Important Photoshop Short Cuts and Editing Steps

Instead of rambling on about my "life" I'll drop some of my photoshop wisdom. First of all most digital images I have seen come off the camera lacking in a lot of key areas. I started shooting in jpg format due to limited space and a lack of knowledge of RAW. Now I shoot only RAW and find it far superior. A lot of steps in preparing an image can be done in RAW format before opening in photoshop.

When looking at a photo there are a few key areas I consider, these are:

• contrast: when dealing with contrast in a photo I use a lot of different techniques. One is Ctrl+L (levels) this opens a screen to adjust the levels of the shot. If you grab the far left slider and move it you can adjust the blacks in the shot. If you grab the far right slider and slide it towards the middle you can brighten the whites. The middle works on all the midtones and you can make them brighter or darker depending on where you want your picture to go. You can also work with Ctrl+M and bring up the curves screen, this allows you to grab the line that is going in a diagonal and if you pull the base of the line down you can darken the shadows, the top part of the line if you pull it up slightly you can brighten your highlights. You can also isolate the colour you want to work on, red, blue and green are selectable. These are just 2 basic ways to work on contrast.



• colour: again I use Ctrl+M to bring up the curves and isolating the colours I can increase reds, decrease them depending on what colour is needed. In photoshop CS3 there is a lot of adjustment options for layers. I suggest playing with them and learning them so you can adjust colour. One very cool one to use is the photo filters adjustment. It allows you to use a filter to do a variety of things. You can use a warm filter to give a portrait a warm feel, or a cool filter to give the picture a blue filter and cool it down. I use the sepia filter a lot on portraits when I feel the skin is a bit too red or needs to be toned down a bit.



• saturation: most digital pictures need a bit more saturation, in jpeg I would work in the curves and colour adjustment to give more saturation. However with RAW I do this all before photoshop.



• sharpening: there is a number of ways to sharpen a photo...I can go in to more depth on this another day...but it's very important and one thing I do is selective sharpening. I want the eyes sharp, mouth and hair. So what I do is create a layer on top that has the sharpening applied to it, then use a layer mask to select those areas that I want to keep sharp.



• Short Cuts: this short cut is my fave of all time -> Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E is the best shortcut of all time, I use it every time I edit. It takes everything you have done to an image and creates a new layer with all of the changes applied to it. It's like flattening an image but better, when you flatten an image all the layers and changes you have made are lost. This action allows you to keep them but work from this new layer which is super valuable. Ctrl+J is a great one too, just makes a copy of the layer beneath, this is handy for doing layer work. Ctrl+E is a good one too, it merges a layer down a level. Use the [ and ] to change the brush size. The D key sets the colours to default...black and white. This is an excellent way to quickly work on layer masks.

There are many amazing photoshop actions that can do a lot of these common photo edits. I have made a few of my own actions. I cannot stress how important using actions is. It reduces steps and makes life EASY!! :) I hope this helps and use google...I learned a lot of my own techniques from researching on google.