Vikas Shah

Painting and restoring

We’ll take a look at Photoshop’s magnificent painting and retouching tools, which offer a wide variety of professional tools for both digital artists and photographers looking for that little extra in their snaps. If you’ve ever seen a magazine cover and admired the unreal perfection of the model’s face, you’ll be more than ready for this little bag of tricks. All set?

Filters and effects

We’ll get to grips with the basics of applying fitters to images, then have a quick peek at all of the hundred (no, really, a hundred) filters on offer. We’ll also look at the Liquify effect which, while it hides under the Filters menu, behaves in a slightly different way.

Text and vector tools

Photoshop 7 offers some interesting opportunities for dealing with text in your graphics, as well as a fully-fledged set of tools for vector drawing. In this chapter we’ll take a peek at how you can make the vectors work for you.

Colors and corrections

As this is the first chapter, we’re going to concentrate on things you can do to the whole image: rotating, cropping and altering the colors. If you’re working your way through the book in order, this is a great place to start. When you’re working with an image, the first step is always to make sure you’re only working with the section you need. Equally, it’s important to know what can — and can’t — be achieved with the various methods of color correction as soon as possible. That way, there’s plenty you can do without ever moving onto the next chapter.

Magazine Retouching Techniques

Whether you’re a professional photographer or not, you will probably have more than a suspicion that the pictures we see in magazines are not printed without a substantial amount of tweaking and touching up. Virtually every photo in fashion and beauty magazines has been visited by the Photoshop fairy. Its reassuring to know that it is actually impossible to look that perfect naturally — but if you want to give yourself or your subjects a quick Photoshop facial, or maybe even some digital plastic surgery, this chapter’s the one for you!

Toning and Aging Images

Whether we look at the world through rose-colored glasses, through the green haze of envy, or see things in black and white, we are profoundly influenced by colors and the ways they are combined. Even a very simple photo can develop an air of mystery, wonder, or high-quality art if it is given certain color toning. As we will explore in this chapter, sometimes a color change is all we need in order to change a simple photo to a really amazing work of art!

Adding and Subtracting Features from your Images

The perfect photo is rarely, if ever, captured. There is often something annoying in the background, or the sky is not clear. Perhaps someone didn’t make it into the group photo, or an employee at the company has been replaced. Maybe we want to take a candid shot and transform it into a portrait. Sometimes we want to create the impossible, whether placing our subject into the clouds, placing a car under a toadstool, or “building” a house in the Grand Canyon. Are these insurmountable problems? Not if we have Photoshop!

Color and Calibration

Quick, think of a color. Not a particularly difficult task is it? But how about thinking of a color that no one else would think of. Now that sounds a bit more tricky! However, it’s not actually that hard. Before I tell you why, let’s get a better understanding of color.

Restoring and Repairing Photos

Photographers and other image professionals are often interested in making new images look old, or in making old images look new. In restoration work, our aim is different. We are not trying to make an old or damaged photo took new, but to make it look as it did, way back when Grandmother first saw it as she sat in Great Grandpa’s arms. So we are making the photo look new but new by the standards of a different era — almost as if we were transporting ourselves, the viewers, back in time!

Infra-red Imaging and Cross-processing

Infra-red film and cross-processing are two things most photographers love to play with but are not used on a regular basis, as the results are hard to predict for all but the most skilled in the craft.