Tilt Shift Photoshop Tutorial

Tilt shift is a photography technique in which a selective area of the picture is focused (the selective focused area is often stretched straight – either horizontally or vertically).

It is possible to play around with this photography on a DSLR using specially designed tilt shift lenses, but this would costs hundreds of dollars. However, this special effect can be easily applied to photos using some post-production work with Photoshop. With so much room for image enhancements and a variety of blur effects to apply, amazing tilt shifts are possible using Adobe Photoshop. In this tutorial, I will explain how to apply tilt shift effects to your photos in Adobe Photoshop. Here I go…

---

How to create tilt shift in Photoshop ?

Follow this comprehensive step by step tutorial to create tilt shift effect in Adobe Photoshop. I assume that you have already installed Photoshop (I am using Photoshop version CS4)

Step 1: Open the photo in Photoshop press ‘Q’ key to enter the quick mask mode. Right after its selection, click on the gradient tool located on the same toolbar. Refer the screen shots below…

 

Ensure that the top gradient toolbar matches these settings - grey value stripes, reflected gradient and normal mode.

Step 2: Now start by placing the pointer on the image where you want most of the focus. Press-hold ‘Shift’ key and click-hold-drag down to the point where you want the focus to terminate.

Quick tip: If you want a horizontal tilt shift/horizontally focused area, then you need to click-hold and drag the pointer vertically starting from the point where you want most of the focus to the point where you want diminished focus. Similarly, if you want a vertical tilt shift/vertically focused area, then you need to drag the pointer horizontally starting from the point where you want high focus to the point of diminished focus.

In my example, I want horizontal tilt shift or a horizontally focused area, so I start by click-holding and dragging the pointer in vertical direction (from high focus point to low focus point of my interest)…

Step 3: De-select the quick mask mode by pressing ‘Q’ key on the keyboard. You will see dotted selection area on the photo as shown below…

Step 4: From the top most toolbar, navigate to Filter –> Blur –> Gaussian Blur. Apply a suitable level of Gaussian blur tool and your tilt shift photo is almost ready. Press CTRL+D to remove the dotted selection lines from the photo.

Step 5: It’s the time to enhance the overall photo by playing with the color, contrast and hue/saturation options of Photoshop. This will add more life to your tilt shift photographs. It’s not necessary that you strictly follow the settings shown below. Just add them in accordance to your photos and taste.

---

And these are some of the tilt shift pictures I obtained as a result of this tutorial…

I hope that you will find this tutorial helpful and interesting too. Go ahead and experiment tilt shift on a variety of photos with this tutorial Your comments and feedback are always welcomed…

Read More

How to Change background in Photoshop

A distracting background certainly spoils the beauty of a good photograph. With powerful image editing softwares like Adobe Photoshop, it is very easy to change the background of a photo. In this Photoshop tutorial, I will explain - how easily one can replace a distracting background with a desired background photo. I am using Adobe Photoshop version CS4 while creating this tutorial. 

---

Step by Step tutorial – Change/replace a background image in Photoshop 

Step 1: Open your image in Photoshop. Press ‘Q’ to quick mask and then select brush tool from the left toolbar. Paint the entire subject completely with the brush tool, ensuring that you don’t spread the color out of the picture. This process takes time.

Step 2: Now after finishing painting the whole subject, press ‘Q’ again and select inverse from the drop-down menu of Adobe Photoshop.
 

Step 3: After that, copy your image using Ctrl+C and open up the new background image in Photoshop itself by navigating through File –> Open. Paste this copied picture on this new background using Ctrl+V. To adjust the photo on this new background, press Ctrl+T (transformation tool). With this tool you can easily resize or rotate the picture on the new background, so that it looks a part of it  
 Wasn’t that easy ? This is how you can change or replace a background image inPhotoshop. As an alternative, you can also choose to blur the background in Photoshop instead of replacing it with a newer one.

Read More

How to blur the background of a photo in Photoshop with quick mask and Gaussian blur tool

Blurring the background of a photo is very easy to do in Photoshop. All that you have to do is to mask your photo or subject and apply the appropriate blur effect in Photoshop. A well focused subject standing against a soft background is a great way to draw the attention of the observer towards the subject. Although one can easily shoot a subject with a blurred background using basic digital cameras, the background can also be blurred easily by using this post-processing technique in Photoshop. So here we go with our new photo editing tutorial on defocusing the background using Photoshop…

---

Step 1: Mask the subject completely. Press ‘Q’ and select the brush tool from the left toolbar. Since we need to blur the background of the photo, we have to mask our subject so that it does not gets affected while applying blur to the entire photo. Refer the sample below…

Make sure that you cover your subject neatly and completely. This process can take time but it’s worth doing for achieving amazing results. If the mask spreads out of the subject, use the eraser tool for correction.

---

Step 2: After finishing the masking of the subject, press Q again. Navigate to Filter –> Blur –> Gaussian Blur. Select a smaller radius value for the Gaussian blur tool, or else the photo might look over edited. a radius value of 4.0 to 5.0 should produce reasonable blurring effect.

 

That’s all. When you are satisfied with the level of blurred background, click OK and save your picture. This is how easily you can blur the background of a photo using quick mask and Gaussian blur tool in Adobe Photoshop. Thanks for going through this short and easy tutorial. Your comments and feedbacks are always appreciated  

Read More

Resize multiple images in Photoshop with batch resizing tool

Adobe Photoshop is a great photo editing software that comes quite handy while resizing multiple photos automatically. It’s obviously very irritating and time consuming when one tries to manually resize every single image in Photoshop. To overcome this limitation the necessity to understand the batch resizing tool in Photoshop increases. Batch resizing tool in Adobe Photoshop resizes multiple images of large size automatically within minutes. The user has only one thing to do – setting the necessary parameters like source folder, target folder, new width and height dimensions and then finally running the automated process.

So without wasting anymore time lets discuss this unique batch resizing technique that saves plenty of time and efforts

Step 1  Open Adobe Photoshop and navigate to File –> Scripts –> Image Processor…

Step 2  Under the image processor - select the source folder that contains all the images to be resized. I will recommend you to transfer all the images to be resized to a separate folder before setting the source folder.

Step 3  Now set the location on your hard-disk to save the new resized images. You can either choose to save in the same location or select a different folder to save the newly processed images.

Step 4  Now set the file type (obviously as JPEG), file quality and new resizing dimensions for width and height in pixels. Set these new dimensions according to your need. Finally after setting all these parameters click the Run button located on the top right window.

That’s all. Now sit aside and relax. Your photos will be resized within minutes depending upon the number of image files and their size.

I hope that you all will definitely like this time and effort saving unique method to resize multiple images in Adobe Photoshop For any suggestions and query feel free to comment on this tutorial.

Read More

How to resize photos in Photoshop

Resizing a picture is very important when it comes to saving the disk space, sending an image in a email or using the resized image as a profile picture on Facebook. A photo captured with a digital camera is very large in size and the need to resize the image arises.

As the resolution of the digital camera increases the image size also increases and thus the need to resize the image.

This table given below, shows an estimate of how much the size of a picture is reduced when resized down in Adobe Photoshop.

Digital camera resolution	21 MP	14 MP	10 MP	5 MP
actual image size(approx.)	12 MB	4 MP	2 MP	1 MP
Approx.. image size after resizing the image	8 MB	2 MB	1 MB	500 KBs

To resize an image, either  Adobe Photoshop or any online utility can be used. But, using Adobe Photoshop is a flexible way to resize an image as you get wide range of controls over the whole resizing procedure.

---

How to resize the picture?

a) Procedure to Resize an image by 50% in Photoshop

1. Open the image in Photoshop

2. Click on image tab from drop down menu and select image size.

3. In image size window, under pixel dimensions change pixel to percentage and set the width and height to 50. Also make sure that you select bicubic smoother from the lower drop-down menu.

note: the number next to width and height denotes the percentage by which the image will be resized. In this case it is 50% resized.

4. After applying all these settings click OK and save the new resized image, replacing the old one.
For the above example, the new resized image was 1.5 MB in size while the original image before resizing was 4.7  MB in size.

---

b) Procedure to resize an image by pixels(px) in Photoshop

Resizing an image by pixel value follows almost the same procedure as that when resizing by percentage, except that you have to select pixels under the image size window. See the screenshot below…

In my example, I have chosen the dimensions 1600*1200 pixels for the image to be resized. The original dimensions were 3240*4320 pixels(14 megapixels). The image is resized down to this resolution at the expensive of a bit degradation of quality due to loss of pixel values.

Read More