Smooth Moves With Photoshop’s Gradient Masks

Image adjusted selectively with a gradient Warm exposure Cool exposure Two exposures blended with a gradient mask Smooth transitions. They’re the essence of continuous tone images. In most cases, you want to preserve them. On occasion, you want to modify them. Sometimes, you want to...

Useful Ways To View Masks In Photoshop

It helps to be able to see what you’re doing while you’re doing it. When you’re refining masks in Photoshop, if you can see them better, you can make them better. There are a number of useful ways you can see masks in Photoshop. In...

Easily Select Edges In Your Images Using Photoshop’s Contour Masks

A complex contour mask – made one minute. Digital imaging offers the ability to define complex contours efficiently and precisely, enabling users to affect an image in very specific areas. What was once extremely tedious and challenging is now quick and easy. Once you learn a few...

Photoshop’s Contrast Masks Help You Isolate Highlights Or Shadows

RGB image Red Channel Green channel Blue channel The relationship between highlights and shadows is a critical aspect of any image. Photographers have been trained to become highly sensitized to these relationships. Today, photographers have more control and greater precision than ever before over these...

The Essential Photoshop Masking Key Commands

There are at least two good reasons to become more familiar with Photoshop’s key commands related to masking. First, while many of these functions can be accessed through menu items, not all of them can; these features are essentially hidden to users who don’t know the key commands....

What In The World Is Detail Frequency ?

High frequency Medium Frequency Low Frequency Frequency is a term that’s being used more and more. That’s because new tools offer you more control over frequency than ever before. Noise reduction, sharpening, and HDR all offer unprecedented control over the look and feel of detail...

3 Things Creative Sharpening Can Do For Your Images

Of the three stages in a sound sharpening workflow – capture sharpening, creative sharpening, and output sharpening – creative sharpening is the stage that has the most impact. The goal of creative sharpening is to give an image a specific look and feel. There are...

Creative Image Sharpening – Double Pass Versus Hybrid

Before sharpening Unsharp Mask only Unsharp Mask and High Pass filters combined Different sharpening techniques make the world look different. A world of difference can be seen between the thin hard line of Unsharp Mask and the broad feathered line of High Pass Sharpening. Can...

The Advantages Of Sharpening With Photoshop’s Layers

Layers have Blend Modes and can be masked Double click a layer to activate its Blend If sliders   There are many reasons to use layers when sharpening your digital images. How do you do this? Simply duplicate the Background layer and sharpen the new layer....

How To Avoid 3 Types & 2 Kinds Of Noise

high noise / low noise column and row noise / severe under-exposure hot pixel noise / very long exposure or very hot conditions Bayer pattern noise / substantial under-exposure random noise / high ISO While it’s best to eliminate noise in images at the point...