Tag Archives: photoshop

Why are my photos darker after I print them?

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computer screenIt depends what you have done or not done as to why your prints are darker.  If you have an LCD computer screen, they will be.  All LCD screens have brightness defaults which are too bright. So you can wind down the brightness by 50% to improve quality. Then you have to calibrate the colour. The old CRT screens can be calibrated by adjusting the brightness and contrast.

You can also fix this problem by editing in Photoshop.

To determine if your screen is too bright, hold a blank white sheet of printer paper next to a white document in Photoshop. It should match in brightness and colour. If not, increase room lighting or reduce brightness of screen.

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Using the Magic Extractor

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If you only want to edit photos, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 is probably your best bet. It is much cheaper than Photoshop and has almost as many features, if not a few more to do with photos, albums, printing, collages etc.

I bought a magazine the other day called ” Photoshop Elements Essentials” and it had a 30 day trial of Photoshop Elements 6. Included were a number of tutorials which you may also be able to get at Lynda.com

I just checked this and you cannot access the free tutorials. But you can get them from Learning Photoshop Elements.

Today, I tried the Extractor tool. I’d been trying this on Photoshop without much luck.

Choose a photo which would look even better if only one feature was highlighted onto a white background instead of the background you currently have, like sport shot.

Sam practising

This is a shot from an Australian Open Tennis championship which I took.

Now to extract just an image of Sam,

1. Select Image> Magic Extractor
2. It took a while to do this and I didn’t get a perfect result, but you use the Foreground Brush to select Sam and the Background Brush to select the background. Cover as much of both areas as you can. Then go to Preview. Photoshop Elements will extract the image for you.
3. If you are not happy with the results you can use the Point Eraser Tool.
Result

Using Curves to make photos brighter or darker

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You can use many graphic programs to alter the brightness or darkness of a photo, but usually only using an auto feature. You can get some quite interesting effects if you use Curves in Photo shop. Once again, I’m using Photo shop 7.

Too dark
That’s too dark a picture, so:
1. Go to Layer>New adjustment layer>Curves
2. Click group with previous layer
3. Move the curve in the box around until you get the brightness or darkness the way you want it.
4. OK and Save
Result

Use magnetic lasso tool to highlight sections in photos

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Personally I am a bit of a purist when it comes to photos, but recently I’ve had photos rejected from the sites I upload to and I’ve realized that everyone is photoshopping their photos now.

Here is a tutorial on highlighting a section of the photo and making the rest decolourized. This may work for say a fruit tree, where you want to highlight the strong colour of the fruit, but not the tree.

I started with a sample picture from Photoshop 7. As you will see there is no particular reason to alter this image, but I am using it as a demonstration.

I am wanting to highlight one of the balloons and leave the rest desaturated.

1. Open Photoshop and open the image you want to work with

2. Duplicate your photo and work on the copy

3. Select the magnetic lasso tool.

4. Set it like this: Feather, 0; width, 10 pixels; Edge Contrast, 10%; Frequency, 57. Tick anti-alias. You should already be in New selection mode.

5. Go to Edit>Preferences>Display & Cursors and in the Other Cursors select Precise and OK.

6. Zoom in if need be.

7. Left-click on the part of the photo you wish to highlight for the coloured part. Trace around the edge carefully and left click again exactly where you began. You will see little dots all around the item.

8. Go to Select> Inverse. Now you will see everything selected except the item.

9. Go to Image> Adjust>Desaturate.

10. Deselect and save.

Here is the finished product.

After

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How to create a transparent background in Photoshop

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1. Open Photoshop.

2. Create a new file with 200 x 200 size with 72 resolution and RGB mode. Background content should be WHITE.

3. Check out Layer palette. It will show the locked background layer. We will not do anything with background layer now.

4. Create a new layer.

5. Select the background layer and DELETE it using the “Delete layer” icon at the bottom of the layer palette. It is situated at extreme right side.

6. You have created a true transparent background.

Making a web site background in Photoshop

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1. Create a new image at 2×2 pixels in white.
2. With the pencil tool, make a 1 pixel dot at the top left corner and another one at the bottom right corner of the image in the colour that you want to make semi transparent.
3. Define the image as a pattern.
4. Create another new image in white at 50×50 pixels.
5. Fill it with the pattern you just made.
6. Save for the web as a .gif and make the white pixels transparent.
7. Save the image. You just got yourself a semi-transparent background image.

To incorporate the background, just add the following line into your stylesheet:

background: transparent url(imagename.gif);

How to alter eye color in Photoshop

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Adobe Photoshop CS2 – How to Modify Colors with Hue/Saturation

my dog

Here’s the changed dog.

The old dog with blue eyes is just back here.

How did I do this?

1. Open photo in Photoshop

2. Zoom in

3. Use Elliptical Marquee Tool and use over one eye at a time.

4. Go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation

5. Use sliders to get the color you want. I check the colorize check box.

6. Deselect.

7. Repeat for eye 2.

Save

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How to make money with digital photography

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I have been a photographer for many years and have done courses and developed my own photos. Now though, I only use a digital camera a Canon Power Shot S30 in fact. I bought a digital camera very early on and paid a fortune at the time. Since then, digital cameras have come down in price and my 3.2 mega pixel capacity is not as I’d like it. Nevertheless, I can still take quite large photos of excellent quality with the camera set on ‘large’ resolution. You can get 10 pixel cameras now for quite small prices.

Now, to get your photos ready for stock photo sites, for which you will get some money if your photo is bought, you will really need Photo Shop. I know it is expensive but it is the best. It has every feature you would want for web design, brochures, leaflets and any thing else that these stock photo sites like. You can look at my free editor page but none of them do the job that Photo Shop does and if you are serious about photography you need it.

There are heaps of Photo Shop tutorials free on the Internet, but to have them all together and to be able to look up an index, a book still serves the best function. PhotoShop for Windows & Macintosh is one of them.

Uploading to stock photo sites

I upload to Big Stock Photo, stock-xchng and dreamstime

Stock Photos, Search and Download Now!

I have been most successful on Dreamstime

You can use these stock photos at Cafe Press. Make a calendar, or any product and sell it. Or use them for brochures, book covers, web page backgrounds.

Should you want to set up your own stock photo site you can use the software package PhotoStore. PhotoStore is a professional, user friendly, web based software package that enables you to publish and sell your photographs, images, artwork, prints and products online. PhotoStore was created specifically for photographers to easily sell their photos online. With its advanced features it can also be used to run stock photo type sites.

For the personal web sites set up to share photos between friends Google‘s Picasa now has a web album

You can see mine at Picasa web albums

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