Retouching People

Zapping shines and shadows

Last night I had the pleasure of doing a little ditty on photography and Elements for the Danbury Area Computer Society, and consequently meeting up with Your Mac Life listener, John Leko and his lovely mom Judy. John's wife Mayra couldn't make it so we took a photo to commemorate the gloriously geeky event (though she couldn't be there, she sent brownies--what a woman!). I took a peek at the photo and unfortunately, both John and I suffered from an acute case of shiny skin. You know, those hot spots that are a touch overexposed and leave you looking as if you're glistening when you've got no cause to be.

Therefore, I thought we'd take a look at how to zap those little buggers using Photoshop Elements (though the steps are identical in Photoshop). It just so happens, that we can use the same technique to zap the shadows so prevalent in double... more

Type Tricks

Rotating individual letters and intersecting text

Welcome to part 3 of the Photoshop: The Missing Maual Teaser series. Since I've been going back and forth with my editor getting the typography chapter in tip-top shape, I have yet another text tutorial for you. Unfortunately there's no equivalent in Elements, so this one is for Photoshop only.

There are a multitude of special effects that can be created with type that has been converted into a vector shape or path. Though the text becomes uneditable, the former type layer is morphed into a living, breathing, and resizable, distortable piece of art or editable path.

All you have to do is select the type layer and choose Layer > Type > Create Work Path or Convert to Shape. Such miraculous transformations allow you to... more

Get it Straight!

How to Crop and Straighten Multiple Photos

Welcome to the second installment of the Photoshop Missing Manual teaser series. This week's chapter was all about the Crop tool, and so is this week's tip. Enjoy!

There’s a reason professional photos look so darn good. Besides the fancy camera, expensive lenses, titanium tripod, artificial lighting, and post-processing voodoo, they’re composed and/or cropped extremely well. Cropping is a means of eliminating distracting elements by repositioning the subject. Good crops accentuate the subject, drawing the viewer’s eye; and bad crops, well, are just bad.

If you're shooting without a tripod, straightening is equally important (though it's really just a rotated crop, which you can do manually by hovering outside the corner of any crop box edge).

Today we'll talk about both cropping and straightening and how Photoshop and Elements can help you get it done on a slew of photos at one time... more