Welcome to Photoshop for absolute beginners.

I intend to write this tutorial in a very general way without making too many specificreferences to Photoshop commands and keep this as general as possible so that if you donot have Photoshop, which is after all a very expensive program, you can probably do

some of the same things in whatever program you of choose.

But before we start do you really need Photoshop at all.

It is not necessary to have Photoshop to carry out editing. For most of my normal day-to-day photography in connection with my work I use a much simpler program which can dothe basic things I need. That is to say straighten horizons, crop images, adjust exposureetc and resize.

The program I use is Irfanview which is not only very quick and easy to use it also has theadvantage of being free. www.irfanview.com

Alternative more fully capable programs are also available much more cheaply than photoshop.

The obvious examples are Gimp www.gimp.org which is an open source image editor andfree

There is also Google's offering which is the more basic but functional Picasa which youcan get for free www.picasa.google.com

If you are allergic to layers then there are two programs both American which are relativelyinexpensive and very good for editing. Both of these unlike Photoshop are designedspecifically with photography in mind and therefore do not have all the graphic design bloatwhich makes Photoshop so difficult to understand.Lightzone $99.95 www.lightcrafts.com

Picture Window $89.95 www.dl-c.com

These both use an entirely different style of interface to Photoshop so this tutorial will notreally help out all that much. However both programs can do everything a photographerwould need and it is possible that you will achieve your results more quickly with them..

Finally if you are into extreme effects and want a competent image editor which can alsodo graphic design tricks, accept Photoshop plug-ins and have the latest gimmicks such ascontent aware resize you could try Xara's offering Xara Photo and Graphic Design 7which costs £69 www.Xara.comAll of these are available as free downloads for a limited trial period.

Finally there is the Adobe alternative Lightroom which is a valuable addition to Photoshopor indeed an alternative to Photoshop if you do not want to do detailed retouching.However Lightroom is hardly inexpensive the full offering is £237.60 but you might wish toconsider it if you choose to shoot in raw

Photoshop for absolute beginners part two

Before starting on image manipulation it is important to understand what we are dealingwith.Without getting all philosophical we must realise that colour is not actually a physicalproperty. It is an attribute created by human vision. This tutorial is highly simplified andcolour theory is more complicated than I am about to set out. However I think that this issufficiently detailed for our purposes.Essentially the human eye has two types of cells one which senses general luminosity i.e.brightness and shadow and essentially picks up changes in brightness making humanbeings particularly sensitive to lines and patternsA second set of cells sense colour. Essentially they sense a continuum of colour blueyellow and red Green. You will immediately recognise how a failure of one of thosesystems leads to the familiar red Green colour blindness that affects some members of thepopulation.Because of this quirk of nature it proves possible to replicate the entire visible spectrumusing just three colours red blue and green.In a digital camera the sensor does not record colours and indeed it does not record thecolour of each individual pixel. Instead the sensor is covered normally by what is known asa Bayer matrix which is a series of coloured filters. Again as a quirk of human vision it hasbeen found necessary to have twice as many green filters as there are either red or blue.Therefore if you have a 12 megapixel camera six megapixels are green and threemegapixels red and a further three megapixels blue. We then need a computer tounscramble the mess and create an image which contains 12 megapixels each of whichcan represent millions of individual colours.The mathematical representation of those millions of colours is referred to in the jargon asa colour space and for the time being we will simply consider the most common colourspace which is referred to as sRGB And is used by most consumer cameras TV sets videocameras and the like to represent colours as numerical equivalents.It is those numbers which we are going to manipulate in Photoshop.

Unfortunately for the shop is a computer program colour science is a technical disciplineand it follows from that that there is a certain amount of jargon that we must address.

JPEG (joint photographic experts group) is the method of mathematically representing aphotograph as numbers and because the eye is more sensitive to changes in brightnessthan changes in colour it is possible to represent the photograph at a higher resolution forluminance and lower resolution for colour and thereby produce a smaller computer file. Ifyou want all the details and I can't see why you would www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jpeg.All you really need to know is that in compressing the file the image can be degraded andnormally this is unnoticeable. However if you overdo it or you try to enlarge the photographpast its capabilities you will see the square JPEG artefacts created by the low resolutioncolour component and it will ruin your photograph.

Bayer Filter The coloured array of filters put over the sensor of a normal digital camera.There are some makes of camera which use different filters or entirely different processesbut more than 90% use the Bayer Filter

Demomosaicing The mathematical process undertaken at in the camera or by a rawprocessor such as light room or Adobe camera raw to convert the individual sensor pixeloutput into a properly coloured image. i.e. it removes the Bayer mosaic from the imageand replaces it with full colour

Anti-aliasing filter This as a very technical explanation but briefly it is a piece of closingglass placed in front of the centre of the digital camera to blur the image before it arrives atthe sensor. This spreads light out from hitting one pixel so that it hits the ones around it.This is believed to necessary to provide highest colour fidelity. However some cameramanufacturers or mate the filter. This is one reason why a digital image tends to needsharpening.

Next I promise we will actually open Photoshop.

Lesson 3 Layers

As promised we are finally going to actually use Photoshop

When we launch the program we get to see a screen which will look something like this.

However straightaway we hit upon one of for Photoshop's complexities. Your screen mightlook nothing at all like this. That is because everything is customisable. Advanced workersmight have a screen layout that they prefer to use but until you get going with the program,and certainly to make these lessons more understandable I would suggest that you set outyour screen as I have done.

If your screen looks like mine then job done. Otherwise I suggest that you empty it byclicking all the little X's in the right-hand corner of the palates until it is completely blank.

What is shown is controlled through the windows menu. Mine looks like the illustrationbelow. You will see the tick boxes next to info, layers, options and tools.

The option selection inserts the toolbar at the top of the screen and its contents depend onwhatever tool you have selected in the tool panel.

The tools item opens up the small palette shown of the left of the illustration with the

brushes etc.

That much should be straightforward. However when you select the layers palette you maynot necessarily get what is shown in the illustration.

You will see that my layers palette includes layers, channels, paths and history

When you make the selection you might get all of those and more or you might find thatsome of those options do not come up. If some of those options do not come up then youwill see that they have individual items in the menu and you can select them until all thepanels are visible on the screen. Unfortunately they might arrive in a jumbled mess.

You will find however that if you pick up the panels by the top line you can dock themtogether so that you end up with a neat composite panel as in the illustration. If there areany extras that for Photoshop has put in and you do not think that they will be useful to youat this stage you can similarly get hold of them by the topline and pull them out of thepanel. You can then close them with the little X's.

Once your screen looks more or less like mine you need to save it.

At the top of the menu you will see the entry save workspace simply click on that and giveit a name. Photoshop remembers the workspace you used last time and will open up likethis every time you use it. If for some reason you manage to mess up the workspace youwill be able to reload it in the future You will find that the name you give the workspace astag itself on to the bottom of the menu. Those of you getting ahead of yourselves will

realise that you can design several different palette layouts and give them different namesand switch between them at will.

Now to get something done.

I assume that you are a photographer and are not going to create a new artwork fromscratch so we will open a photograph. We will get on to raw files later in the process andfor now we will assume that you have a folder somewhere on your hard drive with JPEGsin it.

Open the file menu and then select a photograph to open.

You probably want to jump in and start messing with the picture. But before you do youreally need to get to grips with Photoshops fundamental feature Layers.

At this stage your pallette won't look quite like the one above but it will show yourphotograph in a single layer labelled background.

This is quite restricted and most of the power comes from having additional layers. Theusual first step and the one we will try now is to duplicate the background by dragging theexisting layer to the new layer icon which is arrowed in the illustration above. Photo shopwill immediately create a new layer and label it background copy. For most simpleprocesses this is quite sufficient but if you get into serious retouching the number of layerscan escalate. It is therefore good practice to rename this layer to something meaningful.

Simply double click on the text “Background copy” and a little box opens up where you canput in a meaningful name. The one above is obviously not much more useful than theoriginal but in a complex file this might read for example adjust contrast.

There is another sort of layer that you can create and it is termed an adjustment layer andthis might be more obviously useful. This is inserted into the palate by clicking on the icon.

When you do another menu opens up and you can choose the type of adjustment youwish to make. For the purpose of the tutorial we will select a fairly violent adjustment andclick on hue/saturation. A dialogue box opens up and for the time being click on ok to closeit. The layers palette changes but the image on screen does not.

So far so pointless. We now have three layers in our palate and nothing has happened.

We can however now have a look at how these layers interact with each other.

At present if you look at the top left of the palate you will see the word “normal”. This is thelayer blending mode and when it reads normal the layer completely obliterates everythingunderneath. That is often what you want. However you do have a bewildering an array ofchoices as to how these layers blend. When you click on the little arrow you get a menu.

You can play with these at leisure but for the time being we will simply consider the moreimportant ones which are normal, darken, multiply, lighten, overlay, colour and luminosity.

Normal Simply lies as a solid layer and blocks out what is underneathDarken Anything darker on the top layer overwrites what is on the layers underneathLighten Anything lighter on the top layer overwrites what is on the layers underneathColour The colour of the top layer replaces the colour of the layers underneathLuminosity The luminosity of the top layer replaces the luminosity of the layers

underneathOverlay This is the first of the weird layers. It takes midtone grey as a reference

anything darker the midtone grey is made darker anything lighter thanmidtone grey is made lighter. This might not make sense now but it will lateron

Multiply The contents of the two layers are combined

Since Photoshop is a computer program and what we are really doing is manipulating thenumbers which represent the colours and tones in the image, these blend modes are infact mathematical expressions and if you really want to know how they work you canGoogle them and delve into the mathematics.

The intensity of all these effects can be controlled by use of a opacity slider at the top ofthe layers palette.

You can either type a percentage directly into the opacity box or if you click on the littlearrow a slider opens up which you can move from side to side to control the amount of theeffect.

Underneath the opacity slider there is another one labelled Fill which is to most intents andpurposes does same. We might get on to discussing the differences in a more advancedlesson.

And finally before we start destroying our photo you can control the effect by use of amask.

Again advanced workers will know that there are other options but we will cover thoselater.

This is really the end of the lesson but it needs a couple of demonstrations to show youwhat we have done.

Firstly we will look at the multiply blend mode.

To select a layer click on the box with its name and the box will then turn blue to show youthat it is the active layer. So select the background copy or whatever you changed thename to and change the blend mode to multiply. At the right-hand end of the layer box is alittle [eye] and if you click on that you will see that it turns the layer on and off so that andthe effect disappears and reappears

If you have done this correctly the image should become darker and more colourful.Sometimes this improves an image, especially skys, out of all recognition. You can controlthe degree of this change by using the opacity slider.

Now if we select the adjustment layer you will see that it as two icons in it. One is a squarebox the other looks a bit like a histogram.

If you click on the histogram the Hue & Saturation control will pop up on the screen. Forthe purpose of making an obvious alteration I suggest that you just push the saturationslider all the way to the right and click ok.

If you think that the image looks better you might need your eyes testing. However thepurpose of this is to show that once you have inserted an adjustment layer you can goback to it at any time during your edit and change it.

If you click again on the histogram icon you will find that you can adjust the amount ofsaturation you have applied.

Once again you can alter the amount of the adjustment by using the opacity slider and youwill see that the opacity slider all the effects the active layer. Changing it does not affectany alterations to opacity you made on the multiplication layer below.

The final part of this lesson now concerns masking. You can put the mask on any lay youlike by clicking on the mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette. This is the icon thatlooks like a grey rectangle with a circular white dot in the middle.

In this case however you will see that when you create an adjustment layer it comes with amask already applied. That mask is the white box next to the histogram.

When the mask is white the effect shows through and when the mask is black the effect ishidden.

If you click on the white box and then use the shortcut key [control I] The box should turnblack and the picture should return to normal.

In the illustration I've already painted on the mask yours should just look black. You willnotice the white outline around the black box which shows that the mask is selected.

If you then take a white brush and paint on the image with the mask selected you will seethat were ever you paint the effect begins to show through and that the icon of the maskshows a rough idea of where you have painted.

The illustration above shows the that I have painted a white splodge in the middle and thehigh saturation scene underneath shows through.

The recent correspondence in the forums concerning replacing skies in photographs ledme to conclude that we should perhaps consider selections and how to select items beforewe move further into the fundamentals of Photoshop.

We must realise is that whilst we may use Photoshop for photo editing that is only one ofits many uses. There are probably more graphic designers and illustrators using theprogram than photographers and many of the drawing and selection tools are designed fortheir needs.

Some of these tools can at first sight be very attractive and I know that I will get a lot ofcomments telling me that they work. However 2 tools often used by photographers are inreality of very limited utility. These are the magic wand tool and the magnetic lasso. Ifthese tools work they can be very fast but they rely on computer algorithms to detect theedge of whatever it is you are selecting or cutting out. Unfortunately the higher theresolution of the photograph the less likely it is that the object you wish to select has a neatand clear edge. Selecting the exact edge requires a degree of intelligence which residesbetween your ears and is unfortunately unavailable to the computer.

It is possible to adjust the sensitivity of the tools by changing thresholds etc but in the endyou are likely to be left with a selection which is not quite right and if you use the selectionin an image the joint is obvious.

Fortunately most of the time when we want to make a localised change the edge of theselection is not important and we simply want it to be as soft and unnoticeable as possible.Thankfully that is a much easier task.

Essentially within Photoshop there are three systems for selecting parts of an image

The first which is rarely used by photographers I presume because it takes practice is thepath, this is the tool of choice for difficult selections with definite edges.

The second tool is one of the selection devices in photoshop which surrounds an area ofthe image with the familiar marching ants.

The final method and the one which I suggest should be your first choice in most cases isthe mask.

All of these are to some extent interchangeable and it is often possible to change onemethods into another.

The path is essentially a vector shape. That is to say it is a mathematical construct whichyou can edit and alter like any other object in Photoshop. The line around the areaselected consists of nodal points and you can select individual points or add additionalpoints and edit them to move the points or change the curve of the line. This can be doneat any time. The path you are currently working on is known to Photoshop is the work pathand if you open the paths dialogue it will always have that name. This is the Photoshopdefault name just like the first image you open is always called background.

Just like layers you can drag the work path to the new object icon and give it a usefulname and save it to be used or edited later.

The image above shows a path created by use of the pen tool. The pen tool can be usedfor straightforward drawing but when used to create a path the path icons are all checked.

This tool needs practice because it is not immediately obvious how it works. If you take thepen tool and click on blank page it will create a point. The next time you click on the pageanother point will appear and a line will join them together. In this way it is possible to drawa shape but that is not very useful.

Each time you click the pen you create what is known as a node. If instead of clicking youput the pen on the page and draw it out some handles appear such as those shown at theleft-hand side above. Those handles control the radius of the curve and its direction.

When you are drawing round a complex shape you can therefore create quite a smallnumber of nodes and by adjusting the angles curve the line to fit the shape. I would like tosay that this is easier to do than say but that is not the case and you will be well advised todownload some simple photographs on white backgrounds from the internet and practice.

You will see that the actual pen icon in the toolbar has a black triangle in the corner toindicate that there are other tools underneath it. These are the path editing tools and byusing them and combinations of the Shift Alt and Control keys you can achievetremendous control over the individual points.

The pen tool is the fundamental tool used in Adobe Illustrator and therefore tends to be thetool of choice for graphic designers and others charged with taking elements out ofphotographic images to use in other designs.

The selection is essentially rasterised. That is to say it is pixel-based and is part of theimage. There are limited adjustments possible in that you can add or remove sections ofthe selection and you can grow or shrink the selection and adjust the feathering orblurriness around the edges. However you cannot pick up little bits of the edges and alterthe shape as you can with a path.

This image shows a shape drawn using the rectangular selection tool which is the simplestof the selection tools to use and the options to adjust the selection contained in the selectmenu.

A selection does not immediately appear in the image as an alpha channel but via theselection menu it is possible to save a selection as an alpha channel and give it a name. Atthat stage it becomes somewhat indistinguishable from a mask. It is not so far as I'maware possible to save a selection as a path.

Finally we have the mask. It is possible to insert a mask onto any layer by clicking on themask icon and some types of layer in particular adjustment layers are automaticallygenerated by photoshop with a mask.

The concept of masks is sometimes difficult for people to grasp. In the same way thatlayers are not intuitive to everyone the idea of masking takes a little thought. Howeverwhat the mask does is control the visibility of the layer beneath the layer which carries themask. The following image should make this clear.

The bottom layer as an image of a camera. The layer above it is filled with pink paint andwould under normal circumstances completely hide the image below. However we haveinserted a mask on the layer which can be seen in the icon to the right hand side of thelayer and you can see that it the mask is white with a black circle in the middle. You cantherefore see the camera through the layer.

Normally you would want something more subtle than this.

The value of masks over selections is that the mask on the visible layer always appears asa temporary alpha channel and you can therefore drag it to the new object icon to save themask for use in other parts of the image. This is not much better than the option offered bya selection.

The advantage however is that the mask itself is a photoshop object and you can edit it.You can apply Gaussian blur to feather the edges, you can paint on it with white or blackpaint or various shades of grey to adjust the size or shape of the aperture and you canreplace it or completely delete it at any time. These are options that are not available toyou if you use a selection because as soon as you deselect the selection with the effect ispermanently embedded in the image and you can't go back.

In the case of a mask if you accidentally paint something white which should be black youcan just change the colour of the paint and go over it.

It is for this reason that I prefer to use masks because I am terminally indecisive.

But one of the beauties of masks and selections are that you don't have to choose.

At the bottom of the channels palette is a small dotted circular icon and when you hoveryour mouse over it the tooltip load channel selection appears. You can therefore drag anychannel which includes your mask to that icon to load it into the image as a selection anduse it in the same way you would use any other selection.

Similarly if you create a selection on any layer and have that selection active and thenclick on the mask icon you will discover that the mask is created from the selection.

You can therefore quickly jump between the two methods of selecting areas and use thevarious tools available to each type of selection to adjust whatever it is you are doing.

Strictly speaking the purpose of a selection is to limit the activity of whatever tool you areusing be it a paintbrush some sort of image adjustment or eraser or to the area within themarching ants. Essentially it allows you to paint over the edges without spoiling the rest ofthe image.

The purpose of the mask is to control the visibility of parts of the individual layers.

Selection by Mask

Selection by magic wand

Selection by path

Selection by Magnetic lasso

Alternative software. The open source route.This tutorial is being written using Open Office which is an open source office programsimilar in capability to Microsoft office but has the advantage of being free and is updatedon a regular basis, again for free.

I started using the program many years ago and I've used it in a business environmentever since. Because the program is open source developers continually add features to itand several features that I use all the time such as saving these tutorials as PDFs and theability to open almost any type of text document arrived in OpenOffice long before theywere available in Microsoft's expensive version.

The tutorial I prepared a week or two ago to showed you how to select parts of an image inparticular skys using the channels feature of Photoshop.

Lee subsequently provided an alternative using Photoshop Elements which comes freewith a lot of digital cameras and does not include that capability.

I have therefore been looking around to see what is available as open source which couldprovide a competent and capable photo editing suite without involving either piracy, theft orthe outlay of a substantial amount of money.

As a camera club member you probably own a digital SLR or a high-grade compact orbridge camera you may very well be shooting raw files.

You will therefore need some software to convert those files to something you can show toyour friends and exchange. You need a raw converter and by paying money either you canuse Camera Raw which is embedded into Photoshop or you can buy Lightroom.

Recently I posted a link on the club website to Capture One which was available as a freedownload as a perk from digital photography magazine. However I suspect that CaptureOne will not be free for ever and that owners of the free program are not likely to get freeupgrades etc.

There is however an open source alternative.

The program Dcraw has been written to enable Linux users to decode raw files andsomeone has written a plug-in utilising it which can be imported into the open source photoediting editing program Gimp just like Camera Raw forms part of Photoshop.

However one of the joys of raw editing programs is that they are designed purely forphotography and therefore are very easy to use and understand and do not come with allthe graphic design and digital artist bloat which so seriously affects programs likePhotoshop.So without further ado I introduce Raw therapee.

http://rawtherapee.com/

This is version 2.4

When you open the program it looks very like Lightroom. Obviously they have not spent asmuch money on making a pretty interface but you have most of the same tools. In factwhen you delve into the program you will find that they have even more tools than lightroom because you have access to individual colour channels including LA B channels.

The one thing which is absent might actually delight some of you. This is just a rawconverter it does not have all the database and cataloguing tools which take up so much ofLightroom. Essentially you get the develop module.

The program is fairly self explanatory. In the bottom left-hand corner there is a directorytree and when you select a directory the panel to its immediate right populates withthumbnails of the contents of that directory.

Like many similar programs you can then use star ratings etc to help you sort out thepictures.

In the image above you will see that some of the thumbnails have star ratings and thosestar ratings were given to the raw files in Lightroom when I originally took the pictures.Rawtherapee has imported those settings automatically.

The program recognised raw files from the various cameras I have used and I suspect thatthere are profiles for most of the common makes and models.

If you have an obscure camera you can still use the program provided that you preconvertyour raw files to the Adobe DNG format first.

Adobe supply free software to carry out that conversion which is updated alongside thenew versions of Lightroom and camera raw. It therefore likes a month or two behind

introduction of cameras.

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/

The screenshot below is part of the interface showing the exposure controls. There is aloop view to enable you to look at details the photograph at 100% resolution and thesliders are in this case have been manipulated to perform highlight recovery on the facewhich was a little blown out in the original.

The programme also supports direct export to your photo editing software of choice and bydefault it will export to either gimp or photo shop. In the preferences tag you simply set upthe path to the editing program you wish to use and then there is a button to the bottomright of the program interface to send the image with your adjustments over to photo shop.

You don't get round-trip editing like in light room but that is because there is no cataloguingfeature.

Under the transform tab you find sliders which will enable you to remove or in the exampleabove introduce barrel distortion, vignetting, rotate the photograph crop the image andresize. In other words most of the basic raw manipulation you would want to do.

The colour tab has all the controls you would expect.

The standard ones are the colour balance which can be adjusted a similar way to otherraw processors. There is a eyedropper tool to select a neutral tone to carry out automaticwhite balance thing or you can pick a white balance from a drop-down box or you can dialyour own from a colour temperature.

You also have access to a channel mixer which you can use to create your own colourbalance.

There is also access to the LA B channels and you can boost colour separation.

There are also dialogues for ICM for colour management and facilities to choose colourspaces.

You do not get the luminance and colour sliders that you find a light room but the channelmixer provides the same functionality in a different form.

The detail tab provides sharpening and noise reduction sliders. These are implemented ina slightly different form to in Lightroom but the function and use is fairly obvious.

This is just a quick run through of the program. I only downloaded it this week to have aquick look at it.

The release notes indicate that version 3 has an upgraded interface.

My only complaint with the program compared with Lightroom is that there is a delaybetween moving the slider and the correction appearing on the image. This takes a littlewhile to get used to compare it with Lightroom but on the other hand you do save over£200.

Since this was written Version 3 has been launched which addresses all the faultshighlighted and is now a very competent alternative to Lightroom

I have also downloaded a copy of Gimp and will provide a run through of that program inmy next lesson.

Open source software photo editing using the Gimp.

This is genuinely photo editing for beginners. Until about a week ago I knew of the Gimpbut I'd never made any attempt to understand how it works.

I am going to run through how to obtain the Gimp, how to set it up as a photo editor andthen run through the lake tutorial previously done with Photoshop.

This is going to be a quick run through and it might help if you look at the Photoshoptutorials for basic details such as why we might be doing certain manoeuvres and thenread this one to see how those moves can be achieved in Gimp.

As I say I have only been using the program for a couple of weeks and if there is anyonewho has more experience with the software and feels able to chip in with any comments oradvice I'll be pleased to hear from them.

Gimp is open source image editing software available for most operating systems. Thedownload website is at http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

You download and install it like any other software.

When you download the software the help file is a separate file and you need to make surethat you download both the program and the instructions.

When you open it up you will see that it looks like most other Linux-based software that isto say it opens as a series of windows on your desktop rather than in a single window likePhotoshop does. This takes a little getting used to if you have not used a Linux machine ora Mac

As you can see my desktop is a bit of a mess.

When you open the program it will probably not look exactly like my desktop. You shouldhave at least two windows open, the main one on the left in the image above, the toolbarand the middle one which is the window which will hold the image while you work on it.

The other two palettes floating to the right-hand side may not be there because just like wefound in Photoshop the interface is infinitely customisable.

You will probably have at least one palette open which will be the layers palette. If it is notyou can call it up with the shortcut control L or you can go to the Windows menu at the topof the centre window and using the tab for dockable dialogues open up a menu and findlayers and select it.

Once you have done that you should have a palettes window and on my installation itlooks like this.

Arrowed at the top is a small triangular button. If you click on this it opens up a menu of allthe different dialogs you can dock into this palette.

I suggest that you choose the ones that I recommended in the photo shop tutorial andthese are layers, channels and paths. You will see that I have also docked the pointerdialog which is something not available in Photoshop and I suggest that you dock that tabas well.

The following image shows the selection of tabs available.

We will find that as we use the program that some of the other dialogues pop upautomatically when we choose a tool which uses them.

So having set up our working environment we can now set about editing a picture.

You will remember from the Photoshop tutorials that I have a photograph taken in the LakeDistrict no great shakes but it is useful for tutorial purposes.

We will therefore open that in our new image editor and see what we can do.

The menu system is fairly self-explanatory so you simply go to the manipulation windowand click on the file menu and then browse for the image. Once you click on the selectedimage it opens up in the window. Like this.

At the bottom of the layers palette there are a series of icons which will remind you of theoptions available in photo shop. There are a few less of them because gimp uses the rightbutton on the mouse to provide menu options. The icon which looks like two images on topof each other is the new layer icon and in Gimp it duplicates the active layer and adds it tothe layer stack. That is what we want to do here so click it.

Just like in Photoshop it gives it a name and just like Photoshop you can click on thatname and change it to something useful. This is the first difference. Simply typing thename does not work. You need to use the right click button on your mouse to open up amenu and choose edit layer properties and there you can change the name of the layer.Just for the sake of it I have called this layer levels because that is what we are going todo with it.

Now if you remember the photo shop tutorial we used the info palette to enable us to

check the colours at a couple of points in the image to make sure that we were notintroducing any casts. In Photoshop we set the monitoring points by using a tool that washidden under the eyedropper. In Gimp the tool exists but it is hidden in a different place.

If you look at the edge of the image you will see that there is a dotted line. This is not aselection as you might first soon but is in fact a guideline. If you control click on thatguideline you can then drag the line onto the image. You will find that both the top and sideguides drag together and you can place the intersection of those guidelines at any point onthe image. In Gimp you are allowed 4 points but we only need 2. One highlight and onedeep shadow.

This image is the corner of the window and you can see the dotted guideline that you havetwo control click on and the resultant monitoring point that is inserted in the image whenyou have dragged the guidelines to the required location.

I then added the information dialogue to the right hand palette which now looks like this.

We can now do our correction. The levels command is part of the colours menu and withthe top layer active we select it.

This is very like the equivalent control in Photoshop. You can individually adjust each ofthe channels and you can adjust all of them together. Everything together is referred to asvalue in gimp it would have been labelled RGB in Photoshop. You will also note a furtherenhancement which is not present in photoshop which is the large button which will enableyou to switch directly to the curves dialogue should you so wish.

If you read the previous tutorial you know what to do. You drag the end arrows of eachlevel until they reach the data shown by the bumps in the histogram. You keep an eye onthe information palette to check that once you have adjusted all the three levels that thenumbers are more or less the same in each channel showing that the highlights andshadows have remained neutral.

You should now have an image which has more intense colouration. Click OK.

We will now move onto brightening up the mid-range contrast in photo shop we did thisusing a sharpening manoeuver and we will do the same in gimp.

Click on the new layer icon to duplicate the top layer will stop sharpening is found in thefilters menu and is in the submenu and hands. Choose unsharp mask.

You should end up with something which looks like this.

Once again the sliders and dialogues will be familiar if you have used photo shop but youwill see that the numbers are different.

For the high radius low amount move in photo shop you choose a radius of 30 to 50 pixelsdepending on the resolution of the image and an amount of something like 30%. Howeveryou will see from the sliders above that I have chosen a radius in that range but that theamount is about one. The slider acts exactly the same just the numbers are different.

Having made the move you can then click ok.

As you would expect you can now vary the opacity of these layers to fine tune the sparkleadded by the sharpening manoeuvre.

As an additional refinement and to show how it works in gimp we will now add a mask tothis layer because while the water now looks sparkly and the sky is generally improved asa result of the sharpening the white clouds have blown out.

Once again this is done using the right button on the mouse. Make sure that the top layeris active that is to say coloured blue and then right click on it and the layer mask menuopens up.

This dialogue is self-explanatory provided you know what a mask is. The option we aregoing to choose here is white full opacity. What this means is that the mask will completelyhide the layer underneath. Which is the default position if there is no mask on the layer. Ifwe choose black we will completely hide our sharpening layer and reveal the unsharpenedlayer below.

The other options might make sense to you if you are familiar with masks but we willignore them for now. Having clicked the white full opacity radio button we click add.

Now we are going to need a brush. This is selected from the tools palette to the left whenwe click on the brush icon the bottom part of the palette changes to show the variouscontrols for the brush.

If you explore this palette you will find there are a lot of variations you can make to yourbrush but in this case we are simply looking for a nice soft brush roughly the same size asour clouds.

We select a nice soft brush and then use the scale slider to adjust its size. Just like in forthe shop the square brackets also enable you to adjust the size of the brush once you startpainting with it.

Make sure that you have clicked on the little white square which is the mask icon on thetop layer and then having adjusted the opacity of the brush to say 25% and the mode tonormal just start to paint over the whitest parts of the clouds with a black brush. As you dothis the detail will return because the un-sharpened layer underneath will begin to showthrough.

Once you are satisfied with your brush work stop.

Our last enhancement is adjust to adjust the brightness and contrast of the image and

demonstrate the curves dialogue.

So we need a new left. Once again click on the new layer icon. The top layer including themask is duplicated. We do not want to have the mask on this layer because it will onlycomplicate matters. Again we can right click on the layer and you will see that a menuopens up and we can choose apply the mask. This will remove the mask from the layer butleave it looking exactly as it does. If you chose

We can also edit the attributes and call this layer curves.

The curves dialogue is found under the colours menu at the top of the window and whenyou select the dialogue you will end up with something like this.

If you push the centrepoint of the curve to the left the mid-range tones of the picture willbrighten up. If you pull down the bit at the left-hand edge you will deepen the shadows andthe top control point that I've put on simply protects some of the highlights in the sky.

Clicking on the preview checkbox allows you to see what is happening to your picture andyou can click it on and off until you are happy with the result.

Because this is on a layer and we can adjust its opacity you can afford to go a bit too farwith your contrast adjustment and then click okay.

I then knocked the opacity of the top layer back to about 75% and ended up with this.

You are probably going to want to save your completed masterpiece. Again this is slightlydifferent to photoshop. It will drive you mad till you find out how it works.

You go to the file menu and choose save as. If you do not put a dot JPG at the end of thefile name gimp will save it in its own file format which is like for the PSD format andcontains all the layer and other information. However if you put the .JPG at the end thenthe compression dialogue will open up and you can save the file.

The little X to close the gimp is at the top of the tools palette

Selections and MasksIn our last lesson we looked at methods of selection and we will start with a recap.

For the time being we will ignore the pen tool and concentrate on the most useful selectionmethods for photographers which are selections and masks.

These are implemented through different mechanisms within Photoshop but they are veryclosely related and, as you will see as we progress through this discussion, you can swapfrom one to the other very easily so that they become more or less interchangeable.However there is an important difference between selections and masks.

Essentially a selection is a method of selecting part of an image or layer and restrictingimage adjustments or brushstrokes to the area defined by the selection. This to sayeverything is happening on one layer.

A mask resides on the top layer of a multilayer document and controls the visibility of thelayers beneath. That is to say a mask requires at least two layers to do anything useful.

This is all very well and so theoretical but we really need an example to show what thismeans. Photographic images are exceedingly complicated so for the purpose of thisexample we will create our own black-and-white image to demonstrate the principles.

We will create a new canvas and to keep things manageable we will make this just 500pixels wide and we will fill it with white. We do this by selecting new from the file menu.

We get this dialog box fill in the dimensions required and click OK

Now we will make a selection. Again to keep things really simple we will select therectangular marquee and draw a nice rectangular box in the middle of our canvas. We willthen click the little black-and-white box next to the colour selector to bring up the defaultblack-and-white colours and click the little arrow at the other corner to make black theforeground colour. We then click on the paint bucket and use it to fill our new selection.

You should now have a white canvas with a black box in the middle of it. The marchingants will show that the selection remains active.

We need to compare this with alternative methods in a few minutes so drag thebackground layer to the new layer Icon to duplicate it. You will have now have two layers,both identical, each consisting of a black square in the middle of a white canvas.

With the top layer active shown by the label are turning dark blue we will do something tothe selection. We have already seen that by having part of our canvas selected the actionof the paint bucket was restricted just to the selection. If you want to try an experiment trytaking the paint bucket and clicking on the canvas outside the selected area you will findthat nothing happens.

What we will do now is apply a commonly used filter to our image. Go to the filter menuand select Gaussian Blur and choose a radius of five pixels. This is a low resolution imageso quite small numbers will have a big effect.

Your screen should now look something like the following image.

Click ok to apply the blur. Now get rid of the selection by either using control D or going tothe select menu and choosing deselect from the menu.

You may already know how the magnifying glass tool works. But we will now use it toexamine the corner of our black rectangle. If you click on the magnifying glass tool you caneither just click on the image which will cause it to magnifier or more usefully you can useit to draw a square selection around the part of the image you want to magnify. So take themagnifying glass tool and draw a rough rectangle which takes in the top corner of ourblack rectangle. Like so...

As you would expect the edge of our rectangle is now blurred and has become faintertowards the edges.

However you will also note that the blur is confined within the area defined by theselection. To labour this point click on the little eye on the top layer and select the bottomlayer to make it active. There is no selection running now so if you do anything to theimage it will apply to all of it. Go to the filter menu and when you open the menu you willsee that at the very top is the last filter used that is to say Gaussian blur. If you click on thatitem rather than going through the choose blur choose Gaussian blur routine you will applythe filter with exactly the same parameters as last time. That is what we want to do so clickon the top heading Gaussian blur.

If you have done everything exactly as per instructions the magnified section should still bevisible albeit on the lower layer and you should therefore have an image which looks likethis.

It is quite similar to the previous image but if you look carefully you will see that the edgesare no longer square. To demonstrate the difference between the two layers we can use

one of the blending modes offered by Photoshop that is to say difference. This is usefulwhen you are checking the effect of a filter.

This shows quite clearly how the effect of the filter on the lower layer which did not havean active selection has extended beyond the area of the rectangle which in the case of theupper layer was protected by a selection.

To recap therefore a selection works on a single layer and serves to restrict the effect of animage alteration whether it be by an image adjustment or a brushstroke to the area withinthe selection. It can be also looked on as a way of protecting the rest of the image outsidethe selected area and stopping that area being affected by the tool you are using.

To say that another way in the example above on the top layer where a selection wasactive the effect of the blur was restricted to the rectangular area. The area inside thatrectangle became fainter round the edges but the area outside the rectangle was fullyprotected and did not become slightly grey but remained white.

On the lower layer where there was no active selection the filter affected both the whiteand the black areas of the image.

By now I'm sure you were becoming quite familiar with the can stroll control structure so Idon't need to give you detailed instructions. So we will add a new way to the documentand use the paint bucket to fill the layer with white we will take the rectangular marqueeand we will draw another rectangle in the middle of the canvas. You should end up withsomething that looks like this.

This time you will see that we will enter the figure of 20 in the feather dialog which appearsat the top of the window before we draw the selection.

Very often although we want to restrict the activity of our painting your adjustment wewanted to blend into the rest of the image and we can do that by softening the edge of ourselection by feathering. In this case because our selection was rectangular we can seethat something has happened because the corners of rounded off. However if the selectionwas an irregular shape the effect of the feathering might not be so obvious.

In this case the marching ants do not mark the edge of the protected area. Instead theymark the point were pixels are 50% selected. This the meaning of this might not beobvious so we will carry out a little exercise which will show you how it works.

Make sure that the foreground colour is black and then select a brush, I chose a 19 pixelbrush and it is important to make sure that the brush is hard and that the opacity and floware 100% and that the mode is normal. In other words we do not want any soft edges onthe brush to hide the effect of our feathering.

Then simply paint a diagonal line across the canvas from one corner to the otherpassengers through the centre of your selection.

As you can see the brushstroke extends quite a long way outside the dotted linesgradually becoming fainter as it moves away from the selected area.

Because the tools for selection are immediately obvious in the tool panel a lot ofnewcomers to Photoshop choose selections for most of their adjustments. However eventhough the recent editions of Photoshop have greatly improved the control you can haveover the selections they are quite difficult to use especially if you require the edge of theselection to follow some photographic form which might not be hard edged ie. a horizon, atree, or a person with hair.

The alternative tool is the mask. The mask controls the opacity of the layer it lies on or asdifferent way of looking at that it controls the visibility of the layer underneath.

Again we will start off with a trivial example.

You already know how to create a new document and if you've forgotten refer to the firstpage of this tutorial. Open a new document with a white layer 500 pixels by 400 pixels andthen add a new layer to that document and use the paint bucket to fill it with whatevercolour you like as long as it's not white.

I chose bilious green and my document therefore looks like this.

Now with the top layer active click on the mask icon which is arrowed in the diagram aboveto add a layer mask to the top layer. This will show up as a white rectangle on that layer.

Now we will have a look at one of the first differences between a mask and a selection.First of all it doesn't appear to have done anything and secondly if you now open thechannels palette by clicking on its tab you will discover that in addition to the three colourchannels and the composite RGB channel you would expect to find there is now what isreferred to as an alpha channel which is on layer 1.

This is a greyscale image exactly like all the other channels. If you were to delete the mask

its channel would disappear. However just like layers and the other channels you cancreate a duplicate of it by dragging the channel to the new layer/new channel icon at thebottom of palette. It is therefore possible to save these masks within the image file for uselater in the editing process. We are however getting ahead of ourselves here. We need tosee what we can do with this mask first of all before we think about saving or reusing it.

Before we progress to that we will have a look at how selections and masks interact witheach other. To that end we will now right click on the square icon on the top layer anddelete the mask.

Now with the top layer active use the rectangular marquee and draw a selection somework in the middle of the top layer. For the purpose of this exercise make sure that yourselection is not feathered but as a nice hard hedge by typing note in the feather dialogue

before you apply the selection.

Now go to the bottom of the layers palette and click on the mask icon.

As you will see the mask did something this time. The mask picked up the area of theselection and you will note from the small icon which has appeared on the active layer thatthe mask is now black with a white rectangle which corresponds to the area of theselection. You will also be able to see that where the mask is white you can see the toplayer and where the mask is black the top layer is transparent and you can see the layerbelow.

You can prove this by making the background layer active and filling it with another coloursay red.

Now make the top layer active again and click on the mask image. A little white line shouldappear around the icon to show that it is active. As a slight digression if you now controlclick on that icon you should see the marching ants running round the border between thegreen rectangle and the red background showing that a selection is active. You cantherefore by control clicking on a mask convert it into a selection.

However we have just spent ages looking at selections so do a quick control D to deselect

and now Alt click on the icon instead.

If all has gone to plan you should now have a black-and-white image.

In the picture above you can see the white halo around the mask on layer 1 showing thatthe mask is active and the image visible is the mask itself. This is a normal Photoshopgreyscale document and you can therefore use any tool to adjust it.

If this were a selection you could use the various selection adjustment dialogs but since itis a mask everything in for Photoshop is available to you.

To prove this select a brush and this time pick one with a soft edge and don't make it toobig but something around 20 to 30 pixels will be fine. Because you are painting on a maskthe colour box will be restricted to shades of gray.

You will find some of the shortcut keys very useful when painting on masks

D sets the colour box to the default colours ie. Slack and white and gets rid of any shadesof grey that you might have had.X changes the colours from black to white0 that is the number 0 not the letter sets the opacity to 100%

Now with white paint draw an irregular line on the black area of the picture obviously itdoesn't matter if you go over the edge into the white bit and then press X to change theblack ink and draw some sort of shape on the white part of the mask.

Now isn't that pretty. You will see that because we used a soft brush the edges of the linesfade to grey but the original hard square that we started with remains unaffected.

Now Alt click on the mask icon again. Beautiful isn't it?

Now that's all well and good but while you were painting on the mask you couldn't see youroriginal image so you didn't necessarily know what you were doing. So with the colourfuldoodle on-screen click on the mask on the top layer so that the white halo appears andnow you can paint on the image itself.

Again use a black and a white brush and paint wherever you like. You will see that if youpaint with a black brush the red lower layer comes through and if you paint with a whitebrush the top layer goes opaque and you can still see the green. You can therefore goback and paint out some of the squiggles or create new ones.

This means that if you made a mistake with your initial selection you have tools that enableyou to edit it at your leisure.

It is worth while playing around with simple images such as these until you are happy thatyou know exactly what is going on. However you could be forgiven for thinking what is thepoint of all this.

We will therefore leap forward possibly far too far so that you can see a real worldapplication for all of this.

So here we are we have a picture of this lovely young lady and she has asked for someretouching.

For this exercise we will simply think about retouching the eyes. There are a lot of ways todo this but one which draws upon the skills we have learned in this lesson is to useselections and masks.

Since we are just doing the eyes we will draw round that part of her face with themagnifying glass so that they fill the screen and we will then use the rectangular marqueeto make a rough selection. We do not need to feather this selection.

Then we copy the selection and paste it into a new layer. Which is simply control C to copyand control V to paste into a new layer the image will not appear to change but you willsee that you have a new layer in the layer palette which is obviously quite small.

For the purpose of this exercise we are simply going to brighten the whites of the eyes. Wecould do all sorts of clever things to improve the eyes but for the purpose of this exercisewe will simply make sure that the top layer is active and then Ctrl M to bring up the curvesdialog.

Click on a point towards the highlight end of the curve and drag it towards the white tobrighten the highlights until you think the whites of the eyes are bright enough. Please bearin mind that your curves dialog box might have the black and white reversed compared tothe one shown above. This is a Photoshop quirk and it depends how you have set up thedialog. Then click ok. She has a nice bright rectangle right in the middle of her face. Butwe don't want that so the next thing to do is to add a layer mask. So another shortcut keyfor you to remember this time we will [alt] click on the add a mask button and this will inserta black mask onto the top layer and make it completely transparent. In other words thelayer will disappear. If you did not do that quite right that you ended up with a white layerthen the image will not change but all is not lost because you simply click on the mask iconon the top layer and use control I which will invert the colours and the mask will turn black.The top layer should then disappear from the image but it is still active and blue in thelayers palette.

I'm sure you can guess what we do next. Select a nice soft brush and turn the flowratedown to something manageable say 25%. Select the mask and paint in the whites of theeyes.

The effect is fairly subtle so click on the eye on the layer to check how you are getting on

We have only really scratched the surface of the uses you can make of selections andmasks.

You will see from the real-life example that this is not an either or situation where masksare better than selections or the other way around but that both have uses and complimenteach other.

Some of you will have spotted that adjustment layers have layer masks built into them aspart of the system. You could therefore simplify this particular procedure by simply addinga curves adjustment layer to the background image and then using control I to make thelayer mask black and then proceed exactly as above.

You will also note that because this retouching is on a layer you can take it a little bit toofar and then use the opacity slider for the layer to fine tune the effect.

You can also use other tools on the mask and in particular if your brush work is a bit untidyyou can use a small amount of Gaussian blur on the mask to smooth out the brush marks.

These are all exercises for you to try whilst you wait for the next lesson.

Brushes

So far in these lessons we have used brushes but we have not really looked at the rangeof controls available to you or considered how choice of brushes can help in achieving thelook you are after.

Brushes are part of the tools palette and if you click on the Brush icon the informationpanel in the top row of the window will change to show a range of new controls.

The control to the immediate left gives a menu of brush presets. At the moment there willprobably be two or three available to you and these are the presets which come withPhotoshop. You can save your own brushes to this menu. We will ignore that option fornow because it is of more use to graphic artists and you are unlikely to need to save yourown brushes here.

The second control is one we will use a lot and I will discuss it further in a moment andshow you what happens when we open it up.

The third control is the mode. This gives access to a menu of blending modes identical tothe ones we discussed in an earlier lesson about layers. The ones we are most likely touse are normal, overlay, lighten and darken and to some extent occasionally colour.However all the layer blending modes are available to us and you may find occasional usefor all of them.

There are now come two controls which are closely related opacity and flow. opacity isagain very similar to the control we discussed in layer blending. What it does is essentiallylessen the effect of the brush as you apply it. That is say if you have a black brush and youapplied it at 50% capacity then you will get a midtone grey.

The flow dialog is associated with the final button which looks like an airbrush. Essentiallyit controls the flow of ink to your virtual airbrush. The lower the flow rate the lighter theresult but the drop-off in colour is much slower than opacity and you will find that if youdraw a squiggle with a low opacity brush and crossover the line then there is no increasein density where the line s cross. However if you do the same thing with flow the ink willbuild up to full darkness with repeated crossing. The controls are therefore similar butthere are differences which could catch you out if you don't concentrate.

The above diagram shows what these controls do. This is a simple round brush with pureblack ink. You will note that the opacity does exactly what you would expect.

The flow however does reduce the colour but the laid down colour is dependent upon thespeed at which the brush moves across the page. You will see that has my hand judderedslightly as it went across the brush painted over itself and the result is not smooth andthere is a buildup where individual brushstrokes overlap. This becomes more apparent asthe flow rate reduces.

We will now look at the control which will be of most use when you are using your brush.This is the second tool panel in the top control panel and the toolbar shows a small iconindicating the profile of the brush in use and there is a small black arrow next to it whichopens a drop-down menu and that menu in turn has another small arrow at the top righthand corner which you can click to open a further menu.

We will now look at the options available.

At this stage we will look only briefly at the text menu which opens up to the right-handside. In the third panel down you will see a small tick and in the picture above it is next tosmall thumbnails. That is where I normally leave it. However if you tick one of the otheroptions you will see that the left-hand palette changes and the choice of brushes isdisplayed in a different style.

Text is self-explanatory it lists the brushes by name but the stroke thumbnail might beuseful because it gives you an idea of what sort of pattern the brush will lay down when itis used. This is useful if you use a pen tablet rather than a mouse because it will give youan indication of how controls such as pressure will change the appearance of a brushstroke.

In the fifth panel you will see that you can load and save brushes and in the bottom panelyou will see that there is a list of the brushes currently loaded. The brushes listed there arethe ones loaded into my palette. It is unlikely that you will have all these because I havepicked up and collected brushes from various places over the years and some will not beavailable to you.

Magazines such as Advanced Photoshop often give away brushes and as you will learnlater in this lesson you can design your own.

The main controls are a however in the left-hand palette and the ones you will use mostoften are the top two.

The small thumbnails of brushes give you an idea how they will look. The standard roundbrushes are actually identical but just have separate different default diameters anddegrees of hardness. However you can control these features by using the top slider toadjust size and the slider beneath to adjust the hardness.

Hardness is akin to the feather we discussed in the selections lesson. When hardness isset to 100% the brush as a hard or absolute outline. When you set the hardness to 0 theblack brush fades off to grey at the outside and becomes gradually fainter. The slidercontrols all the intermediate points between.

For most photographic work we will use round brushes however sometimes you will wantto create different effects so there are a variety of brushes available which are not roundand there are therefore a lot of other controls for them.

I think that the grass brush is a standard brush available out-of-the-box with Photoshop.We will therefore have a look at how it operates.

The controls are available to any brush including the round brushes. However some of thecontrols have no obvious effect on a round brush because the geometry is symmetrical.

The grass brush is lower down in the palette than the round brushes and the image abovewas created by selecting that brush and simply drawing a line across the screen with blackink. The brush was made quite a large I think 135 pixels to make the effect visible.

You will immediately notice that the size and spacing of the blades of grass varies as doesthe angle and colour of the blades. This is exactly what you would want if you wereintending to paint some grass into part of your image. You might want to do this to coverup some cloning or an area where you have removed or inserted an object and you needto disguise the joint.

If you are using the brush for those purposes then you need to be able to control how thesize, angle and colour changes and you will see in the picture above that we have openedup the second brush palette which normally lives in the top bar of the Photoshop windowon the right-hand side.

It and the opacity and flow controls we talked about earlier will be present if you set upPhotoshop as recommended in lesson one. If for any reason it is not visible, go to theWindows menu you will find it listed as [options] and you can put a tick against it to make itvisible.

This is a close-up of that control palette. For the time being we will not talk about it furtherbut it is worth playing with. The seemingly random effects are controlled by the sliders onthe right and the ones visible in this picture are those concerning the shape dynamics.

For a normal round brush there are no ticks in any of the checkboxes to the left. Howeverif you tick those boxes then the position of the controls to the right become relevant.

When you click on the particular control the active one turns blue and a different set ofsliders opens up for each one.

As you can see you have very fine control over the shape and action of your brush.

Now the brush is pretty useless without paint. The basic controls for the paint are in themain tool palette which normally resides on the left of the screen. These are the maincontrols you are going to use.

Colour Picker

Switch

Set default

Foreground &Background Colours

Starting with the foreground and background colours there are two overlapping colourswatches. The foreground is the one on the left and apparently on top and this is thecolour of the ink the brush will paint with. The background colour is largely irrelevant for abrush but comes into play if you are using a graduation or if you use the eraser toolbecause the eraser tool will replace the image with the background colour.

The little switch arrow simply swaps the foreground and background colours and this has ashortcut key which is very useful when painting and that is the X key. Pressing X simplyswaps the ink between the two colours. You can therefore have two colours available atany time and swap between them rapidly.

The little box in the left-hand lower corner resets the foreground and background coloursto black and white with black being the foreground colour. These are the default coloursand can be selected by use of the shortcut key D.

The little eyedropper the colour picker can be selected and moved over the image and willpick up the colour of the pixels underneath the cursor. When you click on it the foregroundcolour will change to match the colour under the picker at that time.

Very often when you are painting you will be wanting to pick up colours from the imageand there is a shortcut which is very useful. When you have a brush selected you can Altclick with the brush and instead of painting the brush will turn into the colour picker andchange the colour. This is the quick way when you are moving around an image touchingup.

When you click on the colour swatch you get this dialog and there are many ways to use it.

The obvious one is to click on the vertical colour bar but for more control try pulling downthe little white arrows. As you do so the spectrum in the square box will change and youcan mouse over it to choose your colour.

As you do so all the numbers in the boxes on the left change to tell you what you havechosen.

If you need a specific colour you can type it into these boxes, you get a choice of 4different colour spaces plus a hex box if you know your hexadecimal rgb colours.

If you pick up the eye dropper from the tool bar and click on the image the dialog willchange to show the colour you clicked on. You can then pick a nearby shade if you want topaint a slightly varied tone.

The colour box “circled” in the picture above is all one colour when you open the dialog. Itshows the current choice. When you click on a new colour the box splits as above so youcan see how the colours compare.

Click OK to select the colour or cancel to leave without making a change.

There is a final option or set of options. Click on the colour library button and you get

The drop down at the top gives you access to an entire library of standard defined colours.The ones shown above are Pantone Solid for coated paper. These are useful if someelement of the image has to have a defined colour, for example to match a commercialproduct or company colour scheme. As a side issue you will see that the Pantone coloursare defined in the LAB colour space.

We will come back to brushes in a later lesson but for now we will close by consideringwhat a brush actually is and how do you make one or get others.

If you google photoshop brushes you should find lots of free brushes to download. Someof them will be useful for special projects. Photoshop brushes have the file extension .abr

Once you have downloaded them you need to get them into Photoshop. Brushes live inthe presets folder so you just copy and paste the ABR file into the brushes folder. My folderis shown on the next page.

Sorry but every installation is different so you will have to find the Brushes folder yourselfon your computer The Path in my installation is

C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Presets

Once you have done that the brush is available to Photoshop but will not be in the palette.

You will remember the following menu from earlier. Simply select Load Brushes click onthe ABR file you want and hey presto it will appear on the list. Most ABR files have a lot ofbrushes in them and all the new thumnails will appear at the bottom of the palette.

So what is a brush. You will not be surprised to learn that like almost everything else inPhotoshop it is really a greyscale image. Anything that you can make into a greyscaleimage can be made into a brush. The paint will be applied to the canvas proportionate tothe darkness of the brush.

That is to say if you have a solid black shape it will stamp paint onto the canvas and if ithas fuzzy edges the paint will be thinner in the fuzzy bits.

You might wonder at how this could be useful. I will give two examples one of which youcan do yourselves as a exercise and the second I will work through step-by-step.

If you are a portrait photographer you might wish to retouch your model. One of the areaswhere retouching is carried out is around the eyes. You might wish that your model hadbetter eyelashes.

If you search the Internet you will find greyscale images of false eyelashes. These with alittle care and attention can be made into brushes and lo and behold you will have a rangeof eyelashes which you can scale and adjust and apply to your models.

Most of us do not photograph and retouch models but there is a desire in many clubphotographers to enhance the sky. Wouldn't it be nice if you could paint clouds onto thatempty area.

Well this is how you do it.

First of all we must remember how a brush works the darkest parts of the greyscale imagecarry the most paint. Assuming that we are painting clouds with white paint that means thatwe need a negative image of a cloud which is darkest where our cloud needs to bewhitest. So we look in our clouds folder and dig out this one.

By now you are fairly expert in photoshop so you can open this and crop the image sothat just the top left-hand cloud is visible.

Now we will open the channels palette and look at the individual channels and as youwould probably expect the red channel gives the best definition.

As a side issue you will often find that skies look quite acceptable in the red channel evenif they look fairly anaemic in your picture and in a later lesson we will look at how you can

use that to enhance the existing sky without too much special trickery.

Anyway what we now need to do is to convert our image to greyscale using that redchannel.

We will do this using the apply image command which we will discuss in a later lesson. It isin the menu at the top of the screen. Click on [image] and select [apply image] from thedrop-down and fill in the boxes as per the image below. You will see that we have clickedthe invert box which will convert our image to greyscale and also to a negative all in onemove.

If we just turn this image into a brush then you will see that the image is noticeably greyround the edges and those straight edges will print into your image and look unrealistic.

Applying the lessons we learned earlier you can use levels to adjust the contrast and thenuse a white brush in normal and overlay mode to paint out the background so that youhave a background which is completely white around the edges something like this.

To make our brush we simply go to edit on the top menu and choose [define brush preset]and we will get another little menu which we can fill in with a sensible name and click ok.

This will load your new brush and you will find that the brush now appears as the very lastentry in your brush palette.

To try it out will open an empty file. You can fill empty files with the background colour sobefore we open a new file change the background colour to some sort of skyblue and thengo to file new and when the menu opens choose background colour in the backgroundcontents drop down and you should end up with something like this.

Now you can play with your brush to your hearts content.

All the normal controls apply. You can alter the opacity. Use all the modes and you canvary the size.

Obviously you can make several brushes out of different clouds and by using them paintan infinite variety of skies.

The following image shows the brush used at three different sizes

Now for the finale. We have one other brush control to look at before we end this lesson.

For this exercise I have chosen a brush which is not round and which you will almostcertainly not have on your computer. However it is the one we talked about a little earlieran eyelash brush.

It is a very useful demonstration of the brush tip shape control and those of you who go infor retouching work will make a lot of use of this. Some of you who like arty effects on yourphotographs will also find a lot of use for this control.

The brush tip shape control applies to all brushes not just the eyelash brush and gives youvery fine control when you paint.

For the purpose of the exercise I've simply opened a blank canvas and chosen white asthe background colour and black for the ink.

I have chosen an eye lash from my brush palette and from the menu at the top of thescreen I have chosen brushes and from the menu that opens up chosen brush tip shape.

The image above shows the same brush firstly just as it is and then at two differentrotation angles such as you might need to fit an eye and the bottom one shows how youcan alter the perspective on your brush.

All of this can be done by typing numbers into the angle and roundness control but youhave much finer control by dragging the handles on the little gimbal

There is a lot more to say about brushes but this is more than you need for now.

This one controlsthe angle

This one tilts thebrush

You can alter thesize as usual