity slider on the affected layer to dial in or out the final amount of the effect.
Photoshop CS5 steps into the ring with Painter, Corel’s longtime natural media champion, thanks to its new Bristle and Mixer brushes. Brush-tip properties such as shape, bristles, length, thickness, stiffness, angle, and spacing can all be controlled using simple sliders. If you have a drawing tablet like one of the many available from WACOM or other companies, you can now paint or draw in Photoshop CS5 more naturally than ever before.
The easiest way to learn your way around the Bristle brush tool is to start by adding paint to a simple pencil sketch or outline. In our case, we’ll use the still life seen in Figure 17a, which was created in Adobe Illustrator. As we always recommend, don’t paint on the original artwork. Instead, add a new, blank layer above the sketch on which to work. This way we preserve the original in case we want to go backward or move the sketch to the top of the layer stack for creative purposes. To add a new layer, choose Layer > New > Layer or click on the Create a New Layer icon at the base of the Layers panel.
Tap the B key to access the brush tool (or click on it in the Tools panel), and then open the Brush panel to adjust your settings (Figure 17b). Although you can paint with any brush you choose in Photoshop, only the ten new Bristle brushes shown in Figure 17c can be controlled by the Shape menu and five sliders (bristles, length, thickness, stiffness, and angle) in the Brush dialog. Feel free to also experiment with the 11 other brush properties located in the dialog’s far-left panel.
For now, let’s start by creating a brush based on the settings provided in Figure 17d. Save the brush as a preset called Fruit Brush 36 by choosing New Brush Preset from the fly-out menu in the upper corner of the Brush panel (Figure 17e).
Now we need some color. To pick up color, you have several options. Color can be added by clicking from the Swatches panel, the Color panel, the Adobe Color Picker at the base of the Tools panel, or now by invoking the heads-up-display, or HUD Color Picker (Figure 17f), by pressing Control-Option-Command/Command-Alt-Right click. Depending on your Preference settings, the HUD Color Picker can be displayed as either a strip or a wheel.
Start by choosing a green, red, or brown (Bosc, anyone?) for your pear color. Choose an opacity setting of 50 percent in the options bar and begin to paint with your Fruit Brush on the blank layer. Paint loosely, and don’t worry about staying within the lines. If you’re using a tablet instead of a mouse, notice how pressing lightly with the stylus translates into thinner strokes on your painting. Once you’ve established a thin ground cover of color, stop painting.
Add a new blank layer above the one you just worked on. Change the brush color by using the HUD Color Picker and feel free to change the size or hardness of your brush. Continue painting on the new layer and notice how the colors on the two layers interact with each other. Although not a requirement, we find that breaking out the painting into several layers gives us more control in the end (Figure 17g).
For our money, one of the best new Photoshop features is the ability to change brush sizes and hardness quickly and on the fly. With any painting tool selected, press Control + Option/Command + Alt and drag left or right to change brush size. Drag up or down to change brush hardness.
Add another blank layer and change color or brush attributes and paint again until your pears start to look well covered.
Choose a new color for the stems and create another blank layer. Pick a smaller brush or decrease the size of the tip you’re using and paint the three short stems.
Create another blank layer and paint in the leaves.
Add two more blank layers. On one layer use a pale blue or green color to paint in the glass bowl. On the other layer choose a grayish light blue or green to paint in the cast shadow beneath the bowl.
At this point, you’re basically done painting. Remember to hide the Fruit Bowl Outlines layer if you no longer want it visible. Experiment using various Photoshop filters, Layer Styles, Adjustment Layers, Graphic Styles, or Blending Modes to alter your painting or a layer or two. As long as you continue to work nondestructively (don’t forget Smart Objects!), you’ll never find yourself stuck in a creative corner.
To see how the Mixer Brush tool works, we’ll start with the photo in Figure 18a. After opening the photo, select the Mixer Brush tool from the Tool panel . Among the new options found in the Options Bar are menus to select from a variety of creative brush-blending options. Paint effects can range from dry to very wet, heavy mixes (Figure 18b). Although the Mixer Brush tool can be used to paint on a blank canvas, in this example we’re going to treat the pixels in the image as if they are wet paint.
You can take advantage of Photoshop’s many nondestructive tools, filters, blend modes, and styles to add to your basic painting. Just because you’ve covered your canvas with paint doesn’t mean the creativity has to end there.
Figure 18c shows my finished version. Notice the dark yet sketchy outline that I applied afterward. This effect was the result of first running the Chalk & Charcoal filter (Filter > Filter Gallery;) on the original image. Afterward, I placed the filtered image at the top of my painting’s Layer stack, setting its Blending Mode to Darker Color and Opacity to 58 percent.
One of the more amazing additions to Photoshop CS5 Extended is the new Repoussé feature (based on the French word meaning “to relieve or extrude”). The Repoussé feature converts 2D RGB objects into 3D. These objects can subsequently be extruded, inflated, and repositioned in space. When an image or illustration needs a burst of 3D realism, Repouseé is a wonderful tool for the job. Repoussé can be configured from within a single dashboard of menus and sliders controlling attributes like volume, angle, materials, and lighting of objects or text.
To get started with Repoussé, have a look at Figure 19a, which will act as the background for our project.
With the ability to extrude selections, paths, or text, Repoussé is a powerful addition to Photoshop’s existing 3D toolset, which in itself bears further experimentation and exploration.
With all the great video software already out there, the first time you heard about working with video in Photoshop you probably thought, “Why?” I know we did. But the deeper you dive into the subject, the more you realize just what a natural it is. If you’re currently working with video in other applications, chances are good that Photoshop is already part of your workflow, and now Photoshop has tools you can use for video that can’t be found in any other video-editing software, such as the Healing Brush tools, Content-Aware Fill, Adjustment Layers, Clone Stamp tool, Vanishing Point, and the Mixer Brush. While Photoshop isn’t a replacement for Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro, once you see what it can do, you’ll never look at Photoshop in the same way.
To use Photoshop filters with video, start by opening a video file in Photoshop. You do that the same way you open a still image: choose File > Open (Figure 20a).
From the Window menu choose Animation. Make sure the Animation panel is displaying the Timeline, not Frames (Figure 20b). The thumbnail in the Layers panel indicates you’re now working on a video layer instead of a normal image layer.
With Layer 1 selected in the Layers panel, right-click or click the icon in the upper-right corner to reveal the panel menu. Choose Convert to Smart Object. Now duplicate Layer 1 by dragging it to the Create New Layer icon at the base of the Layers panel. Hide the Layer 1 copy, which we’ll return to later.
Once the video is converted to a Smart Object, return to the Filter menu and apply the Watercolor filter (Filter > Artistic > Watercolor). We used Brush Detail = 9, Shadow Intensity = 0, Texture = 1. Click OK to apply. Now play the video by tapping the Spacebar or the Play button. You should see the filter effect applied to the entire 17-second clip.
If the filter effect flashes on and off, take a look at the green, stubble-like bars above the Comments layer in the Timeline. These lines indicate rendering progress. When the green line turns solid, it indicates that the effect is completely rendered. Playing the clip repeatedly should help to fill in any stubbly bars and fully render the watercolor effect.
Click on the eye icon to turn on visibility of the Layer 1 copy. Make sure you see the Smart Object icon in the lower-right corner. If not, go to the panel menu and choose Convert to Smart Object. With Layer 1 copy targeted, choose Filter > Stylize > Find Edges. Set Find Edges to taste and click OK.
Last, choose Filter > Texture > Texturizer to apply a canvas texture to the video (Figure 20c). Click OK to apply, and then play back your video. Try reducing the opacity of the Layer 1 copy to around 60 percent. This allows some of the watercolor effect on Layer 1 to come through.
The last step in this process is to save the document as a .psd file and then export the clip to be placed into another editing system (File > Export > Render Video). This process is known as final render and can be very slow, depending on the length of your clip and the speed of your computer. The beauty of this workflow is, should you decide later on to make a creative change to your clip, you can easily do so because of the nondestructive nature of the Smart Objects you created from the original video.
The concept of Smart Objects is similar to how files are handled in InDesign; placed files aren’t actually embedded in InDesign but are instead represented by proxies or previews of the file. Any time we want to edit the original placed file, we have to step outside the InDesign layout and into another application to make our changes. Once the changes are made, we save and close the document and then return to InDesign, where our link is automatically updated.
Similarly, a Smart Object is a working preview of an image. With it we’re free to transform, scale, mask, or filter the Smart Object, which is then regenerated through its link to its parent file. The only difference here is that the original isn’t a traditional outside link, like in InDesign, but rather embedded into (and therefore portable with) the Photoshop document. Since the original can only be edited outside the document where it’s placed, changes such as transforming, scaling, masking, and filtering are always un-doable and completely nondestructive. On the flip side, you can’t perform operations that alter pixels directly such as burning, dodging, painting, or cloning.
Figure 21a is a photograph with drab colors, a flat and overexposed background, and a foreground that’s dark and underexposed. Had this image been captured in a raw format, balancing dynamic range would be much easier. Here’s how to use Smart Objects to make nondestructive changes to salvage this snapshot.
If you’re wondering whether the above could have been done without first converting the image to a Smart Object, the answer is yes. But had we done that, we couldn’t have applied Shadows/Highlights nondestructively and taken advantage of its Layer Mask to darken the bottom of the photo.
Among the processes we routinely apply when retouching portraits is a healthy dose of the Lens Correction filter. Long buried in the Distort subfilters list (Filters > Distort), now with Photoshop CS5 this useful gem has been promoted to a higher level of visibility (Filters > Lens Correction).
Among the more obvious uses for this filter, like fixing converging verticals of buildings, we often use Lens Correction to shave a few pounds off the faces we photograph. Maybe our subjects just aren’t wan enough, but rarely do we see a portrait that won’t benefit from a quick trip under the digital knife.
Open your image (we’re using Figure 22a) and convert the background layer into a Smart Object (target the layer and choose Layer > Smart Objects > Convert to Smart Object). This allows you to revisit the filter settings at a later time and to check your work against the original.
From the Filter menu choose Lens Correction. In the Lens Correction dialog, click the Custom tab. Adjust the settings as in Figure 22b or to taste. As you can see, we’ve dragged the Remove Distortion slider to +12 (i.e., more concave) and the Scale slider to 108 percent. The Scale slider is used to enlarge the image slightly to counter the decrease in overall dimensions resulting from the Remove Distortion change.
Use the Preview button to see a Before & After of the image.
When you’re satisfied with the results, click OK to apply the settings and exit the filter dialog. Compare the final results shown in Figure 22c with its original in Figure 22a.
If you’re among those who aren’t sure why Photoshop’s Camera Raw plug-in is important, allow us a quick moment of explanation. Say tomorrow is Mom’s birthday, and you’d like to bring her a cake, for which you have two choices: buying a cake or baking a cake. They both taste good, but the store-bought cake is the product of someone else’s decisions about how cake should look and taste. The cake you bake from scratch, though, reflects your choices and decisions about birthday cakes.
In the same way, JPEG and TIFF images begin life as raw cakes, but before you take a bite, the images are precooked and then baked to how the camera manufacturer thinks your images should look. Although this isn’t necessarily bad, a prebaked image has much less latitude for creative expression as a raw image. Plus, software for processing raw images such as ACR 6.0 is much more sophisticated (think KitchenAid mixer and Viking stove) than the software inside your point-and-shoot camera (think Suzy Homemaker).
The other advantage of working with raw images is that all changes are the result of instructions being given to the image by the software. Not only does this method result in faster, almost instantaneous changes, but also all changes are nondestructive. Since pixels aren’t pushed, pixels aren’t harmed.
Let’s start by having a look at Figure 23a. This is a deceptively simple photograph, one you might pass up after a cursory glance.
Yet by applying a number of features of ACR 6.0, this average photo turns into a dramatic and beautiful image. Begin by working from top to bottom in the Transform area of the panel. Adjust things like Distortion, Rotation, and Scale to counter the effects of the lens (Figure 23b). Use the Basic panel to control Exposure, Black values, Contrast, Clarity, and Vibrance (Figure 23c). Switch to the Detail panel to apply Sharpening and Noise Reduction, if needed (Figure 23d). Click on the HSL/Grayscale panel to adjust specific color Luminance or to convert your image to grayscale (Figure 23e). The Effects panel is where you can now add film-like grain or post-crop vignetting (Figure 23f). Finally, the Camera Calibration panel provides menus to select a demosaicing process (2003 or the higher-quality 2010) and an appropriate Camera Profile (Figure 23g). To see the result of all these adjustments, have a look at Figure 23h.
Although Vanishing Point (Filter > Vanishing Point) is great for removing or cloning objects in perspective, one of its best uses is for producing mock-ups of packaging or products. In this tip, we show how easy it is to simulate a 3D book using finished 2D artwork.
From here you’ll want to repeat steps 2–6 with the spine art, beginning by first copying it to the clipboard and then creating the spine’s perspective grid in the Vanishing Point dialog (Figure 24e).
Remember to create another new, blank layer for the spine before invoking the Vanishing Point filter. With each object on its own layer, repositioning or tweaking the objects later will be much easier (Figure 24f).
The final important step to complete the 3D illusion is to select both spine and cover layers and change their blend mode from Normal to Multiply. Figure 24g shows the final composite mock-up.