If there was more than 24 hours a day, I would probably have time to write some full blown Photoshop tutorials. This is especially considering the fact that I’ve been using the program for over a decade now and am still discovering new tricks and techniques in it on literally a daily basis! But unfortunately I’m unable to do that at least for now, so the next best thing for now would be to post little tips, tricks, and tidbits that I’ve learned along the way.
Recently I opened up (yet) another Twitter account (this one being my fourth, haha) that is going to be used just for that purpose. Feel free to go ahead and follow the link below if you want- I add at least 4-5 tweets there each week.
So a few weeks ago I did a write-up on a nice little photo editing program for the iPhone/iPod touch called Photo Forge, available at the app store for $5. Overall it was a pretty slick imaging editing program, incorporating curves, levels, and around 20 filters to use on the pictures you take with your iPhone.
Adobe themselves have now gotten into the competition, releasing their own version of Photoshop for the iPhone, completely for free!
Photoshop Mobile offers a few basic functions for your iPhone images. The basic crop, flip, and rotation tools allow you to manipulate the size of your images. There are a few basic exposure adjustment features, clearly aimed towards photographers: exposure, hue/saturation, tint, and black & white. There are also two built-in filters: sketch and soft focus, which surprisingly are really not very useful (a sharpening tool would’ve been much more welcome as opposed to soft focus which performs the opposite!) Finally, there are also a few presets that can help stylize your image. One level of undo at the bottom also lets you step back if you don’t like any of the adjustments you made.
Honestly although this is a free program, I am surprised that Adobe has not offered to the market a more fully-featured version for a nominal fee (such as $10). Levels and curves are unfortunately absent here, and am surprised that there are only two filters available here (as opposed to Photoforge that boasts 10 times as many). Now this being a free program that is fine, but it would’ve been cool to incorporate these things, along with a sharpening tool and maybe the ability to paint or use the clone stamp tool using your fingers, to the mixture in a version you must pay for. I do like how you can use your fingers to swipe across the image to make your edits however.
On the flip side of this argument, the only practical instance on an iPhone that you would need to edit images is with pics you have taken with the iPhone’s camera, so a lot of the higher-end tools are probably not even necessary for most people anyways.
If interested in using Photoshop Mobile, definitely check out Photoshop.com and sign up for a free account, it’s an online community that allows you to upload pics you have taken on your iPhone right through Photoshop Mobile to show your friends and family.
With the iPhone camera becoming slightly better with every iteration, and the device itself becoming more ubiquitous amongst many people, this is a great step for Adobe to release this during what really is the infancy of mobile devices and social media. This could mean a great deal of free promotion for Adobe, so we’ll see!
Because this video link came from Net.Tuts+, this has to be legit. Adobe is hard at work right now developing the CS5 suite, and one of their reps just uploaded to YouTube a sneak peak of what is in store for their flagship imaging editing program. CS4 had some negative press last year due to poor sales and many criticizing Adobe’s decision to “rush” it to market, however there were a number of very cool features added specifically to Photoshop, including it’s ability to work with 3D objects, content-aware scaling, and smooth zooming and scrolling across images.
This video alone highlights how every iteration of Photoshop has at least one or two “must have” tools for imaging artists and photographers alike. Although only two things are shown here, neither are a small deal. The new, more realistic brushes look awesome and is probably the first major overhaul to the brush tool (one of the program’s most basic) in at least a decade. The ability to blend colors into each other with a brush so that it mimics actual painting is simply brilliant. Also, I love the warp tool, which was added in CS2, so the “smarter” warping ability shown in this video is also going to be a very welcome feature. Looks like it works similar to After Effect’s puppet tool. I can only imagine what other goodies are going to come bundled with CS5. Guess we’ll have to wait until it’s proper release, to be tentatively released in Spring 2010!
Deke McClelland is hands down one of the best Photoshop teachers out there! He has been giving advice on pretty much anything the program is capable of doing for well beyond a decade now, and goes out of his way to provide many of his tutorials online for free or very cheap. Some of his best tutorials are licensed with Lynda.com, above is an example on one that focuses on the hue/saturation adjustment tool in Photoshop.
Fellow graphic designers out there get your learn on!!
Cliffs notes-
Hue/saturation gives you independent control of specific color regions (reds, greens, yellows, magentas, cyans, and blues).
There are 3 sliders in the palette (see A in illustration below): 1. Lightness (rarely used as it doesn’t give you any control of tonal range, it either plugs up or washes out your image). 2. Saturation (controls the intensity of your color values) 3. Hue (lets you modify your colors ALL across the board)
You can Control/Command + click and drag over any spot on your image to quickly define a specific color range to apply your hue/saturation changes to.
When you are using this palette, inside an individual color channel (as opposed to master), you will notice two additional sliders at the bottom of the box. These sliders allow you to re-map the entire range of colors to an entirely different range of colors. (see B)
The bars BETWEEN the sliders at the bottom represent the range of colors on the top bar that are modified by the bottom bar (everything in dark grey between the bars); the triangular icons outside the bars on each side are “drop-off zones” (the lighter grey). These apply more gentler re-mappings of color from top bar to bottom. The longer these span, the subtler the transition. (see C)
When applying adjustments, it’s always recommended to use an adjustment layer so you can non-destructively mask out parts of the image you DON’T want to apply the modifications to!
For what it costs at the app store ($3) I must say, the features in this new iPhone app are well worth the money! Although it isn’t necessarily practical for the average user to have Photoshop-like image editing features all within the pocket-sized confines of an iPhone, this could definitely come in handy if you make consistent use of it’s built-in camera and want to edit images you take with it on the fly before sending to friends or uploading to Flickr.
PhotoForge comes with many of the basic imaging tools that Photoshop is revered for. There are different brushes and erasers to choose from, a crop tool, an eyedropper to select various color values, the ever-ubiquitous clone stamp tool, and the ability to zoom and and out of images. For editing you get many of Photoshop’s adjustment methods, including curves, levels, sharpening, hue/saturation, and brightness/contrast. It comes with the ability to save your images in RGB or CMYK, and the adjustments let you control each channel independently inside whichever colorspace you are working with. Finally, PhotoForge comes with 20 built-in filters and allows you to output your image to a variety of different sizes.
Not a bad effort on behalf of Ghostbirdsoft! Even though practical use as of now is mainly limited to pictures you take with your iPhone or images sent to you from friends on the device, who knows how many ways this app will make itself resourceful down the road. And seriously, for $3, you really can’t go wrong.
Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 9:12PM 
