Hello friends, this is Ruchika and I’m an online graphic design course student at Graphic Design Institute in Delhi. I recently completed my training in Adobe Photoshop under the guidance of Anuradha ma’am. No doubt Photoshop has added a very crucial skill in my graphic designing training journey.
Today, I’m sharing my learning experience with you that how I learned image editing using its different tools and options. I’ll share the practical steps of how I worked on different options and tools to create compositing and retouching in Adobe Photoshop. Let me start with a quick history first.
History of Adobe Photoshop: It first came on 19th Feb 1990 and its main company is Adobe.
About Adobe Photoshop
I would say that this application is not an ordinary one as it not just used by designers, UI UX experts, photographers, video editors, but also by animators. It is really a versatile application and offers many powerful tools to create branding like merchandises, posters, advertisements etc. On the other big hand, it is equally helpful to edit images. So, for every purpose there exists a professional tool in Photoshop, whether it is moving tool to edit in quick mask tool.
Below, I’m giving the images of all tools with their families. You can clearly take a look at how they are divided into different groups.
The tool family involves families with different shortcuts like M for Marquee tools, V for Move, L and W for lasso and advanced selection tools, C for crop options, etc.
The other groups include I for eyedropper tools, Y for history brush, E for eraser, G for gradient, O for dodge and burn, P for pen, T for type, U for shape, etc.
Among all the 4 main groups that my mentors guided me to master were:
- J Family → Healing Tools (Remove, Spot Healing, Healing Brush, Patch Tool, Red eye and Content Aware Move)
- B Family → Brush Tools
- S Family → Clone Stamp Tools
- O Family → Dodge & Burn Tools
These tools are covering 80% of image editing and correction.
Now, I’m presenting you the two practical examples of how I did retouching and image editing in Photoshop.
Let’s take a practical example today to see how we can transform the appearance of the photograph of a person full of blemishes.
Practical Retouching Examples from Photoshop Student
Example 1
Figure 4 Before and After of Photo Retouching
Left image = before (blemishes, acne)
Right image = after (clean skin)
This is done mainly using Spot Healing Brush Tool (J)
Steps to do it:
- Ctrl + J on the image to duplicate the same
- Select the tool by pressing J
- From top toolbar, select: Spot Healing Brush Tool.
- Choose soft brush and size slightly bigger than the blemish or the pimple.
Tip: Zoom in the image by pressing Ctrl ++ and then work on the image closely.
Let’s get into us before image again and see how we edited lips using Edit in quick mode.
- Press Q on keyboard, and the screen should show red overlay.
- Select Brush Tool (B) and choose a soft brush.
- Paint over the lips and inverse the selection (Ctrl + Shit and I) and colour the lips pink.
- Adjust the shade using blending mode.
Tip: Choose the blending mode Soft Light for the realistic lipstick like Pink Shade
Example 2
Now let’s understand the other tools by another example where we have the need to transform the image on the left to the image on right.
Figure 5 Image shows both original and edited images
Steps to do it:
- CTRL + J to duplicate the image, so as to work not destructively.
- Select the blending mode as Vivid light.
- Press CTRL+I to invert
- Go to filter and select Others and inside it selects High pass. Now enter the value where blemishes are getting faded.
- Again, go to filter and apply blur and then Gaussian blur.
- Now we need to create a replacement mask and hide with colour black and select the soft brush with colour white to reveal the layer underneath.
Tip – If we still do not get the perfect image, export the Version 1 as PNG and repeat all the steps for the perfect version 2 transformation.
Apart from these tools, we can certainly use the filters in Photoshop. The results that we are getting using these tools can be achieved with the help of filters too. Filters use AI to get the perfect transformed image.
Conclusion of the blog:
So, just like there is no limit to the human creativity similarly there exists no limitations in Photoshop. You can convert your creative ideas into stunning visuals using the powerpack tools and options in this photo editing application. Also, we can create GIFs and videos in it using the timeline and frame animation options.
I just recommend to practice daily and if you are very new to this then join a Photoshop training institute like I did. You will get expert guidance and opportunities to work on live projects.
Author Introduction
This blog is written by Ruchika Kalra who is one of our graphic designing students. She is pursuing 6 months training graphic design from our institute. So far Ruchika has completed her training in Photoshop and this blog was one of her contributions to our blogging community.