Gary's Photoshop Blog

Restoring An Old Photograph

Restoring an old photograph is never easy, and almost never the same. But there are some amazing tools in Photoshop created specifically for this job. We take a look at The Clone Stamp Tool, The Healing Brush Tool, The Spot Healing Brush Tool and the Patch Tool and see how used together they can give you [...]

Masking in Photoshop CS5!

Right after I posted the previous vid, I finally checked out the newly revamped Refine Edge command in Photoshop CS5. The fact is, masking hair is now child’s play! Thanks to ‘Edge Detection” technology in the Refine edge dialog box, massaging Alpha Channels and all of the other tricks we’ve learned over the years to extract [...]

Masking Dark Hair

Creating a selection for hair seems to obsess me. Who knows why? Regardless, here we take a quick look at how to mask out dark hair. it is very similar in technique to my earlier video on masking out blond hair, with a few important differences. For one, it’s only ten minutes long! For another, we [...]

Faking Narrow Depth of Field

Creating the illusion of a narrow DoF photo is super-easy. So easy in fact, I didn’t even go through the trouble of recording a screencast of it! Yup, this is a simple step-by-step tutorial. If you have a photo that was shot with an aperture of, say, f/22, and you want to make it look [...]

Amazing Photo Merge

I may be the last person on the planet to discover the awesome power of Photo Merge. It’s something I never really felt the need to explore, until the other day when I wanted to composite several images shot from the Empire State Building into a panoramic image. I planned on spending hours doing this, [...]

Exploring Hue-Saturation

In this video screencast I explore in excruciating detail some “lesser known” features of the Hue/Saturation adjustment. Most people know that you can edit the hue, saturation, and lightness of an image with the Hue-Saturation adjustment. However, this adjustment is capable of so much more, especially when used as an Adjustment Layer. You can pinpoint [...]

Create Rain

…and learn how to make surfaces look wet! In this screencast we look at how to create realistic-looking rain. It turns out that it’s a lot easier than you might think! The thing is, once I figured out how to do that, I realized that if the surfaces in the image to which I added rain [...]

Extracting a Glass from a Photo

Alpha Channels – Part 4

In this screencast we explore 4 different ways to extract hair from an image in order to composite it into a different background. Once again, Alpha Channels play a major role, but we also explore some Blending options in order to achieve great results. I contend that there is no one “best” way to mask [...]

Alpha Channels – Part 3

More info on Alpha Channels, and we use Color Range to begin a complex selection process. In the end we wind up with 2 different Alpha Channels for separate selections and combine them into one selection from which we make our layer mask. Powerful goodness! Get the image so you can follow along: Get Image Direct download: [...]