Practical Photoshop

Sharpen your skills in Photoshop, Lightroom and Camera Raw

hen you want to create a black-and-white rendition of a picture, there are so many different ways of processing the mono image that it can be difficult to know where to start. The colours in a regular picture can be turned into different shades of grey, so a red object, for example, can be made to look very bright, very dark or anything in-between, depending on how you choose to convert it. Add all the other colours into the mix, and making a mono conversion can leave you scratching your head!

For this issue’s download, we have the perfect solution. Just add your colour shot, then go through a series of simple clicks to get your desired mono results in record time. Our B&W FX Kit will also standardise your print size to A4 or A3, and even add a tidy border, so you can produce a great-looking mono print in seconds.

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n October Adobe released the latest version of Photoshop. One of Photoshop CC 2021’s headline features is the new Sky Replacement Tool, which uses machine learning to automatically recognise the sky in your outdoor photos, isolate it and drop in another sky of your choice. You can now replace a dull sky with a few clicks.

Of course, there’s a whole debate around whether the act of sky replacement tarnishes landscape photography, diminishing the joy of capturing a real-life scene. But leaving that aside, this new tool is astonishingly good at what it does. It’s able to isolate even difficult areas of sky, like the gaps between the pier in our example, or other intricate details like tree branches and buildings.

This release also introduces Neural Filters, which – among other things – automatically colourise old photos and generate smiles in your portraits. Along with Sky Replacement, these features represent an exciting new era of AI-powered Photoshop tools.

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Choose a sky

Open a scene, then go to Edit > Sky Replacement to begin. (If you just want to select the sky without replacing it, choose Select > Sky). Photoshop automatically isolates the sky then replaces it with another. Choose a new sky from the dropdown. They’re divided into categories like Blue Skies, Spectacular and Sunsets. You can drag skies between folders to organise them.

ood is one of the key factors that create impact in photos – and light and colour play a huge factor in setting the mood. If you look at the photograph’s close cousin, the movie, you can see the relationship even more clearly: sad scenes are often blue or green with darker tones, while happy scenes tend to have light and warmer hues, often yellows. Other movies have a limited colour scheme throughout, which sets the feel of the story. In the movie world, the processing work to achieve this is called colour grading.

Before Lightroom 2021, we used Spilt Toning and the Tone Curve to do colour grading. But with Lightroom 2021, we lost Split Toning and gained the Color Grading Panel. The panel layout follows traditional movie tools with a three-circle layout, for Shadows, Midtones and Highlights. The Color Grading Panel also appears in the latest release of Camera Raw, and you can follow this tutorial in either program.

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here are so many entry points into image-editing that it’s almost impossible to list them all, but choosing an unexpected element of an image to work on can result in new and exciting techniques that give your shots a welcome refresh. Shadows are one such entry point that can be easily overlooked. Their dark aspect makes them the perfect vehicle for applying a variety of creative effects.

Using an image that’s predominantly made up of darker tones provides an effective method of showing some of the ways you can edit from the shadows. While it may sound like an unconventional approach, it can be highly effective. We’ll cover the use of several different Adjustment Layers and an advanced masking technique that allows for fine-tuned applications of the effects, as well as introducing you to approaches you may not have considered before.

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Create a split-tone

Set the Foreground Color to a dark blue. Set the Background Color to an extremely light yellow. In this technique, blue will occupy the shadows and yellow will cover the highlights. Click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon and select Gradient Map before changing the Blending Mode from Normal to Overlay. The effect will be quite strong, so you can use the Opacity slider to reduce the strength – this image was set to 60%.

Shadow toning

Create a Color Lookup Adjustment Layer; when the dialog box opens, click on the Load Abstract Profile dropdown menu and select Sienna-Blue. You can now target the effect to darker tones by going to Image > Apply Image. When the dialog box opens, use the default settings, but make sure that Invert is ticked, so the darker tones are targeted rather than lighter tones. Repeat Apply Image a second time to further target darker tones.

Colour grading

For the final effect, we’ll apply a slightly unconventional warm tone to shadows and a cooler tone to the highlights. Create a Selective Color Adjustment Layer and set the Colors dropdown menu to Blacks, before setting Cyan to -10%, Magenta to +15%, Yellow to +15%; if you want to deepen the blacks, set Black to +5%. Set the Colors dropdown menu to Whites and set Magenta to -20%. This will make the shadows warm and red and the highlights slightly cool and green.

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h, the many wonders of food… For more and more of us these days, the great sustainer of life is also a great sustainer of our photography. Whether it’s grabbing a cameraphone snap of a lovingly created restaurant dish to share on social media – or more likely in these times of pandemic, capturing an arty shot of a home-cooked culinary speciality – there has never been a time when food photography has been so popular. And camera manufacturers have recognised this – food has its very own creative mode on Canon’s entry-level EOS 2000D DSLR, for example.

But what could you take away from a day spent shooting food in a professional environment? We asked one of our readers

Oto join us on a socially distanced food shoot at the Bath Photo Studio, with one of its four professional photographers on hand with lighting setup smarts and technique tips.

So, a day before the November lockdown commenced, Jocelyn Gale travelled to Bath to rummage through a sack of festive food and create her own menu of shots to meet four pre-agreed challenges. Camera ready? Then let the festive framing begin!