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The Idiot’s way round Photoshop |
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Page 4 of 4
Anyway it’s a pig to get right. The trouble is you have three controls
which work interrelated to each other and you are trying to make
critical judgements on a monitor screen with a resolution of 72. The
first is “Intensity”, the second “Radius”, and the third’ “Threshold.”
Go to “Filter” on the top bar, down to “sharpen” > “Unsharp”. Here
you will see part of your image displayed at 100% Set the “Intensity”
slider to 100%, the “Radius” to 0.6 and the “Threshold” to 0 and leave
it at that for now. I find it works, certainly up to A3 prints of
average subjects. Or Google in “Sharp Control by Vtie” for a super
painless download which is free.
And just before we wrap this lot up I hear somebody mention B/W (black
and white). O.K. I am a B/W photographer but sometimes colour is
better. In the days of film I would often carry two cameras, in fact I
had a chrome one for colour and a black one for B/W, it saved me
getting confused. However now with digital whether you use scanned film
or complete digital you have the choice. Even if you choose to shoot
with B/W selected in the camera so that you can view in B/W, if you use
RAW it will save the image in colour. Viewing in B/W is clever,
something film cameras can’t do, and I love it.
Load your selected image into Photoshop and then, Image>
Adjust>Colour Channels. Click on the little box in the left hand
corner to convert to monochrome. Above this box you will find the three
separate colour channels. Slide Red to +44, Green to +36 and finally
Blue to +20. You can play with these settings to your heart’s content,
as long as they roughly end up as +100 in total.
Well that’s about it. I know some are going to laugh their clever heads
off but I just wish someone had taken the trouble to write a tutorial
at this level when I was starting out. Half the problem with P.S is
that there are so many ways of doing the same thing and all the pundits
seem to have their preferred method of working. But hopefully the above
notes will get the newcomer started and remember it’s not so much a
learning curve it’s a vertical cliff to climb. Anyone who thinks
digital is the easy option is living in cloud cuckoo land. It isn’t
easy and it certainly ain’t a simple option. All we have done here is
to look at preparing an image for printing, in the most simple possible
terms. Yet it has taken over three thousand words and really I have
only supplied the briefest sketch to help some people to get on their
way. Black and white processing in relative terms could be written on
the back of a postage stamp, albeit a commemorative issue. And it
doesn’t finish here with digital. For those sticking to film and
scanning they have a whole mine-field to negotiate and as for printing,
well that can be another nightmare of equal proportion. So why do we do
it? I’m not sure when sometimes half way through the job the P.C.
crashes, or I get a message saying “Buzz off, you can’t do that” but we
do. Perhaps it’s why people go running up Mount Everest, because it’s
there, or perhaps because they can. Anyway, have fun.
Fish eye anybody?
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