Photoshop is named “Photoshop” for a reason; it’s for editing photographs.  Take a look through some basic photo-editing techniques and learn how you can improve your own family photographs.

Cropping Images for Better Composition

Oftentimes, when you take a digital photograph, you’ll end up with a lot of information that you may not want. One of the first things you’re going to want to do is learn how to crop your images, and the most convenient way to do this is using the Crop Tool.

Press the  key to select your crop tool. Use your mouse to click and drag, creating a box inside your photograph.

You’ll notice a tick-box in the corners of your crop-box. You can move and resize your crop area to select the precise area you wish to crop.

You can press the  key to release your crop. You can undo with  and redo your crop at any time, if you feel so inclined. Cropping can eliminate areas of your image that you don’t want to see, or can also create a more interesting composition for prints or the web.

Adjusting Contrast with the Levels Tool

Shooting images on overcast days can give you gloomy images that are either too dark or devoid of detail. While the Brightness and Contrast tool is an acceptable way to adjust your images, the best tool to use is usually the Levels tool.

With your photograph open, simply press  to open your levels dialog box. By default, this is what it looks like.

The three sliders (the  arrows illustrated above) represent Shadows (your photograph’s darkest areas), Mid-tones (the middle darkest areas), and Highlights (the brightest areas of your photo). By adjusting them as illustrated above, brighter whites are created, mildly darker shadows, and the Mid-Tone point is moved closer to the shadows, allowing for more space between the Mid-Tones and the Highlights.

Clicking OK will close the Levels and render them. Immediately, we see more detail in the bird, and our sky is less overcast and gloomy. With little effort at all, you can give your photographs a more naturalistic look and bring out detail you might not have known that you even had!

Adjusting Color-Shifted Lighting

One of the biggest problems with taking pictures indoors is that a lot of indoor lighting will be tinted with a yellow, red, or blue cast. Your eyes may not pick up the difference, but your camera “sees” light very differently than our eyes do. Here’s a simple way to remove reduce the color of an overwhelmingly yellow image.

You’ll want to navigate to Image > Adjustments > Selective Color.

Selective Color is a tool that allows you to adjust your image through various primary colors. These are: Red, Green and Blue, the primary colors of light; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, the primary colors of printing; and also by Whites and Neutrals.

Since our image has a yellow cast to it, I select “Yellows” from the “Color” menu box. You can use the adjustments illustrated above, or find the ones that work for your image. The basic premise is to reduce the color(s) you wish to remove (in this case, Yellow) and, in some cases, add color to the opposing primary colors (in this case, Cyan, Magenta, and Black.) That’s basically a complicated way of saying “less yellow, more red, blue, and black.”

Compared to the original image, the lighting on this now appears as clear and white as natural sunlight and the original looks aged and yellowed. If you notice this yellow cast on your images and want to remove it, this can often be your best bet.

Sharpen Blurry Photographs without Damaging Color

Sometimes dim indoor lighting can give a warm and fuzzy effect to your photography. Unfortunately, the “fuzzy” bit is a problem, as dim indoor lighting tends to make images come out blurry. There are many Photoshop filters that can sharpen an image, but many can damage color or heavily distort an image. This surprisingly easy trick can help sharpen shots and keep color intact.

Lab color is an alternate color space, like RGB and CMYK. It is unusual and most digital art files outside of the professional photography world will not use it.

In order to switch your photograph to Lab color, to go Image > Mode > Lab Color, as illustrated above.

Changing images to CMYK will give you a color shift—not so with Lab color. Your RGB image remains identical without any sort of color shift. On to the next step.

Flip to your Channels Panel. If you cannot find it, you can always retrieve it by going to your menu Window > Channels.

Pick the “Lightness” channel, which will look like a grayscale version of your image.

If your image doesn’t change to grayscale, try again. We need to work exclusively in this grayscale channel for this tip to work.

Navigate to Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. Unsharp Mask can increase contrast and tighten edges Photoshop perceives in images. The illustrated values are overdoing it somewhat—find values that work well with your own image.

Still in our Lightness channel,  renders our filter. Oftentimes the Unsharp Mask filter can create to many harsh darks, so for this particular soft image, a round of Level adjustment can help counter the harshness of the filter.

brings up the levels tool. Adjusting the Midtones and Highlights (as in the example earlier) can create a softer look without sacrificing the faux-sharpness added to the image.

Our final result is a fair improvement over the soft-edged original. You can return your image to RGB color by navigating to Image > Mode > RGB and save it as a PSD or JPG file. It’s also a good habit to save multiple versions of your Photographs in order to return to the original, effectively undoing your edits if needed.

Photoshop tips left you confused? Start at the Beginning! Check out the previous installments of the How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop.

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Photoshop has a huge menu system with options even advanced users may ignore. For today’s lesson we’ll take a quick tour through them and learn which of them will help you increase your mastery of photo editing.

The Top Menu

Your menus are laid out as illustrated above. Let’s take a quick look through these and explain the less obvious menu items.

The File Menu

While this is home to obvious things like “Open” and “Close,” there are less obvious items here to look over. Here are some highlights.

Browse in Bridge: Bridge is a program that comes bundled with Photoshop for visual browsing. It allows users to look through their library of pictures rather than looking at empty filenames, similar to Google Picasa. Bridge is a decent program, but it can be annoying to accidentally open it, as it takes longer than you might want to load.

Browse in Mini Bridge: Mini Bridge is a version of Bridge that lives in Photoshop. Easy to use, but loads slowly. Part 2, Panels touched briefly on Mini Bridge.

Open As: A problematic menu item, Open As seems broken and glitchy. The idea is to be able to open one filetype as another, i.e., to open a layered PSD file as a flattened JPG. Any readers that care to comment on this, let me know of your successes or failures. I think it is broken in CS5 as of yet.

Open as Smart Object: Create a smart object from any file simply by opening it. Smart Objects resize and warp from the original file, so if you plan to resize a JPG or other image multiple times, you may want to open it as a smart object. You may want to learn a bit about Smart Objects first, however.

Share my Screen and Create New Review: Adobe CS Live features only available to Photoshop users that choose to register their copy of Photoshop and create an account on Adobe.com.

Device Central: Launches a separate program for developing applications for mobile smartphones and other similar devices. Not terribly useful for beginner users.

Save for Web and Devices: A wizard-type program launches that helps you compress your files into web-ready JPG, GIF, PNG, or WBMP file formats. In this case, “Devices” refers to the same mobile smartphones, etc, that “Device Central” refers to.

Revert: Reloads your file from the point it was last saved. You’ll lose all changes and your history. However, this is still often useful.

Place: Insert a separate file into the one currently open. Allows you to resize temporarily as a smart object.

Automate and Scripts: Helpful options for advanced users that have to do lots of repetitive graphic work. Scripts, in particular are quite exciting, and are worth a look, even for basic users. They are both deserve articles of their own, on another day.

The Edit Menu

Another fairly obvious menu, the Edit menu is home to some of PS’s most useful features.

Undo, Step Forward, Step Backward: Undo is a single level of revert you are likely familiar with.  is a common shortcut, and you’ll find it will undo your last action as well as redo it. Step Forward and Backward move through your history palette, also covered in Part 2, Panels. This is an another simple way to use the history besides the History Panel.

Cut, Copy, and Copy Merged: You are likely also familiar with Cut, Copy, and Paste, which exist in the edit menu of nearly every program going back to MS Word for DOS. “Copy Merged” is extremely helpful, in that it can copy a multi-layer document as if it those layers were merged.

Fill: Often ignored, Fill is an excellent tool. “Fill” will fill a selection, layer, or channel with your foreground or background color, black, white, or texture, regardless of its content, unlike the bucket or flood fill. CS5 also has Content aware fill, which, given the right file, can attempt to recreate part of your image covered by foreground objects.

Stroke: Creates a linear stroke (read: a line) around your selection with whatever color you care to use. You can adjust line thickness or where in or around your selection you want to draw it. Like fill, it ignores existing content and simply strokes around your selection.

Content Aware Scale: Uses the same technology in “Content Aware Fill” to scale part of an image. Photoshop will make it’s best guess how you want your image to look when you resize with this.

Puppet Warp: New CS5 feature is a very complicated warp that allows users to distort images in complex ways.

Transform and Free Transform: Very useful tools for resizing an image, correcting and creating perspective, and distorting images.

Keyboard shortcuts: A menu for editing and assigning a custom keyboard shortcut for every menu item in Photoshop. Absolutely invaluable for any user.

Menus: Allows users to edit existing menus, hiding features they hate or never use, and highlighting the ones they have trouble seeing, but use frequently. Also incredibly helpful.

Preferences: Many of the quirky problems you have with Photoshop have their controllable settings here. More on the preferences menu and making PS behave better in a later article.

The Image Menu

The image menu allows you to change your color depth and do various other things. What are the most useful options here?

Mode: The color mode is where you set your image to RGB or CMYK, as well as various other types like Lab color or Indexed color, an 8-bit color table based file format. You should never use anything but RGB, unless you care to learn more about image formats and digital imaging.

Adjustments: A sub-menu with areas to adjust Brightness and Contrast, Levels, Curves, as well as Hue/Saturation. There are a host of other options here, all worth exploring. Here are a few of the most important:

Brightness/Contrast: A basic way to adjust lights, darks, and contrast in photographs. Good for beginners and easy to understand. Levels: A more sophisticated way to adjust your value range in photos. Curves: An even more complex way to adjust values and channels, allowing users to adjust targeted values with greater accuracy. For experts. Exposure: Yet another menu for adjusting lights, darks and contrast, this one largely for digital photographers. Hue/Saturation: Adjust the colors of your image, as well as how bright and vibrant they are. Invert: Black is white, white is black. All of your colors are now their opposite value. Posterize: A filter that reduces your image to a limited number of colors. Threshold: Another filter that reduces your image to black and white, completely without gray.

Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, Auto Color: Photoshop will attempt to improve your image automatically by adjusting Tones, Contrast or Color. They are likely inspired by Photoshop Elements (and similar basic photo editors); good tools for beginners.

Image Size: Not to be confused with Canvas Size, Image size will enlarge or shrink your entire image file.

Canvas Size: Will increase the size of the file’s “space” without changing any of your image information.

Image Rotation: Turn your image at 90° or 180° angles, or on “Arbitrary” ones like 21° or -5°.

Duplicate: Create a second open file identical to your file’s current state. Your new file does not retain its history.

The Layer Menu

The homebase for editing your layers, the Layer menu has lots of sub-menus and complex options. Beginner users may wish to look over Part 3 of the How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, and get a basic primer on using Layers.

New: The sub menu here allows creation of new layers, as well as options for turning your existing layers into your “Background” layer, if you need or want one. You can also “group” layers—similar to putting files in a folder in your OS. This option creates the “folder” for layers to be stored in.

Duplicate Layer: Allows users to make a copy of an existing layer, either in the current document, to a new one, or to another open file.

New Fill Layer/New Adjustment Layer: Two alternate types of layers that are dynamic, and can be edited with numerical values over and over again. See Part 3 of the How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop to learn more about Adjustment layers.

Layer Mask/Vector Mask: Tools for “masking” or hiding part or all of active layers. Do you know the difference between Vectors and Pixels? They are the basic difference between these two types of masks.

Clipping Masks: This “clips” a layer or layers to the layer transparency below it. Difficult to understand without experimentation. Expect later articles on Clipping Masks, Layer Masks, and Vector Masks here at How-To Geek.

Group Layers/Hide Layers: Multiple layers can be selected in the layers panel, and grouped or hidden here. This instance of “Group” bundles selected layers, rather than creating an empty group.\

Align/Distribute: Tools for arranging layers within your working space, i.e., centering an layer to your entire image, or spacing seven buttonlike objects out evenly on a page.

Merge Down: Combine the current layer or group with the layer below it.

Merge Visible/Flatten Image: Combine all layers in your document. “Merge Visible” will ignore all layers hidden in your Layers Panel, while “Flatten Image” will throw them away entirely. Merge Visible will also leave any transparency you have, while Flatten Image will create a non-transparent “Background Layer” out of all your layered information. See the illustration below for an example.

Above: Original file with Layers Panel, showing the existing layers.

Above: File after “Merge Visible.” Note the the layer transparency.

Above: File after “Flatten Image.” Note the white background added where the image was transparent.

Other Important Menus

The remainder of the menus in Photoshop are nowhere near as complex as these first ones.

The Select Menu: Menus that work with the Marquee, Lasso, and Wand tools, as well as the layers panel. Select All, Deselect, and Reselect work directly with these. When you have an active selection, Invert will select the part of your image you do not currently have selected. You can also select layers in your layers panel here, as well as adjust your selections with the “Modify” sub-menu. You can also enter the “Quick Mask” mode here, described briefly in Part 1 of the How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop.

The Filters Menu: The toybox for Photoshop users, Filters allow for all kinds of strange and wonderful distortions of images. Some are useful, many are not. Filters are a big topic, and will require at least an entire article to themselves. Until then, experiment with filters to find some that you enjoy.

The View Menu: The View menu is home to a lot of the more unusual parts of Photoshop, like the ability to change the size and shape of your pixels, as well as basic things like “Zoom In.” Here, you can preview your Print Size (roughly) or quickly zoom to 100% zoom with “Actual Pixels.” You can also turn off annoying things like Snap, Rulers (if you dislike them) as well as clearing your Guides or Slices.

The Window Menu: This is where nearly all of your panels disappear to when they are deleted, including the options panel at the top of your screen and your toolbox, by default on your left.  You can also cycle through your open images at the bottom of the Window menu.

The Help Menu: Last but not least, the Help menu is the basic informational menu every good application should have. Check through it to learn about the tools that elude you, or simply come back to How-To Geek for the next installment of the Guide to Learning Photoshop!

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One of the best features of Photoshop is one of the worst, as well: you are overwhelmed with options. Have a quick look through the default panels and learn more of what Photoshop can do in your hands.

Adjusting Panels

The default panels are snapped to the right side of your PS window. They are a fine set to begin with in Photoshop, and you can always adjust them, hide them, show them, or whatever makes the most sense to you. Photoshop workspaces are largely about personal comfort and have little to do with the so-called “correct” way to use Photoshop.

Your default set of panels from “Essentials” will look like this. If you lose any of them, you can get them back by going to the  in the workspace area of your menu bar. You should see an option in the contextual menu that says “Reset” which will reset your workspace to the default panels.

The panels can be condensed by clicking the  on the right of the panel. They can further be condensed or expanded by clicking and dragging on the left side of the panels.

It’s also simple to create “Free Floating” panels by clicking and dragging them away from the snapped areas on the left and right.

It can be simpler to edit panels this way, and later return them to the snapped area, grayed out here by Photoshop as they are dragged to become free-floating.

Panels can be added back to the snap area by dragging them to the far right of your PS window. Release your mouse button when your cursor is nearly on the farthest right part of the screen, just within the dark gray window. You should see the blue line illustrated above, telling you you’re setting your new panel set to snap on the side of your screen.

Exploring Default Panels

The “Essentials” workspace is also the default set of panels. These will be what we’ll go over first.

Mini Bridge: Adobe Bridge is an image file browsing program similar to Faststone, XnView, or Google Picasa. CS5 has integrated a smaller version of Bridge to allow more visual browsing of your images within your panels. This can be extremely helpful, although any of the aforementioned programs work just as well, if not better. Bridge tends to be a bit on the pokey side, and uses more resources than you might expect.

Visual browsing within Photoshop, however, is helpful. Bridge loads when you open the panel and ask to “Start Browsing.” Intuitive tools help navigate to folders on your machine; important and frequently used files or folders can be added to Favorites for quick recall later.

When you find an image you wish to load, either double-click it in Mini Bridge, or right click and pick “Open” from the contextual menu.

History: One of the most important features of Photoshop, History allows users multiple levels of undo, allowing you to reverse a long series of mistakes. This can allow you to edit photographs or images more naturalistically, experimenting with effects that may or may not come out correctly.

As you can see, the above image has some random nonsense done to it I’d like to undo entirely.

Opening the History Panel, you can walk backwards through all of the steps you’ve done on your image, or even revert the file by clicking the topmost area, directly below “History.”

You have a great deal more control over your editing with these multiple levels of undo.

Color: A simple panel, color allows you to pick and edit your foreground and background colors without opening the color contextual menu.

You can adjust your Red, Green, and Blue values from 0 to 255. Higher values will give you brighter colors, as you are adding brighter and brighter light to your current color. You can also pick color straight from the rainbow at the bottom of the panel, if that seems more naturalistic.

You can also click the  to adjust options, and pick sliders from different color modes. If you are a beginner, you won’t be interested in this until you learn about color modes first.

Swatches: A good resource for beginners and professionals alike, swatches are a panel of saved colors.

By default, CS5 has a saved palette of 122 colors for you to use.

You can create new swatches from your foreground color by simply clicking the  and selecting “New Swatch.”

Whatever color you have selected will become available as a swatch.

Styles: As a panel of saved “Layer Effects,” styles can be an interesting way for beginners to start experimenting or veterans to save their most common layer effects for reuse.

Simply clicking any of the default styles will apply them quickly to your active layer. You can manually edit them, or click the   to remove all layer effects.

Many of the defaults may appear strange.

Others may have some limited use.

Many may leave you scratching your head. They are not all useful. However, clicking the will allow you to save whatever effects you have on your current layer, which can prove useful.

Adjustments: The adjustment panel creates layers that change and filter your image dynamically. While you can apply Hue/Saturation, Contrast, or Levels to your photograph, it would be permanent. Adjustments creates new layers on top of your image, that can be adjusted inside this panel.

Clicking “Levels” automatically creates a new adjustment layer.

You are given the option to adjust the Levels sliders and change the contrast of my image.

These changes can be undone without using the history or the undo functions.

Multiple adjustment layers can be stacked, each one dynamically editable at any time, even when the image is saved and reopened. Notice how they appear as separate layers in the layers panel.

The example from earlier, now with the Hue/Saturation and Levels adjustments.

Masks: The masks palette is a method for blocking out parts of layers, reducing them to transparency. This is an elegant, non-beginner way to remove a background from a layer without using effective but destructive editing techniques.

The mask panel has features unique to CS5, and can help even beginner users cut out backgrounds from images with little to no effort.

Layers: Layers are the hallmark feature of Photoshop, allowing users to create 2d images in multiple editable parts.

New art can be created in layers without disturbing separate layers above or below.

Layers can be copied and masked, among other things. Adjustment layers are also  created and managed in this panel.

Layers can be stacked on top of one another, giving weird, fun, or unexpected combinations of effects.

Opacity and Blending Modes are also controlled here. Image editing with layers can quickly create rich images, and makes editing easy.

Channels: Digital images display colors in combinations of primary colors, each with values.

These primary colors are viewable separately your color channels. Beginners can safely ignore the channels panel, as there are few uses for beginner or even intermediate users to use channels.

If you care to play with channels, save your image and experiment. You can find a beginner’s primer on channels here, if you care to learn more before diving in. However, you can do worlds of photo editing without using or even understanding them, so use your own judgment if you prefer to ignore them or learn to use them.

Paths: Another difficult area of Photoshop, paths are vector based primitivesoperating similar to the ones in Illustrator. Vectors themselves are not difficult to understand, but the Pen Tool is difficult and frustrating for new users to dive into.

While the path panel is very straightforward, and paths and vectors fairly easy to understand, the Pen Tool and Paths in Photoshop are better left for a more in-depth article.

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Relentless Appz Has released there 2nd Generation of Android ROM Kitchens and this time, its took a whole new approach. The 1st Generation was aimed at solely the beginners in its design but still allowing some great customisation to your phones look and feel. This however has gone that whole lot further. If you were one of the ones to purchase the original software this is the perfect move onto further developing your own ROM’s. The interesting thing about this Android ROM Kitchen, is that it allows you to practically customise everything you see virtually on any Android Device, it does this by creating tools which have been specifically designed for customising certain parts of your ROM and makes customising a whole lot easier and faster in development, so its perfect for designers, developers and even the curious beginner. The picture below is of the software’s new simplistic look.

To name its features we will need a list so, it will allow you to:

• Take any Android ROM and prepare it for Customisation
• Add and Remove any Applications installed on the ROM
• Change the Font to anyone of the 30 Funky pre-installed examples or to one of your choice

• Add Compatibility automatically between different ROM’s so that you can use for instance a G1 ROM on a HTC Magic
• Create or edit any of the scripts with the ROM
• Change the Boot Screen which loads when you turn on the device, you can choose one of the pre-installed or create your own
• Customise Any Applications you desire, edit the graphics,the layout, everything and this tool will unpack, edit, re-pack and sign the app all for you
• Customise the Framework-res, the heart of the device. This is done in a special method which allows you to edit it without breaking the unique security signature of the Framework, without this special method, its impossible to edit, but with it you can edit all the resources like the smiley faces in your sms

• Add extras like, unique features such as bluetooth fileshare, wifi tethering, file explorer, APN lists, Apps2SD and Super User Capabilities
• Customise the ROM information so that you can state you created it, you can also set up all the default structures like ringtones etc
• ZipAlign this is a great new function which will go through every single APK application and optimise it so that it uses less RAM on the Device so overall provides better performance. The great thing about this funtion is that its all done for you at a click of a button
• Last but not least the packaging up of all your customisations into a tidy archive and then signing it so that you can flash it to your Android device for use

The great thing is, once you have finished creating your custom ROM you can if you have it, then use there other application the Relentless Command Centre to get it flashed onto the device. Although this is not necessary you can obviously just boot into recovery and flash in the normal way and enjoy.

I have created many ROM’s with this software and they all work very well indeed, its on sale at the Relentless Appz website for less than a fiver and the best of it is, if you have every purchased from the Relentless Appz website before, for one of there Automatic Rooting Solutions or the 1st Generation ROM Roaster then you are eligible for a whopping 50% discount, so you get all this software for just £2.49….Crazy

so if this takes your interest go along to there website now

http://www.relentlessappz.com

I recently told you about RelentlessAppz and their fantastic software called Relentless Command Centre. Well shortly after that was released, Sean Marsh contacted me about his newest “invention”. I have been playing with it for a couple of weeks. Its called RelentlessAppz ROM Roaster. Cool name, huh?

The idea is really simple. If like me, you are constantly on the look out for a decent ROM for your Android handset. You will find that every ROM you try is almost right. Just not exactly how you like. For example, being in Ireland, it always annoys me that I have to re-enter my APNs to get my data connection going whilst most others have them preset. Or when I reflash, the most essential app for me is Titanium Backup. Some chefs add them, some don’t.

Well, if you relate to all that and feel like having a little fun, then this is for you.

Relentless Appz ROM Roaster

This is a review of the software. Later I will write, not so much a how to as its pretty simple, but more of a tips and tricks of the software. Whilst Sean doesn’t get a gold star for his Photoshop skills  , he does get bonus stars for making something that is usually out of the reach of the everyday user in to a simple click click affair.

Features

• Add your own APN list
• Add a custom boot screen and Launcher
• Add your own fonts
• Enable APPS2SD
• Choose where apps get installed
• Install specific keyboards
• Add Social networks, Music apps and File sharing apps
• Fine tune control over what apps get added at the beginning
• Add superuser app
• GREAT FUN!!!
• 32b Compatibility Mode -E.g Use a Hero ROM on a Dream/Magic

This is your control centre.

You need a base ROM to work with and load that into the interface. Then as you move along you add and remove features that not completely your liking. When you are done, you hit the turkey and flash your device.

If you need reminding on flashing devices just use the search button on this site.

PRICE: £4.99