Imaging guides

The Lighting Effects filter in Photoshop lets you add lighting to an image that’s either not well lit or that needs some creative lighting. While the filter has been around for many versions of Photoshop, it’s easier to use in CS3 and later because you can apply it using a Smart Object. This lets you adjust the filter if the settings aren’t quite right, something that wasn’t possible in earlier versions. 

Some of the best tools you can use in Photoshop are free and can be combined to create interesting art. This month, we’ll show you how to combine free silhouette brushes with Photoshop gradients and filters to create images suitable for framing. The brushes we used are tree silhouettes, from http://tinyurl.com/n67l7b. Download the ones you want, unzip the file and move the brush .abr file into your Photoshop Brushes folder. In most cases, this is C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\ Adobe\Adobe Photoshop\Presets\Brushes folder.

The Warp tool in Photoshop has a lot of creative uses, from wrapping images around a can or bottle to creating artistic elements for your designs. It’s been available in Photoshop for a long time, so you can use it regardless of the version of Photoshop you’re using. We’ll show you how to use it to warp shapes for a photo border. To get started, open a photo to apply the effect to. Crop the image and double-click the background layer to make it a regular layer. To add some extra space to the canvas, select the Crop tool and drag over the image.

If you work with images or video, and in particular colour correction, it’s important to make sure your monitor is properly calibrated. After all, you can’t properly assess the colours you’re manipulating if your monitor isn’t displaying them correctly. So what exactly is calibration? Your monitor’s display is made up of red, green and blue pixels, which combine to show every possible colour. There are a number of methods for classifying and displaying colour, depending on whether it’s intended for screen display, print or video.

Google SketchUp is a free and fun tool for creating 3D models. If you create a model of a building or object, you can even share it with other users via the Google 3D Warehouse. Begin by downloading the program from http://sketchup.google.com. Once it’s installed, launch the program, go to ‘Choose Template’ —> ‘Simple Template – Meters’ and click ‘Start using SketchUp’. You’ll see an image of a person on the screen and three axes. Click the Orbit tool and drag the axes to view the 3D space in a different way.

You don’t have to be a photographer to create great images in Photoshop. There are plenty of great sites that offer free and paid images you can use to make art and perfect your Photoshop skills. We’ll use some free textures to explore some cool Photoshop techniques that we’ll assemble into a simple collage. All the images used in these examples can be found at Mayang’s free textures site at http://mayang.com/textures. We’ve used an image of a car and buildings for the main techniques, and then assembled the final collage using other textures from the site.

If you shoot with a digital SLR, chances are you’ll be capturing your images in RAW format. These images need to be pre-processed before you can work with them in other applications. The open-source application Raw Therapee is a great RAW processor. It can also process JPEG and other photo formats so anyone can use it. Start by downloading and installing the most recent stable version of Raw Therapee from http://rawtherapee.com/downloads. Launch the program and in the Folders view in the bottom-left corner of the window, locate a folder containing the images to work with.

When you need to edit photos, a powerful shareware application is always a good option. This month we’ll get you started with PhotoPerfect, which offers a good range of editing features, many of which aren’t found in other programs. You can download PhotoPerfect from http://www.photoperfect.com/photoperfect-introduction.html. You can trial the program for free and are asked to register it if you intend to use it for profit or any other ‘non-trivial purpose’.

Cropping images to interesting sizes, such as the 16:9 letterbox movie size, gives you a starting point for some interesting effects. We’ll show you how to create an interesting movie-like effect in Photoshop using this letterbox image size. Start with an image that has some interesting detail across the middle of it and which could be something you might see in a film. Use the Crop tool to trim the image so that it’s much wider than it is tall and so you keep the most interesting area of the image.

One of the fun effects you can create in Photoshop is a page curl. This is easy to do and you can create as much of a curl as you want. We’ll show you how you can achieve this effect in Photoshop, but any photo editing program that has a warp filter can give you the same results. Start by turning the background layer of an image into a regular layer by double-clicking on it and clicking OK. Duplicate this layer by selecting it and clicking Layer —> ‘Duplicate Layer’. The top layer will have the page curl applied to it and the bottom layer will be greyscale.