Top Photoshop Secrets

Home Office Computing, June, 1999 by Randy Hamilton

Are you getting the most from Adobe's flagship image editor? Here are nine ways to look like a graphic-arts genius

WHETHER YOU'RE CREATING WEB PAGES OR printed brochures, finding just the right picture to get your point across can be difficult. Have you scrounged through gigabytes of clip art, captured dozens of images with a scanner or digital camera, but still found yourself saying, "Well, that's close, but still not quite what I want?" Stop settling: With the dean of image editors, Adobe Photoshop, and these few tricks, you can turn "almost there" into "ah, perfect!"

Finding Raw Material Before you can start customizing your pictures, you'll first have to get them into Photoshop. If you're using a digital camera or scanner, use the File/Import command. To recycle clip art, copy a picture from a word processing or desktop publishing document, create a new file in Photoshop, and paste it in. For pictures from the Web, copy the picture to your hard disk (right-click and Save Image As), then simply open it in Photoshop.

Creating Transparent Images Web images can look professional and interesting if--instead of being placed in boring square boxes--they're set transparently against the page's background. To create a transparent GIF image, use Photoshop's Magic Wand tool.

Click anywhere in the background of the desired image and hold the shift key while clicking in any areas you don't want included. Then choose Select/Inverse to create a selection around your image. Next, copy the image and create a new Photoshop file with transparent contents. Now, just paste what you copied against the transparent background. Finally, switch the image mode to RGB color and export it in GIF89a format.

Making Great Backgrounds To make an image that can be seamlessly tiled, choose Filter/Other/Offset, then click on the Wrap Around option button. In the Horizontal and Vertical boxes, type a number that is one half of the picture's pixel size (for example, 512 and 384 for a 1,024- by 768-pixel image). This will show you what your picture will look like, seams and all, when tiled over an entire page.

To remove the seams, choose the Smudge tool and simply smear the edges around. For photorealistic images, you may need to use the Rubber Stamp tool to clone existing parts of the image over the seams. This is probably one of the most time-consuming tricks you can do with Photoshop, but it's also one with the biggest payoff.

Once you've got that perfect background, you need to make sure people can read what you write on it. That's easy: Just increase the brightness and decrease the contrast until your text stands out prominently.

Calculating Download Times All those great graphics on your Web page won't do any good if they take too long to download. To shrink image sizes and subsequent download times, choose Image/Image Size and decrease the height or width. Checking Constrain Proportions preserves an image's aspect ratio, keeping it from becoming distorted. Alternatively, you can export an image in 256-color GIF89a format, which takes up less space.

Making Thumbnails If your image loses too much detail when you shrink it to Web page size, put a smaller thumbnail version on the page instead, and link it to a larger version for viewers who don't mind waiting for the larger download.

Protecting Your Work You've put a lot of time into creating great images. Don't let someone pilfer them. To embed a copyright in any picture, choose Filter/Digimarc/Embed Watermark. Later, you can use Filter/Digimarc/Read Watermark to prove you created the image. (See also www.adobe.com/ stutipstechniques/photoshop.html.)

Quick Fix for Poor Photos Digital cameras are great tools for the aspiring photographer, but don't expect them to fix flaws like red eye in flash images, bad lighting, or skewed angles; that's what Photoshop is for. If you're not happy with the overall look of a picture, try choosing Image/Adjust/Variations to make side-by-side comparisons.

For skewed photos, try the Image/ Rotate Canvas/Arbitrary tool to nudge the picture into alignment. To eliminate red eye, you can use the Paint Bucket tool to fill in pupils with a dark color, or the Darken tool to simply tone down the glare.

Virtual Makeovers You already know how Photoshop can repair less-than-perfect photographs, but how about the subjects of those photos? What if that otherwise handsome picture of you reveals that you got only four hours sleep the night before?

If you want to remove those latenight bags from under your eyes (or even shave a few years off your age), try using the Lighten tool with a small, low-pressure brush to gradually wash away dark areas.

Getting Great-Looking Printouts You've bought a low-priced digital camera to produce images for your Web site, but it doesn't have the resolution required for great printouts on paper?

To fix this, use the Image Size tool (with the Resample Image option) to increase the resolution to that of your target printer. Then choose Filter/Blur/Blur from the command menu. This will cause Photoshop to take all those big chunky squares of color from the low-resolution photo and soften them into nice, even, printer-friendly tones.