Personal, Professional, Practice: Photoshop Lesson 2

In our second Photoshop lesson today I learnt some things that I hadn't come across before. As a very casual photoshop user I didn't know how useful masking could be when editing images! We took an image of a character and was able to change and edit the way he looked without changing the background as well as blend layers to make them look like one.

The first tool we looked at was changing the levels of the image to easily change the contrast and clarity of the image as well as looking at the hue and saturation. Hue and saturation can change the whole look and colour in the image and this would be good for changing the colour of clothes on a character easily and seeing which worked best. Image > Adjustments > Levels and Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation is how you would find these.

Next, we looked at how to use the spot healing brush tool which blends things together to make them smooth but also can get rid of things that you don't want in the image. I took this image of a character with three heads that had been copied on and blended them to make the harsh lines are no longer visible. A tip to remember with this tool is that if you are blending layers then make sure that 'Sample all layers' is ticked in the toolbar at the top.

Finally, we looked at masks which are very useful so that you can edit a certain area without effecting the rest of the image, this could be the character but not the background behind them. Using the magic wand tool to select where you want the mask to go round is a great way to do this quickly and if you select the back first then select inverse can also be used. I've taken screenshots of the different processes you can use with masks like, adding images for texture, colouring the character and using overlay.

I feel like I've found out some really useful tips today that will help me when I go to design my own characters on Photoshop, which I may not have been as confident with before learning these new techniques.