Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

Notes from the tutorial:

STARTING WITH THE CORRECT SETTINGS:

1) SIZE 

In order to produce a piece of graphic design/ edit a photo correctly we must work with the correct canvas size, unlike illustrator we can not increase and decrease the size of the design and maintain the clarity/resolution, this is due to the fact that illustrator works with vector graphics and Photoshop does not. Therefore it is important to adjust the size that we are working with when opening Photoshop, there are a fair few default settings on Photoshop however if the paper size you want is not available as a default you are able to create your own by clicking on 'custom' as long as you know what paper size you need. 

2) RESOLUTION 

The second step we need to take before using photoshop is establishing the resolution (pixels per inch) we need to work in. If you are working on a print format piece of design the standard print resolution should be 300 pixels per inch, however if your working on a web design the standard resolution tends to be 72 pixels per inch. 

3) COLOUR MODE 

The third step-up step you need to take is to make adjustments to the colour mode, the colour mode is dependent on what format you are working in whether the piece of design is going to be printed or whether it is going to be used for the web:

WEB FORMAT - RGB - Red, Green, Black

PRINT FORMAT - CMYK - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black/key

PROOF SETUP:

After learning how to set up a canvas we then moved onto learning about 'proof setup', we loaded an image from our hard drives which had been prepared for us beforehand. The proof setup button simply shows us how the image would look when printed out, the colour different is fairly significant and noticeable and this tool simply makes you aware that what is shown on screen (in terms of colour) is not always necessarily the colour that will be printed out onto paper. 

A screenshot of the image on screen before the proof setup tool is applied, as you can see the colours are very strong, the blues are fairly sharp.

A screenshot of the image after the proof setup tool has been applied, as we can see when the image is printed the colours seemed to have faded, this is due to the fact that printers can not simply print the light at this spectrum of brightness.

GAMET WARNING:

The gamet warning tool which is found under the view icon on the toolbar shows you the areas that need to be put into colour range, these areas are highlighted in grey and are noticeable in order for change to occur.

As you can see this is the same image from above with the blue lights, the gamet tool has been applied here and as we can see the areas have been highlighted in grey. 

In order to reduce the hue/saturation to correct these areas which have been highlighted you must go onto the adjustable layers icon found at the bottom right hand side panel:

ADJUSTABLE LAYERS - Adjustable layers work in a non-destructable manner so that the changes do not effect the original layer, this is a smart ay of working as any changes can be back-tracked easily.

 An example of an adjustable layer, as you can see the original image remains on the background and all amendments are made on following layers so theres no real deconstruction to the original image.

In order for us to get rid of these grey areas shown in the image above we need to increase the hue and decrease the saturation.

As we can see once the increase and decrease has taken place the image will turn red to acknowledge the amendments.

AUTOMATE TOOL

Along with learning how to edit images during our tutorial we were also shown the 'automate tool', the tool simply automatically resize a batch of images, the droplet tool allows you to set what size you want the image and leave it to process.

PANORAMA

In order to create a panorama image we need to select the photo merge tool which is found within the automate drop down menu

We then need to select the image we want to merge by clicking on the 'browse' button followed by selecting the images we want to be apart of this panorama, then check that at the bottom that the 'Blend Images together' button has been selected. 

Vigenette removal - These are the dark shadows around the edge, the tool compensates for these dark shadows and tried to remove them as much as it possibly can. 

Once the photos have merged (in this screenshot I have merged 3 photos together) the edges will still be fairly out of place.  Therefore you need to use the crop tool to edited these so that the finishing image looks rectangular.

The final outcome produced by the merge tool.