Excerpted from “Real World Adobe Photoshop CS2.” Published by Peachpit Press. Do you ever work with images that are flat, washed out, too dark, or have a bad color cast? You don’t have to accept those failings. Instead, try a few basic steps to bring them back to life. Learn how to take blah photos […]

For some time now I’ve been explicating the finer points of color management in this column, and while I’ve strived to define terminology when needed, the conviction that a permanent, at-your-ready glossary would help tremendously has grown each and every month. In this column, we’re introducing just that — a glossary of key terms that […]

This story is taken from Real World Adobe Photoshop CS. Very few of us shoot the perfect photograph right off the bat. Even traditional photographers employ a variety of techniques in the darkroom to improve their images. That’s why Photoshop includes tools for dodging and burning as well as applying level and curve adjustments. These […]

For my money, one of the most-underrated features in Adobe Photoshop CS is the Camera Raw plug-in, which reads raw images from just about every camera on the market that supports that format. (Version 2.2, which adds support for several new models thus bringing the total to more than 60 cameras, was released in late […]

Whether or not you buy into the Adobe Creative Suite concept, and even if you find the new, highly confusing icons for the applications annoying to the point of dementia, Adobe Photoshop CS is, in its own right, a very worthwhile upgrade. The most compelling changes, at least from this reviewer’s perspective, are in the […]

Editor’s Note: For an updated look at sharpening, see “Creating Sharp Images: The Big Picture.” It includes how-to advice for Photoshop CS2, CS3, and CS4, and for Photoshop Lightroom and Camera Raw. In a previous column, I advanced the notion of using a two-pass approach to sharpening. Since then, I’ve taken a much longer, harder […]

The Adobe Creative Suite (CS) represents a major change in the way Adobe develops, markets, updates, and prices its design and publishing products. When taken as a whole, the collection of products is like a murderer’s row of graphics applications, and nearly every one hits the ball out of the park. This is not the […]

In amongst all the other goodies in Adobe Photoshop 7, you may have missed Auto Color entirely. Or, you may have chosen it from the Image > Adjustments menu, found that it gave you a fairly unattractive, cold, contrasty image and decided it was as useful as all the other auto-adjustments — which is to […]

Color management lives and dies by the accuracy of the profiles you use. The generic profiles that scanner, printer, and monitor vendors supply vary quite a bit in their accuracy. Some devices display more unit-to-unit variation than others, and some inks and papers vary more from batch to batch than others. In the case of […]

In my last column, I addressed the question, “How can I get Photoshop to make my prints match what I see on my monitor?” — and broke the sad news that neither you, I, nor anyone else can actually do that. Monitors can display colors that are either not reproducible in print, or are only […]