Two essential and challenging Photoshop skills are Masking and Compositing. Fortunately for all of us out in Photoshop land, Katrin Eismann has written a masterful book on developing these skills, Photoshop Masking & Compositing
You will learn about selection tools and techniques, how to use masks and layers, advanced selection techniques for difficult subjects like human hair, and how to do flawless composites.
Katrin Eismann is a world class expert on photo retouching. She is one of the best of the best. In 2005 she was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame. Anything she writes should be high on your reading list if you are serious about making the most of your Photoshop skills.
Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition)
Everything you need to know about Dan Margulis is in Advanced Color Correction, Part One.
After you have devoured the book I recommend in that article, you will know why you need to get Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace
If you want to master color in Photoshop, Dan Margulis is the best of the best. He is one of the first three persons to be named as a member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame. And the book to get is Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction (5th Edition)
If you aren’t shooting RAW files with your digital camera (as opposed to jpeg files), you should think about the advantages of shooting in RAW. Read the article RAW vs JPEG Camera Files at my photography web site.
A lot of the quality of your final image will be determined by what you do with your RAW files when you open them in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR).
Bay Area Bridge. Photo © Jim Doty Jr.
I was asked recently how to re-size images for the web using Photoshop. The person asking the question was not only having problems resizing images, but the photos looked desaturated with muted colors. My instructions (below) are for using Photoshop CS3 for Windows, so some menu items may be a little different in other versions of Photoshop or with Photoshop Elements, but the basic principles and steps are the same.
My reply follows.
Every new version of Photoshop has one or more new goodies to make it tempting enough to upgrade. With Photoshop CS4, one of those new goodies is “Content Aware Scaling”. It is much easier to look at than try to describe. You can see it in action here.
You bought Adobe Photoshop CS3 or CS4 and it worked fine for a year or two. Then you get this message:
“Licensing for this product has stopped working. You cannot use this product at this time. You must repair the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling this product or contacting your IT administrator or Adobe customer support for help.”
You uninstall and reinstall Photoshop and it still doesn’t work. Now you are really frustrated, but you try uninstalling and reinstalling again. No luck. Now what?
There is a quick and easy way to use Photoshop to correct for a color cast in a photo. It is described in today’s email issue of Digital Darkroom Questions (DDQ) and is reproduced (with permission) below.