You remember the National Association of Photoshop Professionals? NAPP? Their president, Scott Kelby, is like the Photoshop guy, he teaches Photoshop and Lightroom and travels all around the world doing seminars and evangelizing for Adobe (in an indirect way, as a representative of over 30,000 people who use Photoshop professionally). He’s as close to a Photoshop guru as you can realistically get before you become Thomas Knoll or Russell Brown.

What I’m trying to say here is that you really couldn’t learn Photoshop (or Lightroom) from any better folks than Scott Kelby and his Photoshop crew (Corey Barker, Pete Collins, RC Concepcion, and of course Matt Kloskowski). Normally this type of instruction costs a few bucks or at least a trip somewhere. But not this week.

This week only, presented in a live format, Scott and his crew (he calls them “The Photoshop Guys”) are doing a series of retouching presentations that you can watch for free. This starts tonight at 6 PM EST. The presentations are, in order:

• Wedding Retouching (tonight, Dec. 5)
• Digital Makeup (Dec. 6)
• The Next Level of Retouching (Dec. 7)
• LIVE Show – Audience Participation in Q&A (Dec. 8)
• Tips from the Industry (Dec. 9)

My understanding is that the fourth presentation is the only time that The Photoshop Guys will take any questions directly from the digital audience, but all five presentations will be streamed live.

To tune in, just visit Retouching Week on Photoshop User. It looks like the video and chat feeds are having some problems at the moment, but since the event has not yet started I’m sure the IT screw at Photoshop User will be able to work out all the bugs before it gets underway tonight at 6.

I don’t know about you guys but I’ll be tuned in!

Few people in the world know any of this better than Scott Kelby. As the president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (by the way, you know your software is influential when a 70,000-member association springs up around it), he is intimately in touch with the pulse of the Photoshop user and the photography industry.

As a sidebar here, let me just say, from my personal experience through the years, that Adobe is a stand-up company, at least as far as publicly traded software companies go. This article is not meant to be open season on Adobe. I believe Photoshop Lightroom to be one of the greatest tools any photographer has ever had access to, and little could change that at this point.

Nevertheless, sometimes publicly traded companies make strange decisions. Strange as in, well, let’s just come out and say stupid. Stupid decisions. Such as Adobe’s recent decision to change their upgrade path for the upcoming version of Photoshop and Creative Suite (of which Photoshop is a component). The next version, which will ostensibly be 6, will no longer be available at an upgrade discount to users of any version prior to 5 or 5.5.

In other words, if you wanted to upgrade from Photoshop CS4 to Photoshop CS6, Adobe would essentially say to you, at least to the extent that a multinational corporation can speak, “No.” Or maybe it would use a more casual phrasing, like “No way, Jose!”

Adobe has always offered upgrade pricing for each new version of their software and, with few exceptions, if you had a valid license for a previous version you were eligible to upgrade to whatever the new version happened to be. Now, not so much.

To our aid, as though through the clouds like a spandex-clad superhero, flies in none other than Scott Kelby with a politely but firmly worded open letter to Adobe asking them to establish a more, how can I put it, reasonable upgrade path that accommodates folks who have been loyal and valuable customers to Adobe but who couldn’t see through to purchase Creative Suite CS5 or 5.5 because, let’s be honest, it’s freakin’ expensive.

If any single person out there holds enough sway with Adobe to really get something done about this, it’s Scott. One time, and I don’t mean to gloat or anything, but one time, Scott linked to an article here on my blog in a very routine “link round-up” article on his blog, and on that day alone I received over 2,000 unique views. It was a good day for me, personal victories, and all that.

What I’m saying is, people listen to him, they respect him, and that’s just us regular Photoshop users and photographers, the unwashed masses of the Internet. People inside of Adobe listen to him, too. We’ll soon find out, though, what that really means…

Genia, AKELstudio's Photoshop Mastermind

Anyway, I really enjoyed Alex’s high-key macro behind-the-scenes and some of his in-studio video tutorials on shooting products under water (if you want to check that out you can read it here), and then I found out that his wife, Genia, is actually the Photoshop mastermind behind all of AKELstudio’s post-production and has her own blog, too!

You may not know this about me, but my first contact with Photoshop was in my middle school’s computer lab. They had version 2.5, which was the first version that shipped for Windows and also the last version that didn’t have layers. Version 3 was shipped in 1994 and introduced layers for the first time. I have been using Photoshop on and off since then, and almost on a daily basis since version 5 or so. Needless to say, I’m sort of a Photoshop junkie. To say that I “like” Photoshop would be an understatement.

Another thing that has really excited me lately is HDR (or compressed dynamic range, as it should properly be called, but that’s a discussion for another time). I just caught wind of this article Genia posted back in June of outdoor HDR images that Alex photographed and she put together using Photomatrix Pro (my favorite HDR program, by the way, you should buy it from Amazon right now) and Photoshop.

Go and check out this HDR images. I really appreciate HDR that you can’t quite tell is HDR, though Genia does enjoy the more exaggerated HDR effects as well, which is cool, I’m into that. You can hover your mouse over each image to see one of the exposures from the “before” that contributed to the final version.

You can do so much with Photomatix, I would highly recommend giving it a try. You can download a trial version from HDRsoft and if you like it, please please please buy it from Amazon so I can keep paying my web hosting bills.

High Dynamic Range Images Before and After via The Perfect Photo Blog

I have a question to ask you. What do Santa Claus, this portrait of Lincoln, and great daytime television have in common?

That’s right, they’re all mythical. Well, actually, the portrait is real inasmuch as it physically exists, but it’s one of the earliest (now rather famous) examples of photo manipulation. It turns out that although the photo seems to depict a stoic Lincoln standing beside a writing desk, the only thing in that photo that is actually Lincoln’s is his head. The body is that of Southern politician John C. Calhoun.

Apparently, so few “heroic” portraits of Lincoln existed (perhaps because Lincoln was weary of posing for them) that the only logical alternative was to fake it. In addition to pasting Lincoln’s head onto Calhoun’s body, the text on the papers visible on the desk were changed from “strict constitution,” “free trade,” and “the sovereignty of the states” to “constitution,” “union,” and “proclamation of freedom.”

So who needs Photoshop, anyway?

Via Museum of Hoaxes

Trust me, if you have a few minutes, just watch one or two of these and you’ll see what I mean. I should mention that there is some coarse language, so try not to get in trouble watching these at high volume in the office, OK?

• You Suck at Photoshop #1
• You Suck at Photoshop #2
• You Suck at Photoshop #3

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Originally, I used Photoshop to create everything from promotional stickers and web graphics to letterhead and stationery. Eventually I moved to Illustrator for layout/drawing stuff, but Photoshop remains a huge part of my daily life. As the owner and sole employee of Fisheye Multimedia, I am called upon to repair and modify photographs for my clients and to manipulate newspaper layouts for framing. As a photographer myself, I spend hours upon hours in Lightroom and Photoshop, tweaking masks, adjusting curves, cloning and healing, and so on.

I am a very particular Photoshop user with specific needs and expectations established by years of use. Photoshop CS3 is a piece of crap.

I moved to Creative Suite 1 a good while after its release and it really fit the bill for me. Its adjustment layers and effects layers were immensely helpful in my professional photo restoration tasks and the program was about as efficient as I could expect it to be. When Creative Suite 2 was released, I was peripherally excited about its new features, but because I had no direct application for most of them, I didn’t jump on it. Creative Suite 3 was released six months ago and again I looked at the features and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of rocking the boat… My very efficient and comfortable boat in which everything worked precisely as it should.

Then I bought a new computer. An 8-core 3GHz Mac Pro with five gigs of RAM and the 30-inch cinema display; the works. After six years with the same dual 1.24GHz G4, I figured it was time to go cutting edge. My G4 was cutting edge when I bought it, but then I watched the G5s come and go, and then the transition to Intel processors, and I felt a bit left out. My machine couldn’t even run Aperture because Apple made an executive decision that you must have at least a G5 to run it. Bummer!

With the new computer I thought I would finally upgrade Photoshop and give Creative Suite 3 a try. I’d heard a lot of great things about it from other photographers, notably my colleague Chris Blake. It seemed to work for them, so it should treat me well. I downloaded a trial.

In the defense of Photoshop CS3, I think the new GUI layout with the palette wells and everything else is top notch. It’s high time they made the floating palette system more efficient and I love the highlighting of certain menu items and re-arranging of palettes based on workspace presets. I was very excited at first, as I usually am when I get into some new software or hardware (nerds are so easy to please). That is, until I tried drawing something.

I agreed to do a quick cartoon logo for a friend’s up and coming e-commerce site, so I settled in to do some sketches. As I started to draw, I realized that the brush strokes were lagging behind my cursor as though my computer was too slow. Couldn’t be! I gave up on the project and did some research.

All I could find of any use was this thread on Adobe’s “User to User” forum. I do believe that the original poster of this thread had my exact problem, but nobody could produce any successful fixes for it.

Among the suggestions were:

• Install the Force VM Buffering On/Off Plug-In from Adobe (Read Me)
• Enable the “Bigger Tiles” Plug-In (included)
• Set the “cache levels” setting 5 or lower (default is 6)

I tried each of these suggestions and none of them changed the responsiveness of the paintbrush.

Having exhausted currently available options on the painting score, I went to install my scanner. After installing the software, I was able to run it in standalone mode (I have an Epson Expression 1680) and scan images just fine, but the scanner itself never appeared in the File -> Import menu in Photoshop CS3.

From what I gather, either the scanner’s TWAIN interface software and/or associated utility application (EPSONScan) is not a universal binary (CS3 runs natively on Intel Macs) and Epson lied about it (because it says it IS a Universal, native Intel build).

Either way, I had reached a dead-end with CS3. Perhaps they will resolve these issues in the future (and I’m addressing both Adobe and Epson here). I’m really glad I didn’t jump on that $800 auction for CS3 Design Standard on eBay last week!

My solution was to go back to Photoshop CS2, which has thus far been 100% faster with everything, regardless of whether it’s running natively or emulated through Rosetta. I probably have eight cores running at 3.0GHz to thank for that, but I still wish that Adobe would get their act together and fix this laggy drawing problem in CS3 so that those of us who suffer with it can use their native (universal binary) version.

Today I will unclothe the common histogram and show you not only how to read it, but also how you can use it to strengthen your work.

The histogram is a very powerful tool because it provides an instant window to image information that is otherwise very difficult for a person to get a sense of. According to the Photoshop CS manual,

A histogram illustrates how pixels in an image are distributed by graphing the number of pixels at each color intensity level. This can show you whether the image contains enough detail in the shadows (shown in the left part of the histogram), midtones (shown in the middle), and highlights (shown in the right part) to make a good correction.

Most importantly for photographers, the histogram shows you this subtle highlight and shadow information in a way that is completely independent of your monitor’s capabilities and color profiling.

Great, so it shows us detail information, or something like that. What does that mean exactly? As stated in Adobe’s definition above, the left side of the histogram represents the darkest pixels in the image, while the right side represents the lightest pixels. The height of each “bar” (in a Photoshop histogram, each bar is one pixel wide) represents how many pixels of that precise brightness exist in the image relative to all the other brightnesses. All of this is much easier to understand if you can see it. So, here:

I have conveniently numbered each shaded area of the image and their corresponding histogram bars. The first thing you should notice is that the bars move toward the right of the histogram as the shade gets lighter. Because areas one, two, and three get progressively lighter by exactly the same amount, their bars in the histogram are evenly separated. Likewise for areas four through seven.

The next thing to notice is the height of the bars. How are the heights of these bars calculated? An important note when looking at any histogram in Photoshop is that the graph is scaled so there is never any “wasted” vertical space. In this case, bars one, two, and three are precisely one quarter the size of the entire image, so even though the number of pixels in each of those sections is precisely one quarter the number of pixels in the entire image, the bars are not one quarter the height of the histogram. Why? Because there is no single shade of pixel that has a higher count than any of those sections (one, two, or three). The graph is scaled vertically.

Okay, so why are the bars for sections four through seven as tall as they are? Each of those four sections of the image is one quarter the size of section one or two or three (as you can probably tell just by looking), so their bars in the histogram are one quarter the height of the bars for sections one, two, and three. Is this all making some sense?

Just by looking at this histogram (which is harder to read by virtue of its sparsity, but bear with me), we can actually see that the image must contain precisely seven distinct pixel brightnesses ranging from completely black to completely white (and look, it does!). Furthermore, we can see (for example) that there are about one quarter as many pixels of brightness four than there are of brightness three. Fantastic.

So what happens when the image has many more shades in it? Let’s say, for example, that it has every shade in it.

Be honest: is the histogram at all what you would’ve expected it to be? I was a bit surprised to see that curve in there, but it does show us some things about the Photoshop gradient tool that we might not have known before!

We have already drawn the first conclusion from this histogram: it contains every possible shade of pixel. We know this because the data begins at the very left edge and proceeds all the way to the very right edge without a single gap. What happens if a shade is removed?

The attentive among you will notice that two changes have occurred. First, there is a pretty obvious gap where that particular shade of gray was removed. Second, the bar at the very right edge is now filled in. Why? Because I covered the gray shade with a white line, so the count of white pixels has now increased! Brilliant.

Let’s make a more drastic change and see how that affects the histogram display:

I have now removed most of the dark tones in the example image. Notice that the histogram has a huge gap on the left side. No matter how large or small your image is, the histogram always ranges from 100% black on the left to 100% white on the right. Also notice that the tallest bar is the one at the far right, for 100% white. This is because there are more completely white pixels than pixels of any other brightness in the image, so the histogram is now scaled to the height of that bar (the tallest bar).

By now you should be pretty comfortable getting the following information out of a histogram:

1. The range of tones in an image; does the image contain completely black and completely white tones, and is it missing tones anywhere in the range?
2. Which tones occur most often in the image; which bars in the histogram touch the top?

That’s a good start, but it won’t make you more proficient at editing your photographs. Let’s take a look at a real example to see how what we’ve learned applies to a photo.

Here is a photograph that I made at one of the (many) tobacco fields up in Windsor, Connecticut. It was a foggy morning and, as you can see from the histogram, there are no very light tones in this image at all (you can tell by the large gap on the right side). Notice also that there is not a significant amount of black (the curve on the left doesn’t begin immediately at the left edge).

I want to evenly brighten this image so that the sky area becomes white. I will use levels for this (which I won’t explain; there are ample articles for using levels), but you could also use curves. Once I’ve brightened the image, it might look more like this:

There are two important things to notice about this histogram. First, you may wonder why it’s full of gaps. These gaps are a side-effect of expanding the tonal range of an 8-bit image; Photoshop shifts and redistributes the tones in the image to give the best perceptual result, but it doesn’t (and cannot) create more pixels with intermediate tones to complete the entire tonal range. This is one of the linchpins in the 8-bit versus 16-bit editing debate, which I may cover in a later article.

Second, you will notice that I now have a significant amount of pure white in the image (the very last bar on the right goes all the way to the top of the histogram), and the curve appears to be “cut off.” This is usually a bad thing, because it tells you that you have lost highlight detail. If this were a high-key portrait, or if your intent was to wash out the sky to pure white, you would have succeeded. I didn’t mean to do that, though, so I’m going to undo that change and try again.

The changes in the photograph itself might be very subtle and difficult to see on your monitor. This is the entire point of the histogram. By reading the histogram, you can tell what’s going on even if you can’t see it in the photo. Notice that I have not clipped as much of the highlight area of the tone curve, leaving almost no pure white at all. This tells me that my sky is going to be filled almost entirely with delicious digital sensor noise, which will give it a more continuous tone and realistic feeling.

By keeping an eye on your histogram, you can quickly and easily evaluate whether or not you’ve achieved the result you were after. If your camera has the ability to display a histogram you can even do this evaluation in the field. I personally use the histogram display on my Canon 5D just about 100% of the time; once I have seen the composition through the viewfinder, what I’m most concerned with is the exposure, and the histogram allows me to see that no matter how bright or dark it is, and no matter how accurate the camera’s LCD display is. A truly valuable tool!

That’s it for our in-depth examination of the histogram and all of its exploits! I hope you’ve enjoyed digging into the mechanics of this very useful tool and if you have any remaining questions or if you think I screwed up anywhere along the way, please leave a comment!

Lightroom, Lightroom, Lightroom, Lightroom

While reading histograms directly on your camera is the first step toward complete control of your exposure, no digital photographer should overlook the importance of post-processing. When Adobe released Lightroom, I was already using Apple’s Aperture, but after only a few hours, I was ready to switch. I was a Lightroom pre-release beta tester and I have purchased every upgrade to Lightroom ever since; it’s literally the killer app of killer apps.

Lightroom takes the histogram to the next level with RGB graphs and over- and under-exposure views that actually show you on the photo itself where you’re losing detail. Not only is Lightroom an indispensable tool for developing photographs, it’s an awesome way to learn how imaging works.

If you haven’t purchased Lightroom yet, let me urge you now, please, please buy it. It will change the way you develop and organize your photos. On top of that, if you buy it from B&H at their great price, and use one of the links below, you help me keep this site online… Which I would really appreciate. Using these links does not change your cost in any way, shape, or form.

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Software for Mac & Windows
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Software for Mac & Windows – Student & Teacher Edition

If you are a student or a teacher, you can get a huge discount by purchasing the second one; it’s absolutely identical in every way (except the box, it says “Student & Teacher Edition” on it), but you do need to produce proof of your student or teacher status.

There has been a good deal of activity and interest lately in the area of “high dynamic range” or HDR imagery. Many of these “HDR” images are characterized in part by a surreal or otherworldly feeling accompanied by an ethereal glow surrounding the subject. I think the term “HDR” was ill-conceived in this context. There is such a thing as a high dynamic range image, but you wouldn’t be able to view it because it contains more tonal data than you can perceive or that a computer monitor could display. A true HDR image would be processed into viewable images by compressing its range; essentially by running it through Photoshop’s “levels” or “curves” (but not in Photoshop, because Photoshop probably couldn’t open it).

The HDR images you see on Flickr and PhotoSIG are actually compressed dynamic range because they portray scenes that had too much tonal range to be captured in a single frame; the range of tones from highlight to shadow are compressed into the range of a normal image. This is usually achieved by making two or more frames at different exposure settings and combining them using Photoshop or one of a number of standalone and plug-in softwares for that purpose (such as Photomatix, PanoTools, etc.)

It’s easier to understand (for me, at least) using pictures, so here is an example. The two photographs below were taken of the same scene, a scene with too much range for my camera to see full highlight and shadow detail at the same time. One of the photos is exposed to capture the highlight data completely and the other is exposed to capture the shadow data completely.

Below the photos you can see their histograms (I just snagged these from Photoshop’s histogram palette). Notice how photo #1’s histogram is biased toward shadow data and photo #2’s is biased toward highlight data. You can see from the pictures themselves that #1 has a much cooler looking sky, while #2 has the detail you would probably want in the subject (in this case, a humble charcoal grill).

If you had a copy of Photomatix, you could just provide it with these two photos and off it would go. I, myself, don’t have a copy of Photomatix, so I’m going to show you how to combine the best parts of these two images using only Photoshop. I’m going to assume you have a functional understanding of Photoshop; if you don’t understand any of the terminology used in my instructions, check out the Photoshop online help or shoot me an e-mail.

Now, before I dive in, I should mention something about HDR. Using HDR software (or techniques) with the idea that more detail in more areas is always better will only land you with very flat, continuous, boring photos. Always keep the overall aesthetic of your work in mind as you apply these techniques and don’t come under the impression that HDR is a silver bullet for an imaginary digital camera sensor limitation. Okay, that’s enough with the lecture!

I’m going to combine the two photos above into a single CDR (compressed dynamic range) photo. The basic idea is to let the properly exposed part of the top photo cover the same part of the photo beneath it (where it’s not properly exposed), and then also hide (or mask) the improperly exposed part of the top photo so the properly exposed part of the photo beneath it shows through. It might sound complicated, but it’s really not too hard.

Because I took both photos without a tripod, I will have to re-align them with one another. Ideally it’s best to use a tripod to get two nearly identical frames at each exposure, but I didn’t have mine with me so I did the best I could. Open both photos in Photoshop and drag one into the other so that both images are in the same document. You will see from the screenshot below that I have placed the photo with the subject properly exposed on top of the photo with the background properly exposed. It doesn’t matter which photo is on top, but you may have to alter the steps if you do it differently.

Now that you have the photos layered atop one another, it’s time to align the images. What I typically do is put the top layer in “difference” blending mode, which allows me to see exactly how the shapes overlap. Here is what it should look like and where you can find the “difference” option in the layers palette.

What you want to do is eliminate those white spaces as much as possible. Use basic transformation commands and techniques to alter the top layer (“Layer 1”) until the white spaces are as small as you can get them. I’m not going to go into the specifics of transformation; all that stuff is covered in-depth in the Photoshop online help¹. Hopefully after you’ve worked on it for a bit, it will look more like this:

There is still a bit of white left in my example, but don’t sweat it, it’s not that picky an effect. Now you can turn off “difference” mode (switch it back to “normal.”) The next step is to create a mask that will hide the terribly overexposed sky in the top photo so that the awesome sky beneath it will show through. For this, I will use a little trick in the channels palette.

Take a peek in the channels palette. What you want to do is click on each of the Red, Green, and Blue channels and find the one that has the most contrast between the subject and the background. It won’t be perfect, but for this type of effect it’s very handy that your sky is overexposed. For me, the blue channel had the most contrast. Hold down the Command key (Windows users, that means the Control key) and click on the channel of your choice (blue, in my case). It should create a selection in your document.

Now, with that selection intact, click on the RGB channel to bring your photo back. Here is another fun masking trick. Press “Q” on the keyboard to turn on Quick Mask Mode. What you see ought to look something like this².

Quick Mask Mode is based on a tried-and-true masking technique that was used in old-school publishing. The red color is a throwback (or shout-out for you urban kids) to a product called Rubylith, which was used to mask elements in a page layout or design before computers made that process drop-dead simple³. In Photoshop terms, the red areas will not be included in the selection when Quick Mask Mode is turned off.

You can always invert selections, so it’s not really important to us that the selection contain the subject or the background. What is important to us, however, is that the foreground is as well-masked as possible. Right now, the darkest areas of the foreground are fully masked (as you can tell by the darker red), whereas the right edge of the grill is only partially masked because its blue channel was brighter there. What are we to do?

Enter the levels palette. When you are in Quick Mask Mode, levels will affect the mask, not the image. A stroke of genius from Adobe, if I do say so myself.

This is what the levels looked like for me. What you’re going to want to do is drag the shadow slider (the black triangle at the left edge of the histogram) over to the right until your subject is as dark red as it can be without starting to turn the background red as well. Histograms are very interesting things; what you will probably find is that the shadow arrow winds up parked right at the edge of a pretty obvious slope, a slope representing where your foreground subject’s data drops off into the abyss of your overexposed sky.

Pay attention to how the quick mask reacts to where you’ve dragged the triangle and get it to where you feel it’s optimally dark across your subject and hopefully not too red at all in the background. When you think it looks good, press “Q” again to convert the quick mask back into a selection (you can toggle back and forth between selections and quick masks at any time).

As I explained earlier, the portions of the image that appeared red in Quick Mask Mode were excluded from the selection, so this selection should contain the background only. Go up to the Layers menu, choose Add Layer Mask, and then choose Hide Selection. Your properly exposed background elements should now show through!

But it probably doesn’t look too hot, does it? The problem is usually that the images aren’t perfectly aligned, and even if they are, there are probably going to be little jaggies and artifacts due to the overlap of detailed elements. Don’t worry, there is a solution to this problem, and with it comes another fun layer mask trick.

Hold the Option key (Windows users, hold Alt) and click on the layer mask’s thumbnail in the layers palette. The layer mask thumbnail is the one that looks like a silhouette next to the thumbnail of the actual image. The document itself should now look like a silhouette, like this:

Now we can use any Photoshop painting tools or filters on the mask itself. For this trick, we’ll use the Gaussian blur filter, found under Filters in the Blur menu. How much you blur the mask depends on the resolution of your image. Mine is around 13 megapixels, so I had to apply a Gaussian blur radius of around 50-60 to make it stand out. It should look something like this:

To return to the image, click on its thumbnail in the layers palette. Hopefully you now have a pretty awesome-looking compressed dynamic range photo! Here’s what I came up with:

It’s not as good as it could be, though. The sky, while much better exposed than the sky from the foreground photo, still lacks some punch. In comes curves. Since the background lives on its own layer, and because you should always try to alter your photographs as non-destructively as possible, we’re going to use an adjustment layer. If you don’t know what an adjustment layer is, you should drop what you’re doing and read the Photoshop online help right away⁴! Come back here when you’re done.

Okay, so, create a curves adjustment layer above the background but below our subject image layer (inspirationally titled “Layer 1” in my previous screenshots). It should look like this:

The curves dialog will open and you will want to put in a dramatic “S” curve like you might in any other photo with poor contrast. Because adjustment layers only affect the layers beneath them, it should alter the background without altering the subject. Here is what mine ended up looking like!

I hope this has been useful and/or interesting and I do intend to create more Photoshop how-to articles in the future. If you have any questions about how this works, drop me an e-mail! I might add common questions and answers to this page, so keep an eye out!

1. See Transforming and Retouching –› Transforming objects –› Using the Free Transform command.
2. See Selecting –› Using Quick Mask mode to make selections.
3. Some smaller newspapers and design shops still build layouts by hand, but I think it’s sadistic.
4. Start with the section called Using Layers –› Using adjustment layers and fill layers.