Photoshop CS6: Essential Skills

Mark Galer, Philip Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136087097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Media digitali

Combining real word examples, step-by-step projects and professional advice, Photoshop CS6: Essential Skills provides you with the ultimate learning experience. Written by two internationally recognized authors and Adobe Photoshop Ambassadors, this book and downloadable resource package gives you a guided tour of everything you need to know to master image editing and achieve stunning results.

Broken into three parts, this self-study guide to Photoshop covers all the foundation skills to get you started, before moving on to more advanced image editing and photomontage techniques to develop you skills even further. A complete section of step-by-step imaging projects and the 12+ hours of video tutorials on downloadable resources will hone your image editing skills to give you professional quality results.

what's new for CS6

essential skills

• Overview of the new and changed features in Photoshop CS6.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 – a new look and a new direction

It is always a thrilling time for the authors of a Photoshop book when a new version of the king of image editing hits our desks. And this time around it is no different. It is with a mixture of excitement and expectation that we start the program for the first time. What great features will the Adobe team have dreamed up for us?

Modern and clean interface

Immediately we are struck by the different appearance of the interface. It looks and feels more modern than its predecessor and it certainly sits well with the other Adobe digital imaging products (Lightroom and Photoshop Elements) we have on the desktop of our test machine. I think that as we start to play with the interface color schemes we are all secretly hoping that the modernization of the package goes beyond just the cosmetic.

Certainly in terms of performance, the Adobe Mercury Graphics engine seems to be taking full advantage of the 64-bit, big memory and fast video card test environment. So that's a good sign. Diving into the new Crop tool and exploring the Blur Gallery we start to see that the changed interface also signifies a changing approach to how Adobe wants us to work with our images. It might be an overlap with the direct adjustment features found in Lightroom, or maybe even a cross-fertilization with the many touch-based devices we use daily, but irrespective of where it comes from, Adobe is showing us that the future of image editing is direct and interactive.

We see the implementation everywhere in Photoshop CS6. From the rich cursor info pop-ups that guide our editing decisions, to the on-image controls in the Blur Gallery, the Lighting Effect filter and in 3D, to the extensive use of right-click contextual panels and dialogs. And for us, any way that will make working with our images more direct is the right way to go.

So as you work through the various tips, techniques and information about the new features found in Photoshop CS6 in this round-up, think about where you believe Adobe is taking us and see if you think we are on the right track.

All-new Crop tool

Almost all images are reworked a little with the Crop tool at one time or another so when Adobe headed back to the drawing board to redesign the tool, they had to get it right. I'm sure they knew that not doing so would bring a flood of complaints from hordes of cranky users. Thankfully someone in the team must have been noting the many suggestions and gripes submitted over the years and the version of the tool that appears in Photoshop CS6 has pretty much nailed it.

Borrowing a little from the way that Lightroom does things, the image moves in the background as you reposition the edge-handles of the cropping marquee. This keeps the crop box in the middle of the workspace at all times. A small info display follows your cursor movements showing you the width and height values of your crop and, best of all, there is now an option to crop nondestructively. Yes, that's right. Unlike the bad old days we can now change our minds after committing the crop and saving the file.

Perspective Crop tool

Although the ability to correct foreshortening problems in your photos while cropping is not exactly new, the inclusion of a separate dedicated tool to make these corrections is. So in addition to mentioning the new Crop tool, I think that it is also worthwhile to talk about its sibling, the Perspective Crop tool. Grouped together in the same submeu as the Crop and Slice tools, the Perspective Crop tool allows you to realign converging verticals to make them parallel again or square up picture elements which are slightly askew.

It's true that similar functionality was available in CS5 as a setting on the Crop tool's options bar, but in CS6 the tool has its own spot on the toolbar and a new workflow to boot. After selecting the tool, simply click the four corners of the object you want to straighten, hit Enter and the job is done.

Skintone-aware selections and masking

Photoshop already has a wide choice of selection and masking tools and features. They range from easy-to-use offerings such as the marquee tools, to the more advanced and sophisticated edge detection technology of the Refine Edge feature (introduced in CS5). So what more can the Adobe engineers offer us in terms of better selection options? The answer is skintone awareness and a little face detection technology. That's right. The Color Range feature (Select > Color Range) now has options for targeting areas of skin tones in your photos. Choose the new Skin Tones entry from the Select menu in the Color Range dialog box and adjust the Fuzziness of the selection with the slider. You then fine-tune the selection further by selecting the Detect Faces option and hey presto you have a selection that grabs the key skin areas of your image. Okay, this is not a skin selection magic bullet. Finicky image editors like myself won't be able to resist tweaking the resultant mask, but that's not the point. The feature gets me to a usable mask quickly and then I can spend my time fine-tuning the results.

Content-Aware Move

The content-aware family of technologies started with Content-Aware Scaling in Photoshop CS4, the next version of the software introduced Content-Aware Fill, and now we have two new additions–Content-Aware Move and the Content-Aware mode for the Patch tool. Content-Aware Move sits on the Spot Healing Brush submenu along with other key retouching tools. Like the other tools in the family, Content-Aware Move tool's job is to make our life easier when pushing and pulling the different parts of our images around. Key to this task is the tool's ability to 'magically' fill in the gaps left behind when moving objects and to ‘seamlessly’ blend object and background at its new location. In this regard the tool does an amazing job, but like all things ‘magical’ the results can sometimes be a little unpredictable. Adobe has included two Options bar controls to help make things more predictable–the Adaption method, for adjusting the blending process, and Mode, for switching between Move and Extend modes.

Content-Aware mode for the Patch tool

Though not strictly a new tool, the Content-Aware mode for the Patch tool does provide extra and much needed functionality, especially if your daily work involves plenty of retouching. The two-step process, select and drag-to-patch, remains the same, but the effectiveness of the patching process is much better. You still have to be ac...