Tutorials

The Digital Darkroom

The Digital Darkroom & Optimizing Your Images Through Photoshop

Here is the file download of this information – Digital-Darkroom.pdf

Adjustments through the Adjustment Layer

The benefit of adding an adjustment layer is you don’t permanently change the image itself. You are able to undo, remove, or alter an adjustment such as curves or levels at any time without losing all your subsequent work or losing the pixel data.
To add a curves click on the icon that looks like a black and white cookie.

Curves

Photoshop’s Curves is a flexible control that can brighten or darken parts of a layer based on the layer’s luminosity. It is much more powerful than layers adjustment, you can target contrast, color, and tone. When set to RGB you are affecting the 3 channels, or you can selectively edit one. The three channels are RED, GREEN, and BLUE.

Play around with the settings and manipulating the line, your image preview will update to show you what you are doing. If you ever want to reset while still in the panel, hold down the option key and the cancel button turns into a reset button.

Pulling the curve up brightens the image, and down darkens it. An S-Curve will brighten the higher points in your tones and darken the lower points.

Converting to a Smart Object and Filters

Photoshop’s smart objects and smart filters allow for a flexible workflow. Smart objects point to an original vector object, raster image, or RAW file. Using smart objects means you’re working with reference images. So when working with smart objects, the changes applied to them do not affect the original image. You can even save these effects and swap images. Smart filters are also not permanent effects, but can be edited or removed. Normal filters are irreversible, at least after saving the document.

Step 1: Convert for Smart Filters
Go to Filter in the menu at the top and in the pull down menu click on ‘Convert for Smart Filters’

Step 2: Apply A Filter To The Smart Object
Go to the Filter menu once again, choose Sharpen, and then choose ‘Unsharp Mask’. Directly beneath our smart object layer, we now have an area that says “Smart Filters”, indicating that we have at least one smart filter applied to the object.

The white rectangular area to the left of the words “Smart Filters” is a mask, just like a standard layer mask, allowing us to select a specific area of the smart object to apply the filter(s) to.

Filter – Unsharp Mask

An “Unsharp Mask” is actually used to sharpen an image, contrary to what its name might lead you to believe. Sharpening can help you emphasize texture and detail, and is critical when post-processing most digital images.

Amount: When you sharpen an image, Photoshop takes the edge between two colors and makes the light pixels lighter and the dark pixels darker. Amount determines how light the lighter pixels get, and how dark the darker pixels get.

If you set the amount too high, your picture will look grainy and overly contrasty, and you’ll actually lose some fine detail.

Radius: This determines the area that will be sharpened. A low radius means only the pixels right next to the edge will be sharpened. A high radius means a wider area will be sharpened.

Setting the radius too high will give you weird outlines or halos around your edges.
Threshold: Threshold determines how much contrast there needs to be between colors for them to be sharpened. A higher threshold means higher contrast areas will be sharpened, but low-contrast areas will not. Sharpening low-contrast areas (like a baby’s smooth skin) makes them look rough and speckly.

Setting the threshold too low will give you a grainy look on low-contrast areas, and will make noise stand out.

All-purpose sharpening: amount=85, radius=1, threshold=4
This is just a starting point; you’ll want to play around until it looks right to you.

Burning and Dodging

The terms “dodge” and “burn” refer to techniques that were used to either lighten (dodge) or darken (burn) specific areas of a photo by increasing or limiting the exposure in those areas in a traditional darkroom. The Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop are the digital versions of these techniques and are often used to either lighten underexposed areas of a photo or darken overexposed areas.

Step 1: Duplicate the Layer
You don’t want to do your burning and dodging on your original layer or else the adjustments you make will be permanent so you’ll want to duplicate the background layer. In the layers box click on the small three horizontal line icon, a drop down menu will appear, choose ‘Duplicate Layer’ option.

Step 2: Burn and Dodge tools
You use the dodge tool to brighten and the burn tool to darken on your new layer. Select either the Dodge or Burn tool on the main menu bar that is vertical on the left of the screen.

At the top you’ll see the options where you can target shadows, midtones, or highlights through a drop-down menu. You can also choose your exposure setting through the percentage next to the words exposure and change the size and hardness of you brush in the brush option menu.

Step 3: Check Your Results and Layer Opacity
Check your results by clicking on and off the eye icon on your new layer. You can also change the opacity of your new layer if you want to apply a suitable application of your burns and dodging.