Adobe Photoshop has become the standard in professional photo manipulation software because the company has made continual improvements to it, largely at the request of photographers and graphic designers. Version CS4 brings many new things together with the time-tested tools designed to take photographers out of the darkroom and into the innovative future.
- Open a digital photo in CS4. Save a copy of the photo before you do anything else. You will want to work on the copy and preserve the original. Working with the copy, tone the photo to your liking. You can use presets. Go to Image, then Auto Tone, Auto Contrast or Auto Color for these presets. These have moved here from previous versions of Photoshop, which had them in the Adjustments pop-up menu. If you need more dynamic variation than the presets, go to Image, then Adjustments, then Levels. Beneath the Options button on the right are three eyedroppers for, from left, blacks, midtones and whites. Select the black eyedropper and find the darkest area of the image. For numbers, go to Window, then Info. The Information palette will show you light to dark ranges for red, green and blue or cyan, magenta, yellow and black (K). The higher the number of K, the more black is in that area of the image. Using the black eyedropper, find the blackest area of the image and click. Then click the white eyedropper and find the whitest area. This will be close to zero on the Info palette. When you find it, click it. This generally will give a balanced tone, but you can tweak it with the sliders. The left one is black, middle is midtones and right is white.
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Step 2
Use Shadow/Highlights or Curves to tweak the tone further. If the image has stark contrast and some of the detail is lost, Shadow/Highlights will punch up the shadows without touching the highlights, or vice versa. Curves allows you to set a brightness in the center, then tweak the lights and darks on the sides. Other controls under Adjustments such as Brightness/Contrast, Exposure and Variations also allow manipulation of the tone. Variations is not as subtle as some of the others, but it allows you to compare variations of the image with different colors added or subtracted to the image.
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Step 3
Resize the photo depending on how you plan to use it. For an image intended for a website, for example, you only need a resolution of 72 dots per inch. If you plan to print the image, it should be at a minimum of 200 dpi. The more dots per inch, the finer the quality of the final image, but the bigger the file. To resize an image to 8 1/2 inches by 11 inches, go to Image, then Image Size. In the pop-up menu, use the bottom portion. If it’s a horizontal or landscape image, set the width to 11 inches. The height will reset automatically. Then go to Resolution and set it at 300 dpi.
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Step 4
Print the image. Go to File, then Print. In the pop-up menu, you can select the printer and make adjustments. The default is for a vertical, or portrait, image, so if you need horizontal, click that button next to the Page Setup button. You will see how the image will look when printed. Click the Print button. A pop-up menu will appear where you can set specifics for the printer. No matter what kind of paper you are printing to, go to Quality & Media and select Glossy or Transparency. These settings will produce the best image on any paper. For a photo, choose a top-quality photo setting. For mixed words and images, select composite.
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Step 5
Experiment. There is a lot more to Photoshop than just toning photos. Go to Window, Actions for some presets. Try Fluorescent Chalk, Soft Posterize or Sepia (Layer) for example. You also can try things in the Filter Gallery (Filter, then Filter Gallery). You can make a photo look like a painting, or as if seen through Glass, or as a Chalk & Charcoal drawing. You can give the image a soft, otherworldly look with Diffuse Glow. One photo can produce a wide variety of images.