I’m finally getting full Photoshop. I wanted to play with Elements for a while, and then consider the full version. I’m looking forward to working with masks, curves, channels, and recipes/ actions. Any other advice on what I should be playing around with at first?
From what I’ve seen of your photos, you will probably find curves useful for your landscape images. Do a google search for Curves tutorials Photoshop + Curves.
I think your question would be easier to answer if folks knew what you like to do with your image editing software. Improving photos, creating web graphics, creative stuff, use selection tools, BW conversion etc?
Why do you say curves should be specifically useful for landscape images?
I will be doing mostly landscape work. My normal workflow is to adjust levels, adjust brightness/contrast, and bump up the saturation a touch. I rarely change the brightness/contrast sliders, but I usually check them out. I do resize for web images often, and I’ve played around with BW conversion a little for winter mountain scenes. As far as web work, I’m looking forward to being able to create an action to resize down to web size and thumb size efficiently, and for creating drop shadows with the settings I like automatically.
Eric, as I understand it, the tools Brightness/Contrast, Levels, and Curves represent a progression in control of the tones in an image. Brightness and Contrast are the most basic and provide the least control over image quality: one overall adjustment slider for each. Levels is a step up: three adjustment sliders for the RGB composite and/or three adjustment sliders each for the red, green, and blue channels – white point, black point, and midpoint. Curves is at the top of the heap: 256 separate adjustments for the RGB composite (and in full Photoshop, 256 for each of R, G, and B). Many pro workflows rely almost exclusively on Curves with a dash of Levels; the B/C tool is virtually non-existent. There’s a whole book on color correction using Curves ("Professional Photoshop – The Classic Guide to Color Correction" by Dan Margulis). The message seems to be, "Master Curves, and you master Photoshop color and tone correction."
I’ve just been reading up on curves, and I can’t wait to start using it. I’ve read in this forum of a curve download available for elements. Is this the same as Photoshop’s curves, except that you can only make RGB adjustments, no single-channel adjustments?
Eric, that’s essentially true – just composite, no R, G, B. It’s also available only as an adjustment layer, not a direct application to an image layer. I consider that more of an advantage than a disadvantage, though; I prefer the use of adjustment layers because they don’t ‘bruise the pixels’ of the image layer.
I still don’t know that much about curves. Thanks to Chuck for elaborating. I didn’t know that there was a book that dealt with it. But here are a couple of brief overviews on the use of curves.
I’m finally getting full Photoshop. I wanted to play with Elements for a while, and then consider the full version. I’m looking forward to working with masks, curves, channels, and recipes/ actions. Any other advice on what I should be playing around with at first?
Just to add to the posts already made by others, I won’t go into curves etc.
You will want to check out the measure tool. It is useful for ‘straightening’ photographs. I.E. Making the horizon horizontal etc.
The Patch tool is also very useful for ‘eliminating’ unwanted objects and artifacts from an image.
The difference between curves in Photoshop and Elements will be that in Elements you can only apply Curves in layer modes, rather than to specific channels (e.g., R, G, B) unless you separate the channels out into layers.
Like everything, the parts of PS that you visit first should be dependent on what you do with images, The first thing I would be visiting in Photoshop is exploration of the color settings and soft-proofing…and I would also learn to use tool presets and workspaces (to help manage palettes). Really the most important parts of Photoshop will be the same things you have in Elements — I work almost identically in PS and Elements to a point (most of my corrections are done in layers in either program, using the channel palette almost exclusively for work on alpha channels). That point would probably mostly have to do with automating functions with actions.
The real area of grand exploration is Image Ready — which often just gets dismissed. If you do anything with web images or have an interest in animation, rollovers, etc., that’s where you will have the most to learn. If you’d really gotten the most out of Elements, you should have some familiarity with all those things you mentioned, as there are work-arounds for all.
Color settings will offer a lot more opportunity. Calibrate. Without that, your previews can be deceiving, and your results…a crapshoot.
Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!
Related Discussion Topics
Nice and short text about related topics in discussion sections
