Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

You may already know that Photoshop blend modes can immeasurably enhance your creativity and playfulness. You may be familiar with the artful aspects of blend modes; however, most Photoshop users don't know they are corrective, too. Understanding how they work is a key to using them to your best advantage.

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NOTE: This article was originally posted as an appendix and supplemental material to Photoshop: In-Depth Healing Tools in conjunction with Carol Rhodes.

With digital camera photographs, there is very little preparation involved to work with them in an application like Photoshop. Many times, it is as simple as plugging a cable into the camera and then into your computer. The rest of the process is frequently accomplished automatically, or with very little direction.

However older photographs must be scanned in for the computer to be able to use them.  You might think, "I'll never need to work with old photographs, I have my digital camera."  But considering photography has been around for more than a century, and digital photography has only been the standard for a decade or so, there are millions of printed photographs still around that are deteriorating everyday.  If you want these photographs to last into the next generation, you need to preserve them digitally.

The problem with print photography is that it was growing and changing constantly throughout it's lifetime.  Many of the developing techniques used by early consumer cameras are unstable, and the chemicals used can breakdown over time.  Look at any old photograph.  The 'sepia tone' effect that we associate with older photographs is actually the deterioration of the chemicals used to develop the photograph.  Left unchecked, eventually the image will be unrecognizable.

Considering that many print photographs are stored in shoe boxes in closets and under beds, it's even more important to preserve the images we want to last forever.

In this article, we will examine scanners, including what types are available to consumers, and what features to look for.  Finally, we will discuss the best practice to follow to ensure you get a good scan.

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Many times in our images, we find damage that is too intense to replace with the basic healing tools.  When this happens we can sometimes replace these damaged pixels with information from a different image, and occasionally with information from the same image.  In the previous exercise with this image, we repaired the background.  This time, we will see how to repair the damage over the right arm, using the left arm as a basis for our correction.

Use this exercise file to follow along:

View this video tutorial to see how we can use information in the image to repair it.

Repairing Heavy Damage by Duplicating Pixel Information

With the announcement that IU had acquired free Adobe software for all of it's employees and students, your first thought was probably "How do I get it?" Now that we've all had a couple of months to get the software downloaded and installed, you're likely thinking now: "What do I do with all of this stuff?"

Adobe is one of the largest software companies in the world, and while most people are familiar with their core apps, like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash, there are many applications included in the suite that you might not be familiar with. In this post, we'll take some time to examine all the different applications that you can install with the various Adobe suites. We will focus on the applications in Design Premium CS4 and Production Premium CS4. There are many add-ons and extra technology included in the installers, but we will look only at the applications included.

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Let's take a look at this image:

Feel free to download this image and follow along by clicking this link:

.

Clearly, this image has been damaged over time. There are many problems we need to fix, but one of the major problems is the background. Besides the man's left side, he's actually in pretty good shape. The background is the major problem here. We could use some healing tools to fix each area individually, but there is an easier way to accomplish this. We can use a pattern to replace the entire background with a texture.

We 'll use Photoshop's Pattern Maker to accomplish this. The Pattern Maker can be used to create a simple pattern that will fill the image. But we can also use it to create textures that we can apply with the Pattern Brush.

NOTE: In Photshop CS4, the PatternMaker is no longer included with the standard Photoshop install.  It is now a separate download.

It can be downloaded for free here. To install the files, extract the downloaded files (once as a zip file, and again as an .exe), and move the file:

Photoshop Content\English\Goodies\Optional Plug-ins\Plug-ins 32-bit\Filters\PatternMaker.8BF

into

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop CS4\Plug-ins\Automate

And then restart Photoshop.
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Many times when working with Photoshop beginners (and even some experienced users), I find that they sometimes struggle with Photoshop not reacting the way they expect it to. Even if you know exactly what tool or method to use, it can be frustrating and confusing when applying that tool or method doesn't act as expected. Photoshop is a complex application and a particularly unforgiving one as well. It very rarely gives feedback, and when it does, it 's almost always negative. Because of this, it 's easy to lose track of what tool is selected, what settings are being used, and which layer you are working on. But with a little detective work, it 's fairly simple to track down the problem.

With that in mind, here are the things to check when a tool doesn't work.

1) The Toolbox

2) The Options Bar

3) The Layers Panel

4) Do I have a selection or transformation active?

Let 's look at each one of these individually and see what problems might occur.

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