Ive had Photoshop 6.0 installed on the computer for quite some time but Ive always been inclined to use some of the cheaper easier to use software to do my digital work.
I just bought the book “Photoshop 6.0 for Dummies” and rented some 6.0 videos to help me get started.
What I would like from the kind fellow Dopers out there are some of your tips, tricks, comments, web sites (if any good ones exist), dos, donts, and etc. I`ve been to Adobe.com and browsed their tutorial section.
I realise that this is a very complex program and some of the tips and tricks may be difficult to transfer to a post box. Any insight will be helpful. I intend to be a Photoshop pro in about a year or so. I had no idea how incredibly powerful the software was until I watched the videos and started reading the book.
Without knowing a whole lot about image processing, it’s going to be tough to ever make use of the full power of Photoshop – unless you understand what you’re doing, you’re going to be doing monkey-see, monkey-do stuff for a long time. Also, you don’t really say whether you’re doing processing of scans and photos or creating original art or doing photoillustration or something else entirely, so it’s a little tough to know where to go with this.
That being said, [ul]
[li] Channels are your friend. Learn how to create them and what they’re used for.[/li][li] Image–>Adjust–>Levels… = good. Image–>Adjust–>Brightness = well, not bad exactly, but not nearly so good as Levels. You can do more to improve the overall quality of a scan or digital photo with some very mechanical, by-the-numbers levels adjustments (without even looking at the image) than with any other single tool in Photoshop’s amazing palette.[/li][li] For photographs, consider using Unsharp Masking rather than Sharpen. If you’re working in CMYK, try Unsharp Masking on only the Black channel.[/li][li] The History pallette is another of your best friends – don’t be afraid to experiment, because you can always roll back one step or a dozen if you don’t like the results.[/li][li] Consider what you’re planning to do with your work, determine the optimal resolution, and try not to work at a resolution much higher than that – pushing unnecessary pixels around is hard on the computer, and on you.[/ul][/li]
Want more? Look for books and articles by Bruce Fraser. For instance, here’s his article on five of his favorite Photoshop 6 tricks. Steve Roth’s Real World Scanning and Halftones, 2nd Edition is still the best book around on working with photographs in the digital realm, even if it is about six years old (supposedly, a new edition is in the works).
For the love of Christ, stay away from using the lens flare!!!
Other then that, thinker around and you’ll discover stuff. I self taught myself PS and didn’t discover things until a year or so later. For example, on the toolbar any icon with a small “dot” in the lower corner means there are additional tools available by holding down the button when selecting them.
Sounds stupid but there are a millions things that I never knew existed in the program. I would play around with something, come across something I wouldn’t understand, which I would then google. Rinse and repeat. Books and videos are a good idea as well, and the fact that you went out and got them is a good indication to me that you really want to learn the stuff. That, in my opinion is the most important aspect, the desire to immerse yourself into something.
Thanks rackensack, much appreciated. Especially the links and book support. As a newbie to PS scene, I didn`t even know which of the plethora of books out there to really start with.
Mostly, Ive taken thousands of digital pictures of the kids, scenery, vacation places and other things of interest. Knowing what the software CAN do will help me in what I WANT to do. Like blending pictures, creating web images, composites, and touchups, among other things. Some of it will be new art but the bulk of the stuff I will be doing will be altering already captured digital pics. Ive probably got about 200 scanned in old photos too that I will be messing with.
Thanks WorldEater, That dot thing was one of the first things David Cross (video) demonstrated. Try using the ALT key when doing (just about) every function and see what cool stuff that does. Almost every function has a hidden trick if you hold down the ALT key while you perform the function.
Layers, masks, channels, paths, links, history…man my head is spinning.
What is the difference between Image Ready (3.0) and Photoshop? They seem to have a lot of the same features, so why have them both??
Get the Photoshop WOW! Book for your version of Photoshop. These books have among the most good info per unit volume of any books I’ve seen. They are divided into four-page sections, each of which gives the rundown on a specific technique.
There’s no hand-holding; it doesn’t get to the level of “click here, press there”, so you need to know the basics of finding your way around the program. But once you do, you will find the book invaluable.
Image Ready is intended for preparing images for use in webpages.
It offers functions for slicing images into parts, naming the parts, and compressing them on output, so that they can used to build a tiled image in a webpage. ImageReady also generates the HTML that surrounds and arranges the image parts in the page. ImageReady does not have the elaborate adjustment tools or print-oriented tools that Photoshop does.
I reccomend getting filters for your program as well. Alienware (I think thats what its called) makes some neat effects like drop shadow, flame, smoke, etc.
And you definetely need to learn about layers, I used Photoshop for a year before figuring out their usefulness, glad I did.