Photoshop Basics

The art of photography isn't only defined by grabbing a camera and taking pictures, it also includes editing and modifying photographs and the most common way to do this is with Adobe Photoshop.

As I had Communication Design last term, I already had to work a lot with Photoshop, but I have to admit that I'm still struggling a lot with the program, especially as there are a million different tools, which make it different to kind of get an overview.

However, in our photography class last week, we started to experiment with Photoshop by just messing around with some of the basic tools, that are probably also some of the most useful ones to edit pictures.

I think one of the most important things about Photoshop are the different layers, which enable you to insert pretty much anything you want, let things flow into each other or mess around with the colours in a picture.

So in this first picture, we tried to create a kind of contrast by putting a black and white layer over the initial photograph, before using the eraser tool to just point out and put the focus on one particularly colourful object in the picture.

As you can see, I used a picture from our field trip a couple of weeks ago from one of the guys in my photography class and just focused on his red hat.

Afterwards, we again worked with different layers to, first create one single landscape by uniting two different ones and then, insert an object into that landscape.

So we used a different layer for each of our landscapes and then again just used the eraser tool to erase half of the second landscape so that one half of the first landscape could show through.

As you can see I used quite different landscapes to really show the difference.

After that we used another layer to insert an object. in my case a minion. We then used different tools to delete the white background of the minion picture and then use different shadows so that the minion looks as realistic as possible.

The last thing we learned might not be necessary for our photography projects for this term, but I think it was nevertheless really interesting and kind of the cliché of what people think Photoshop is used for. So, we learned how to do all kinds of beauty transformations, such as change the body proportions, the eye colours or remove pimples. 

Unfortunately, I forgot to save the example where I changed the eye colours, so here you have a picture in which I used the patch tool to remove acne and pimples from the person's face. 

                                                     BEFORE ->











<- AFTER












NOTE:
Working with Photoshop for the first time can be confusing at times and it might not always be easy to know how to deal with all the tools or figure out what tool to use for what. 
I have made this experience so often last term during my Communication Design classes, and a really helpful tip is to just go on Youtube and look for tutorial videos. You can find a video with detailed descriptions for pretty much every Photoshop tool, and this makes working with Photoshop a lot easier and more pleasant especially when you are a beginner.