Basic Photoshop Skills You Should Master

The digital camera has taken the world by storm and thousands of people have gigabytes of images stored on their computers. Just like using normal photographic film, not all of the images are perfect but the disposable nature of digital photography means that it no longer matters if the shot is blurry or taken incorrectly.

With tools such as Adobe Photoshop, through can be edited, enhancements made and stray items taken away. The things you can do to your photos are endless really. If you have some photos, I bet they are not all perfect and there are improvements you can make to them to make them better. Lets discuss a few ideas and tips that could help you.

Correct light levels.

If your image is too dark or too light, you will need to adjust the image so that it looks natural. In the old days of film cameras, this was called under and over exposure. In Photoshop, simply select the Edit menu, choose Brightness/Contrast and then drag the sliders until you get the right effect. This is also a great place to make moody black and white images too, increasing shadows and blowing out light areas.

Make your photos pop with color.

A little like the exposure problems we have already talked about, some photos just look dull and uninteresting. Perhaps it was a grey day and your child’s red top did not look as bright as it should or perhaps the green grass in your photo looks boring. The color and tone of the image can be adjusted using the Image menu. Click it and then choose Adjustments and then Match Colour. You can then drag around the intensity and luminance sliders to get the best image.

Get rid of the background.

This is probably the most asked after tutorial on the Internet about Photoshop. People want to remove people or objects quickly and easily from the photo or remove what is in the background. There are many ways to do this but the best way is to use the Pen Tool, which you can select from the tools panel on the left hand side of the screen. Draw around the edge of the part you wish to remove and try to get the edge as best you can.

It is a very tricky process, but the better you can get with your line, the better your image will be. You can also zoom right in to the image to get finer control over the Pen Tool. The Pen Tool uses points on a line to define the shape. The closer the points are together, the better quality the line will be. If you want to use the Pen Tool to go around the edges of a curve, click one point at the beginning, one at the end and then hold CTRL and click on the line that runs between the 2 points. You can then move it to curve precisely around the area.

Once you are happy that the item has been selected using the Pen Tool and the ends are joined up, right click inside the image and choose Make Selection and click OK. You can then cut, copy or move the selection to a new layer. There are many other ways of doing this and the Pen Tool method is possibly the most accurate, but also the most time-consuming. Google some more options if you can get on with this one.

Learn how to email your images.

Now that images are on your computer, you might want to upload them to a website like Facebook, Flickr or send them through email to friends and family. The problem is that the images can be very large and cause email programs to freeze and Facebook to reject it. If you do get the images to go through, the person viewing them at the other end will have to download them, which can also be slow if the images are large.

Luckily, Photoshop has built-in tools to optimise your images for such uses. Open the image you want to send, choose Save For Web from the File menu and you can then adjust the size and quality as you like. There are sliders and preset that will allow you to choose predefined settings, so it is easy for the novice to use too.