Having installed your Adobe Photoshop programme and read all the tool tips, you are ready to get started with Photoshop! With luck you have practiced all the basic tools from our earlier tutorial Tools Pallette Explained, and have your image open for editing.
The first thing you need to decide is the direction you want to take your image.
Whether its a landscape image or a portrait, there will always be the initial thought of how you would like it to look.
For a basic portrait you will firstly need to decide how much editing you want to do. Some images lend themselves more to less.
Skin textures and tones can really lend themselves to an image, especially on a charactor portrait, but can be rare that you find someone that actually wants you to keep those blemishes, bruises, or loose hairs in their portraits. Many think that photo editing is wrong and that the best images should be untouched. “You are lying in your photographs.” is a well known phrase.
Well yes, it’s a portrait! Of course its lies. You don’t really think people dress up that way every day or smile that much in real life, do you? Not all portrait photographers strive to be liars but this is a topic for a separate occasion. But there is no getting away from it, portraits have been manipulated and enhanced for centuries.
For those who are into idealizing portraits and removing blemishes the Photoshop Spot Healing tool is a must have! Its as good a place as any to begin on your portrait.
How far you take it is up to you, whether you want to create the ‘Glossy Mag’ look, or whether you would like to keep it as natural as possible.
The way we work totally depends on the overall affect we want to achieve.
If you are working on a landscape shot, often you will only need to do some basic photoshop adjustments, like levels and curves to bring out the best in the image and improve the overall appearance. Maybe even a little dodge and burn. Its best to experiment in different layers so that your original image doesn’t become spoilt with stages that you cant undo!
However, even within landscapes, all too often we can take the almost perfect shot, but the sky can let us down by not having any detail in it. This so often happens here in the UK with the grey muddy sky above.
Sometimes, when we have tried working the image as far as we can in Photoshop RAW Converter, and we have tried every posibility to bring that sky into something short of stunning, all to no avail, the only option we may have is to import a sky from a different image which brings more power and focus to the image we are trying to create.
This is easily done, again its best to work any imported images in the adjustment layers to maintain options to undo, redo or totally go back to the beginning, before we started working on the photo.
Lastly, perhaps you will want to create a totally fantasy scene, importing many images, laying them all out on a single canvas and blending them into one creation of art.
This is something that can be easily achieved in Photoshop, the only thing you really need is the imagination to know where you are going! This is something that cant ever be taught, but I believe we all have the dreams inside us somewhere.
Most fantasy art creations tell a story or give a different slant on what would otherwise be an ordinary image.
Here it is the blending of images that takes the time.
There are many stock agencies where you can find material, often fantasy artists don’t even own a camera!
All of the techniques mentioned here will be coming onto the site in the form of online tutorials over the coming weeks.
We hope you have found our photo tips interesting and useful as you get started with Photoshop!