This is a draft. I would appreciate your review of this tutorial and your telling me about any egregious or not so egregious errors.
An informal survey of Photo Venture Camera Club members shows that there is a lot of variation in skill using an image editor. Furthermore there is a lot of variation in image editors in use. Most of them seem to be in the family of editors put out by Adobe - Photoshop of various generations ranging from PS7 to CS3 and Elements 2 to Elements 6. At a surface level that is quite a range of editing capabilities but if you boil it down to the tools a photographer needs in going from pixels in the camera to print on the wall, there is surprising continuity among these various editors.
We are going to capitalize on that continuity here and offer a tutorial that should familiarize you with a basic set of tools we all need. I was very gratified to see that there is rather little that I would view as absolutely necessary beyond what is offered in Elements version 2 so most of this tutorial will speak to both Photoshop and Elements users. There are differences in routes to needed tools and they will be followed. When the need arises, the Photoshop and Elements paths will separate long enough to deal with their individual use. Otherwise this tutorial treats both programs together.
I don't mean to minimize the value of the later editions of Photoshop and Elements. I presently use CS2 and will likely move on to CS3 in the next few months. Each new edition has offered tools I find valuable and use. But the basics, the tools needed to get a good ground level introduction to image editing for photographers, are right there in all of the editions mentioned above.
Let's get one point clear right at the beginning. My basic objective is to introduce a small number of tools and familiarize you with how they can be employed in basic image editing. The idea in part is to show how flexible the tools are rather than whether they are necessarily the best choice among all the available tools. We are talking about powerful programs for image editing and there are nearly always several ways to accomplish the same end. It is almost certain that I will use tools here in ways you may not be accustomed to seeing. But again, the idea is to get across some basics. We can always move on to other tools when grounding is complete.
Before moving on to image preparation I want to bring up a few caveats:
- I'm assuming you have a basic familiarity with the tool bars, drop down menus and palettes available to you in Photoshop or Elements. If you don't, this would be a good time to go through the first part of your manual and do one or more of the tutorials that come with the program. I used to manage a group that included technical writers who write customer manuals and I have a special affinity for people who actually look at those written works of art. We concluded at one point that more people write them than read them. The manuals can be useful and now is one of those times.
- An unfortunate fact of life is that your camera does not see the world in the same way you do; the image you see on your monitor is a little different from what the camera sees, and beyond that the image produced with your printer is not the same as what you see on the monitor. The topic of color management is a long tutorial unto itself and only basic color correction will be addressed here. It would also be very worthwhile to invest in hardware and software that profiles your monitor. More information and thoughts on this will be presented later.
- Because this course speaks to a wide range of versions of editing programs, many of which do not accommodate Camera Raw, we will not be covering Camera Raw here. That is a separate topic to be covered at another time. This does not affect what we need to know about the tools that will be presented here. In fact an understanding of the tools we use will be helpful in appreciating what Raw conversion can do.
Now on to image preparation.
Before
After