The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers part 25 docx

224 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers You can shoot outside all day and be getting shots that look just great, but step indoors and

To make any of those color swatches

your Foreground color, just

double-click on it

Getting Rid of Your

Empty Layers Fast

In CS5, Adobe included a built-in script

that will go through your Layers panel

and remove any empty layers (layers

with nothing on them) automatically (once you get a large multi-layered project going, you wind up with more

of these than you’d think) To have Photoshop tidy things up for you, go under the File menu, under Scripts,

and choose Delete All Empty Layers.

Removing Noise from Cell Phone Photos

Since Photoshop is a pro tool, most

of us probably wouldn’t even think

of using Camera Raw’s built-in Noise Reduction feature to remove the noise from our cell phone camera’s photos, but…why not? Cell phone photos are notorious for color noise, which Camera Raw cleans up really well

Try it one time, and I’ll bet you’ll use

it more than you ever dreamed (to open a cell phone photo in Camera Raw, just find it on your computer in Mini Bridge, then Right-click on it and

choose Open in Camera Raw).

Using the HUD Pop-Up Color Picker

If you’ve ever thought, “There’s got

to be an easier way to pick colors than clicking on the Fore ground color swatch every time,” you’re gonna love this: It’s a pop-up Color picker (Adobe calls it the HUD [Heads-Up Display], because you keep your eyes on the image, instead of looking over and down

at the Foreground/Background color swatches) First, choose a Brush tool,

then just press Command-Option-Ctrl (PC: Alt-Shift) and click (PC:

Right-click) on your image It brings

up a simplified color picker where you can quickly choose your color (I find it easier if you choose the hue first, from the bar on the right, then choose the tint and saturation of the color from the box on the left)

The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers

Photoshop Killer Tips

Photo by Scott Kelby Exposure: 1/80 sec | Focal Length: 18mm | Aperture Value: ƒ/3.5

Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems

The title for this chapter comes from the 2009 movie Little

Problems (written and directed by Matt Pearson), but

I could have just as easily gone with the 2008 short Little

Problems (written and directed by Michael Lewen), but

there was one big thing that made the choice easy The

first movie was about zombies You just can’t make a bad

movie about zombies It’s a lock Throw a couple of hapless

teens (or in this case “an unlikely couple”) into some

deso-lated location with a couple hundred flesh-starved un dead,

and you’ve got gold baby, gold! Now, has anyone ever

won-dered, even for a second, why every zombie in the rich and

colorful history of zombies, has an insatiable hunger for

human flesh and only human flesh? Why can’t there be

zombies that have an insatiable hunger for broccoli? Then,

in their bombed-out shell of a desolate vacant city, on every

corner there would be other zombies selling broccoli the

size of azalea bushes Anyway, it’s just a little too coinci-dental that every zombie wants to eat you, but they don’t want to eat something that might actually keep them alive, and is in ample and easy reproducible supply, like broccoli,

or spring rolls, or chowder Nope, it has to be human flesh, even though you know and I know (say it with me) it tastes like chicken (well, that’s what I’ve been told, anyway)

Another thing that drew me to the first Little Problems

was the director’s last name, seeing as all my books are published by subsidiaries of Pearson Education, a company who somehow chose to hire Ted Waitt as my editor, despite the fact that they were forewarned by the DCBGC (the Desolate City Broccoli Growers’ Consortium) that Ted might not actually be the strict vegetarian he claimed to be in his resume I probably shouldn’t say anything bad about Ted, though I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me

Little Problems

fixing common problems

224 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems

The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers

You can shoot outside all day and be getting shots that look just great, but step indoors and everything changes The culprit is Auto white balance (the default setting on digital cameras, and most people never change from this default) With Auto white balance, shooting indoors (like the interior shot shown below) you get what you see here—a photo that looks way too yellow (or if I had shot in an office, where the standard is fluorescent lighting, it would be too blue) Here are three different ways to deal with the problem:

Step One:

Here’s a photo taken in the lobby of a

hotel and, of course, it has the type of

lighting you’re likely to find in a lobby

(or a home), called “tungsten lighting”

(by photographers and people who sell

lighting for a living), which is why the

color in the photo looks so yellow (pretty

typical for shots taken indoors when

your white balance set to Auto) The first

method is to add a blue Photo Filter

ad-justment to offset the yellow and make

the color look more natural, so click on

the Photo Filter icon in the Adjustments

panel (it’s shown circled here)

Step Two:

Just a heads up: when you choose Photo

Filter, the default filter is yellow, so your

photo looks even worse at first, but that’s

easy to fix From the Filter pop-up menu,

choose Cooling Filter (82), as seen here,

and then drag the Density (amount) slider

to the right until the image looks more

natural Here, I dragged it over to 50%

(the amount will be different depending

on the photo, so this is a judgment call

you’ll have to make) This correction looks

okay, but if you have the original RAW

image, you can get a much better

correc-tion than this using Camera Raw

Three Ways to

Fix the Color in

Indoor Shots

The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers

Step Three:

If you took the original shot in RAW,

this is the best case scenario, because

you’ll usually get much better results

by opening the image in Camera Raw

and choosing one of the built-in

pre-sets in the White Balance pop-up menu,

like Tungsten (shown here), which

pret-ty much fixes the problem, and does

it without washing out the red color

in the chairs (if you look back at the

image in Step Two, the chairs lost some

of the saturation in the reds It was a

fair trade—to lose some of the red to

get the rest of the color fixed—but this

method, with a RAW photo, is much

better all around) In short: you’ll get

better results fixing the white balance

of RAW images in Camera Raw than

you will for JPEG or TIFF images

Step Four:

If your original shot was taken as a JPEG

or TIFF, you can still use Camera Raw to

adjust your white balance, but the results

won’t be as good as if it had been shot in

RAW Click on the photo in Mini Bridge,

then Right-click on it and choose Open

in Camera Raw When it opens, you’ll

see that something’s missing—there is no

Tungsten preset for JPEGs or TIFFs, only

As Shot and Auto (Auto seems to look

okay as a starting place for this photo,

but I had to drag the Temperature slider

to the left a bit to remove more of the

yellow, and it still doesn’t look as good as

the simple Tungsten preset used on the

RAW image in Step Three) Your other

choice is to get the White Balance tool

and click on a light gray area in the photo

(I tried this, as well, and in this case, it

looked worse than the Auto preset)

226 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems

The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers

Step One:

Open a photo where your subject is

in the shadows (it can be a person, or

a building, or anything backlit) In this

example, the light is coming from the

windows behind our subject, so he

ap-pears almost like a silhouette Ideally,

we’d like to brighten him up, and darken

the light from the windows and the wall

to the right by pulling back the

high-lights To do this, first go under Filter

menu and choose Convert for Smart

Filters This lets you apply the

adjust-ment as if it was an adjustadjust-ment layer

(meaning you can re-edit it later if you

need to, or even delete the adjustment

altogether) Even though the adjustment

we’re going to apply isn’t found under

the Filter menu, for some reason Adobe

lets it act like it is a regular filter, so why

not take advantage of it, eh? Now go

under the Image menu, under

Adjust-ments, and choose Shadows/Highlights.

When Your Subject Is in

the Shadows

We all wind up shooting subjects that are backlit (where the light is behind your subject) That’s because our eyes automatically adjust to the situation and we see the subject just fine in our viewfinder The problem is our cameras aren’t nearly

as sophisticated as our eyes are, so you’re almost guaranteed to get some shots where the subject is way too dark Although I feel you get better results using Camera Raw’s Fill Light and Recovery sliders, Shadows/Highlights does a fairly decent job, and there’s a trick you can use to make the adjustment re-editable

The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers

Step Two:

If you’re choosing Shadows/Highlights, you

probably have a problem in the shadow

areas, which is why, by default, it’s set to

open up (lighten) the shadow areas in

your photo by 35% (as seen here) In

pre-vious versions of Photoshop, the default

setting was 50%, but most users felt it was

too high a setting, so in CS5, Adobe set

it down to something more reasonable

However, in this case, our subject is so

bur-ied in the shadows that we’ll have to open

the shadows quite a bit, but the problem

with opening the shadows 50% or more

is your photos tend to look “milky.” To

get around that, turn on the Show More

Options checkbox, as shown here

Step Three:

This brings up an expanded version of the

dialog (as shown here) I have a little

for-mula that I use that usually gives me the

opened up shadow areas I need, with out

looking totally fake First, I usually leave

the Amount some where around 35% (the

final amount depends on the individual

photo, and here I had to increase it to 75)

Then, I drag the Shadows Radius slider to

the right to between 65 and 80 (as shown

here), which smoothes out the effect even

more (The Radius amount determines

how many pixels each adjustment affects,

so to affect a wider range of pixels,

in-crease the amount.)

TIP: Save a New Default

If you come up with some settings you

like, click the Save As Defaults button

in the bottom-left corner of the dialog,

and now it will open with your settings

228 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems

The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers

Step Four:

Now that the shadows are opened up

(and look reasonably realistic), you can

work on the highlights In most cases,

you’ll only have to fix one or the other—

the shadows or the highlights, but not

both It takes someone special to actually

take a photo that is so wrong on every

level that it needs both areas adjusted

(like I did here) So, to pull back (darken)

the highlights in the window and on the

wall on the right, go to the High lights

section and drag the Amount slider to

the right (as shown here) Now, if later

you need to tweak these changes,

be-cause in Step One you applied this as

a Smart Filter, you can go to the Layers

panel, double-click directly on the words

“Shadows/Highlights” (as shown here),

and the Shadows/Highlights dialog will

appear again, with the settings you used

previously Just make any changes you

want, then click OK

Before After (opening up the shadows and pulling back

the highlights)

The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers

Step One:

Here’s a shot taken in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and the sky is that flat gray that

we all hate for travel and outdoor shots

Before we go any farther, the first thing

I usually try is to press Command-L (PC:

Ctrl-L) to open the Levels dialog, and

darken the midtones by dragging the cen-ter Input Levels slider (circled here in red)

to the right If there is any detail in the sky

we can’t see, this will usually do the trick, but unfortunately for this image, it just made the gray, grayer, so once I tried it,

I hit Cancel instead of OK Of course, to adjust the sky, you’ll have to select it first

You can use any selection tool you’re comfortable with, but for something simple like this, I usually just use the

Magic Wand tool (press Shift-W until

you have it; it’s nested with the Quick Selection tool)

Nothing ruins an outdoor shot like a dull gray sky (well, except for one

other thing—later in this chapter, you’ll learn how to remove tourists), but

luckily, in many cases, you can save the shot by darkening the midtones a bit,

and adding a blue tint or gradient to the sky Here’s how to do both:

Fixing Shots with

a Dull Gray Sky

230 Chapter 9 Fixing Common Problems

The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers

Step Two:

Click the Magic Wand tool on the gray

sky to select it I set my Tolerance (up

in the Options Bar) to 10, so it doesn’t

accidentally select the buildings at the

bottom of the image, as well (when I

tried my usual Tolerance setting of 20,

it selected too much) At 10, one click

won’t select the entire sky, so

press-and-hold the Shift key and click in any areas

it didn’t select (it may take you a few

Shift-clicks to get the whole sky selected)

Now, although this isn’t exactly what this

project is about, you could paste a

to-tally different image of clouds into this

selected area You’d do that by opening

a photo of clouds, pressing Command-A

(PC: Ctrl-A) to Select All, then pressing

Command-C (PC: Ctrl-C) to Copy that

image into memory Then, you’d switch

back to the first image, go under the Edit

menu, under Paste Special, and choose

Paste Into to paste the clouds into your

selected area

Step Three:

Instead, we’re going to open a photo that

has a sky color we like (you can download

this same photo, and most of the key

pho-tos used in this book, at the Web address

listed in the introduction at the front of

the book) Once you open the image,

switch to the Eyedropper tool (I), and

click once on the darkest blue area in the

image (as shown here) to make that your

Foreground color Now, press the letter X

to swap your Foreground and Background

colors, then click the Eyedropper on the

brightest blue in the photo (lower in the

sky), so that now your Foreground is a

lighter blue, and your Background is a

darker blue