Photoshop Essential File Formats Quick Guide

Written by Steve Patterson. If you’re one of the many, many people who have found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of file formats that Photoshoppresents us with when trying to save an image, good news! You can safely ignore most of them!

That’s right, out of the 25 file types found in Photoshop’s "Save As" dialog box, there’s really only a handful of them that most of us will ever use. In this quick guide, we’ll look briefly at the essential formats we need to know, or at least be aware of, including the pros and cons of each one and the situations where it makes the most sense to use it!

Photoshop .PSD

Of all the file formats that Photoshop supports, the PSD format is probably the most important. PSD stands for "Photoshop Document", and as the name implies, it’s Photoshop’s native file format. PSD is one of the few file types that fully support all of the powerful features that Photoshop gives us, like layers, layer masks, adjustment layers, channels, paths, and so on. It also serves as your working file. When we open an image in Photoshop, regardless of which file type the image was originally using, Photoshop temporarily converts it into a PSD file behind the scenes so we can work on it with all of Photoshop’s tools, commands and features at our disposal.

PSD files are your best choice to serve as your master files and for archiving to CD, DVD or an external hard drive for safe keeping. If you’ve done any sort of editing work on an image and there’s even the slightest chance you’ll need to come back to it again at some point in the future, save your work as a Photoshop PSD file. There’s no loss in image quality no matter how many times you re-open and re-save a PSD, and all of your layers, layer masks, adjustment layers and so on will be saved as part of the file, allowing you to go back at any time and make changes to the image or continue working from where you left off.

You can easily print your images at home with Photoshop directly from the PSD file, and many commercial printers are now able to accept PSDs as well, although some may still require an EPS or TIFF version of the file instead, so it’s always best to check with your printer to make sure you’re giving them the format they need. One of the newer advantages with PSD files is that they can now be imported directly into Adobe InDesign, giving you complete access to the individual layers in the file as you’re designing your page layouts. You can even re-open a PSD file in Photoshop directly from InDesign, make changes to the file, save it, and have the changes immediately update in your layout!

The only real disadvantage to PSD files is that the file size can get very large, especially if you’re working on an image with hundreds or even thousands of layers. But with computer hard drives and memory being so cheap these days, it’s a small price to pay for the creative freedom that Photoshop and its native PSD file format give us. Bottom line, your PSD file is the most important file you can have, so be sure to save yourself a master copy of your work as a PSD file so you can always return to it in Photoshop when you need it!

JPEG

The JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) format has been around for nearly 20 years now and has become the most popular and widely used file format for viewing and sharing digital photos. It supports 24-bit color, which means it can reproduce roughly 16.7 million colors, and even the cheapest digital cameras can capture images as JPEG files. Most high end digital SLR cameras give you the option of capturing images in either the JPEG or RAW format.

It’s important, though, not to confuse "popular" and "widely used" with "professional quality". JPEG is what’s called a lossy file format because it compresses the images, which essentially means it takes some of your image information and tosses it out the virtual window, never to be seen again. It does this to reduce file size, but the more compression you use, the worse your images look. You control the amount of compression being applied to the file using the Quality setting that appears in Photoshop when you go to save it. A high enough Quality setting can still produce great looking images but your file size will be larger. Lower Quality settings can produce very small file sizes, but set too low and you’ll introduce ugly and obvious compression artifacts.

The biggest strength of JPEG files is convenience. They’re usually small enough that they can easily be uploaded and displayed on web pages, or on photo sharing sites like Facebook and Flickr, and emailed to family and friends. Online printing services usually require your photos to be uploaded as JPEG files. The downside to JPEGs is that the reduced quality caused by image compression means they’re not a good choice for printing when image quality is your primary concern, and they’re also not a good choice for archiving your originals.

If you’re capturing JPEG files in your camera, make sure you’re capturing the largest, highest quality images possible. Check your camera’s instruction manual to find out where the image quality option is in your camera’s menu system. The highest quality setting is usually labelled "Large".

One thing you want to avoid doing whenever possible is re-saving JPEG files repeatedly. Each time to open and re-save it, you’ll add even more compression to the image, and it doesn’t take long for things to get ugly. Once the image detail is gone, you can never get it back (unless of course you read the first part of this article and saved a master copy of the original as a Photoshop PSD file).

GIF

The GIF file format, which stands for Graphics Interchange Format, has been around even longer than JPEG, and it’s the format of choice for web graphics. Notice I said web graphics, not web photos. GIF files can only display up to 256 colors, far less than the thousands of colors needed to convincingly reproduce a photographic image (and far less still than the millions of colors supported by the JPEG format).

When it comes to web design, though, the GIF format is indispensable. The files are well suited for web page layouts, banners and buttons, especially if they contain large areas of solid color. All major web browsers support GIF files and their small file sizes load quickly on the screen. GIF also allows web designers to create simple animations. One major advantage GIF has over the JPEG format, and another reason why it’s so important for web designers, is that it supports transparency, although it supports only one level of transparency, meaning a pixel is either transparent or it’s not. This can result in harsh edges around graphics if the edge color differs from the color of the background it’s placed over. For higher quality transparency effects, a better choice is the PNG format.

PNG

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was originally meant to replace the GIF format (PNG also stands for “PNG not GIF”). That never happened and GIF files are still in wide use today, yet the PNG format improves upon the GIF format in nearly every way. It even improves on the JPEG format. While JPEG files support 24-bit color (16.7 million colors), PNG files support up to 48-bit color, giving us more than 1 billion possible colors! That may sound impressive, but even JPEG files support more colors than the human eye can see, so any real world differences between 24 and 48-bit color are minimal at best.

The biggest advantage over JPEG is that PNG is a lossless file format, meaning that even though it still compresses images to reduce file size, the compression method it uses does not result in a loss of image quality. You can even re-save the same PNG file multiple times without degrading its quality, whereas JPEG files look worse each time you re-save them. With over a billion possible colors and lossless compression, PNG is a great choice for saving digital photos as high quality originals. The downside, though, is that PNG is not as widely supported as the JPEG format, and PNG does not support CMYK color, which means commercial printers can’t use them. For everyday viewing and sharing of your digital photos, the JPEG format is still more useful and convenient, even if the image quality isn’t as good.

PNG’s main advantage over GIF files, besides far exceeding GIF’s 256 color limit, is that it can reproduce a full 256 levels of transparency compared with GIF’s single level, giving us smooth transitions around edges without having to worry about matching the edges with the background color. PNG files are also usually smaller than GIF files, so they’ll load even faster in a web browser. Unfortunately, older web browsers may not support the PNG format, which means GIF is still the safest choice when browser compatibility is your main concern. Also, while GIF supports animations, PNG does not. PNG files are most often used in multimedia programs like Flash as well as Keynote and PowerPoint presentations.

TIFF

Like PSD files, TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is one of the few file types that support all of Photoshop’s features and is another great choice for archiving your images, with lossless compression that allows you to save photos with the highest possible image quality. The quality comes at a price though, as TIFF files can be very large, especially when compared with JPEG files. TIFF is the universally accepted standard for images destined for commercial printing and is compatible with virtually all page layout programs like QuarkXPress and InDesign.

Even though TIFF files are capable of storing all of the layers, adjustment layers and other elements you’ve added in Photoshop, it’s generally recommended that you save all those elements in your master PSD file, then use the TIFF format to save a flattened version of the image for print. This makes it easy to tell just from looking at the file extension which version of your image is the master working file (.psd) and which is the flattened, print-ready version (.tif). Also, many commercial printers will ask for a flattened version of your TIFF file.

With InDesign now being able to import and work directly with layered Photoshop PSD files, and both the PSD and PDF formats gaining popularity in the print community, TIFF isn’t quite as important as it once was, but it remains the print industry standard and enjoys widespread support.

EPS

EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) is another print industry standard format that’s been around for quite a while, but its use has been in decline over the years. EPS files are not really image files in the traditional sense. Instead, they contain a series of instructions for how a printer should reproduce the image. They can be imported into most page layout programs, but the “encapsulated” part means the files are essentially locked and can no longer be modified unless they’re re-opened in Photoshop. A preview image must be embedded in the EPS file when you save it in Photoshop if you want it to be viewable onscreen when working in your page layout program, otherwise you won’t be able to see it until the layout is printed. While EPS remains an industry standard format, you probably won’t use it very often unless it’s the format specifically requested by your commercial printer.

PDF

Finally, while most people are familiar with PDF files for viewing, sharing and printing electronic documents (hence the name Portable Document Format), PDF is also gaining in popularity as a great choice for saving images destined for print. Like the PSD and TIFF formats, PDF supports and preserves all of Photoshop’s features, including the ability to use spot colors, something the EPS format does not support. PDF gives you the choice of either JPEG compression, complete with a Quality setting to balance image quality with file size, or lossless ZIP compression. And the PDF format benefits from the fact that anyone with the free Adobe Reader installed on their computer can view the image.

The most important thing to remember is to save your working Photoshop file as an unflattened PSD file to use as your master copy, which will preserve all of your layers, channels and so on in Photoshop’s native file format, allowing you to return to your work at any time. From there, you can save a copy of your image in one of the other six formats depending on where the image is headed (print, the web, or a multimedia program) or which format your printer has requested.

And there we have it!

Download our tutorials as print-ready PDFs!

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems.
Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS6 is the 13th major release of Adobe Photoshop. The CS rebranding also resulted in Adobe offering numerous software packages containing multiple Adobe programs for a reduced price. Adobe Photoshop is released in two editions: Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Photoshop Extended, with the Extended having extra 3D image creation, motion graphics editing, and advanced image analysis features. Adobe Photoshop Extended is included in all of Adobe's Creative Suite offerings except Design Standard, which includes the Adobe Photoshop edition.
Alongside Photoshop and Photoshop Extended, Adobe also publishes Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Lightroom, collectively called "The Adobe Photoshop Family". In 2008, Adobe released Adobe Photoshop Express, a free web-based image editing tool to edit photos directly on blogs and social networking sites; in 2011 a version was released for the Android operating system and the iOS operating system.
Adobe distributes Photoshop in both Windows and Macintosh versions.

Adobe Photoshop: The Best Image Editing Software

Having a good photo editing software is one of the essentials on a computer, and having one you are comfortable with is very important. For me, there is no comparison to Adobe Photoshop as it is capable of doing the most complex manipulations possible.

Usually when you purchase a new computer, it will come with a pre-installed image editing software that is able to do your basics, such as cropping or red-eye removal. This turns out to be all that is needed for the average user, so they become very comfortable using their basic software and have no need to upgrade to something more complex.

But for those of you that want to take it a step further, you will need software that will accommodate your needs. Adobe Photoshop can do anything that you could ever want to do to a photo. The only hang up to some people might be its ease of use. If you are opening Photoshop for the first time, you may be overwhelmed by all the options and tools, and have absolutely no idea where to begin. After all, there are many college courses devoted solely to this one software.

For me personally, I have always used Photoshop, so the tasks that may be confusing to some are pretty simple. For any questions I might have, there are tons of online resources to answer any questions at all. A specific search will yield lots of results including step-by-step tutorials, as well as video lessons that can teach you anything you need to know.

It is much pricier to buy Photoshop than to just be content using the software that comes on your computer. There are many options of how you can purchase it, with many package deals that include other premium Adobe software. Starting at around $200, you can get a package that will take care of all your multimedia needs. The Adobe Master Collection includes a wide range of software that will keep you occupied for quite some time while learning the ins-and-outs of each.

I highly recommend upgrading to Adobe Photoshop. After you get comfortable using it, the sky is the limit to what you can create. You can use it for all of your simple tasks, like cropping your ex out of a picture on vacation, or the more complex stuff like placing the same picture of you in front of the Taj Mahal.

After you buy Photoshop and learn the basics, trust me, you won't be disappointed.

File format of Photoshop

File format of Photoshop

Photoshop files have default file extension as .PSD, which stands for "Photoshop Document." A PSD file stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, CMYK Mode (used for commercial printing), transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings. This is in contrast to many other file formats (e.g. .JPG or .GIF) that restrict content to provide streamlined, predictable functionality. A PSD file has a maximum height and width of 30,000 pixels, and a length limit of 2 Gigabytes.
Photoshop files sometimes have the file extension .PSB, which stands for "Photoshop Big" (also known as "large document format"). A PSB file extends the PSD file format, increasing the maximum height and width to 300,000 pixels and the length limit to around 4 Exabytes. The dimension limit was apparently chosen arbitrarily by Adobe, not based on computer arithmetic constraints (it is not close to a power of two, as is 30,000) but for ease of software testing. PSD and PSB formats are documented.

Because of Photoshop's popularity, PSD files are widely used and supported to some extent by most competing software. The .PSD file format can be exported to and from Adobe's other apps like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects, to make professional standard DVDs and provide non-linear editing and special effects services, such as backgrounds, textures, and so on, for television, film, and the web. Photoshop's primary strength is as a pixel-based image editor, unlike vector-based image editors. Photoshop also enables vector graphics editing through its Paths, Pen tools, Shape tools, Shape Layers, Type tools, Import command, and Smart Object functions. These tools and commands are convenient to combine pixel-based and vector-based images in one Photoshop document, because it may not be necessary to use more than one program. To create very complex vector graphics with numerous shapes and colors, it may be easier to use software that was created primarily for that purpose, such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. Photoshop's non-destructive Smart Objects can also import complex vector shapes.

Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPhone, Android

App Name: Adobe Photoshop Touch for Phone

Adobe Photoshop Touch for Phone provides many of the same image editing features users are familiar with in Adobe's popular Photoshop software.

Price: $4.99

Available Platforms: iPhone 4s and 5, iPod Touch (5^th generation) and Android (4.0)

What does this app do?: It was just about a year ago that Adobe, the maker of digital content tools such as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, released its popular Photoshop Touch application for the iPad. This week, the California-based company made the application available for mobile users taking the functionality of the photo editing application and packing it into an app for a smaller screen.

Photoshop’s product manager, Stephen Nielson, says part of the impetus for developing the app for the phone stems from the way photography has changed with the proliferation of smartphones. Take, for example, the recent emergence of iPhotography. With many people now snapping images with their mobile devices, Neilson said it made sense to offer the advanced tools of Photoshop in an app tailored to the small screen of a phone.

“My phone is the device I always have on me,” he said. “I can be creative anywhere, even when I don’t have my tablet with me.”

The app allows users to create and edit a project, add layers and filters, and share across multiple platforms such as Facebook, Google +, Twitter, and Dropbox, depending on the type of file. The veteran Photoshop user will find many of the same editing features already available to them in the desktop software, such as the ability to crop and extract images, add warps and lens flares, and adjust colors and blending. A row of buttons across the top allows users to add adjustments, such as curves and effects. From the bottom of the screen, select and swipe to apply tools, such as paint and camera fill. The app’s Scribble Selection feature allows users to etch out selections and to continue to refine as they go.

The app also syncs with Adobe Creative Cloud, a monthly fee-based service that allows users to create, store and share projects across the Web. Users can access and sync up to 2 GB of content to the cloud for free.

Is it easy to install: Yes. You’ll find the 32.2 MB file easy to download and install.

Should I try it?: Adobe Photoshop Touch for phone manages to cram in most of the features available in the desktop version while still giving users enough screen real estate to play. To accomplish this, however, Adobe sacrificed the help and tutorial content, hiding some basic how-to information under the menu button leaving out the rest.

This shouldn’t stop experienced Photoshop users. In fact, the app seems better suited to someone who is already accustomed to the software. For the uninitiated, you might try learning the application on a desktop first, or sticking to a simpler photo editing app, such as Adobe’s Photoshop Express or Instagram.

Cool Photoshop Tips And Tricks

What Can You Do With Advanced Photoshop Tips and Tricks?

Advanced Photoshop users are often familiar with all tools and have mastered most of the fundamental tutorials, tips, and tricks, such as creating a cloudy background. Some people are unaware of all of the cool tricks that Photoshop has to offer, especially when you've upgraded your version to CS. The power to create some of the most impressive works of digital art are only a few clicks away once you get a hang of advanced Photoshop shortcuts and tricks.

Some Photoshop tricks on the advanced level can help a more tedious project seem easier. The more you learn the tips and tricks of the trade, the better your overall creations will turn out. To get an idea of some of the advanced tricks associated with Photoshop, a few examples are mentioned below:

Photoshop allows advanced users to create digital comic coloring that looks just like the human hand penned it. The tricks and tips associated with this sort of higher-level design deals with the manipulation of various brush sets to achieve the look you desire. Photoshop also lets users create photomontages that can transform an original photograph into something much different.

There are also tips and tricks that can take your most unfavorite picture and alter it in any way you wish. Let's say you want to change a regular photograph into something dazzling. Advanced Photoshop tricks can beautify a face that displays a natural appearance. In regards to a photo, skin can be fixed, blemishes and wrinkles erased, teeth fixed and whitened, as well as changes made

Cool Photoshop Tips And Tricks

Adobe Photoshop CS6: Standout New Features

My Top 3 Favorite Features in Photoshop CS6

I have to say CS6 is not yet perfect. Even with the huge step on content-awareness, it still only works best on simpler backgrounds. And the video editing tool is cool, but its functions are pretty basic. It’s a good start though.

I still use Photoshop CS4 in the office at my day job as a graphic designer, and every time I go home to CS6, I can definitely feel the world of difference. Of the years that I’ve used Photoshop, I can say that CS6 is one of the largest leap forward in terms of features and usability. A lot of it’s new features are definitely geared towards making your work faster and easier, allowing you to focus more on creativity.

Upon first digging into Adobe Photoshop CS6, a few features have really popped out at me as incredibly useful. I would like to offer a brief overview of some of these new ways of attacking your creative challenges using the latest version of Adobe's flagship app. Ps CS6 will run you about $649 to buy it outright if you do not own any previous versions. If you own Photoshop 7, CS, or CS5, you are eligible for upgrade pricing - looks like $199 for the upgrade. Check Adobe's store on their website for more info. For more information about what comes in the different versions of CS6, and what your suite configuration options are, see my previous post.

My current favorite five new PsCS6 features in order are:
1. Nondestructive Smart Filters

2. Quick Selection Tool & Refine Edge

3. Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending

4. Automatic layer alignment and blending

5. Vanishing Point with adjustable angle

Feature Overviews:

* Nondestructive Smart Filters

Adobe has finally given us non-linear, nondestructive filters. Can I just say "HOORAY!" In the past, you applied filters and effects in a linear order: one filter would alter your image, and the second filter would alter your now altered image, and a third filter would alter the altered altered image. The problem with that workflow is that if you decide you want to slightly tweak the second filter, you'd have to either undo back to that point (losing your subsequent edits), or use the history palette to step directly "back in time" to the point before you added the second filter, add your "revised" second filter and then add your third manually. All too often, you don't quite remember what exact parameters you had set on that third one - or worse, your real world project involved applying 20 filters instead of the 3 in my example and changing the second filter would mean redoing the 18 that follow it. What a drag. Because of this issue, people developed many work arounds (often involving saving off multiple "partially completed" versions of files all over your hard drive with iterative file names, hoping that if you needed to go back to a certain point in time you'd be able to figure out where you needed to be), and while these workarounds were clever and well-conceived in many cases, there was a perfect, real solution, waiting to happen.

The real solution to all this is what we have been given in CS6: Nondestructive Smart Filters. In this new version, each filter and effect that you apply to a layer, remains live and continually re-editable, in real time, and the parameters that you adjust will all cascade down through whatever subsequent filters or effects you might have added to your layer. These are savable, movable, copy and pastable, and most importantly scalable.

* Quick Selection tool & Refine Edge

A design mentor of mine once told me "Photoshop is all about the selection. You select something, and then you do something with the selection. Nothing more, nothing less. Remember that, and you'll never go wrong using this app." Almost 10 years later, I must say she was absolutely correct. Using Photoshop is all about "the selection." There are more tools in Photoshop for selecting than for any other single task.

As in just about every version of Photoshop that has ever been released, CS6 has made even greater strides in the area of "making your selection" than comes to memory in recent years. The new Quick Selection Tool used in combination with the Refine Edge palette is about the most helpful and clean way of selecting the edges of an object in your image that I have ever seen. This new revised Quick Selection tool is so smooth. You basically set the parameters of your Quick Selection tool - as if it were a brush - and paint the general area of your image edges (like trying to select just a kid and his soccer ball out of the photo of the big game) and Photoshop is watching what you do, and interpreting what you consider to be the general edges of what you are wanting to select and it figures out what's kid and ball and what's grass and goal posts and sky and crowd and selects just what you want it to. It's VERY fast and clean. Then, you can invoke the Refine Edge palette, and you have seemingly infinite control over exactly how the edges of that selection behave. Check out the palette to the right to get an idea of what you could do to "refine" that edge. With radius, feathering, smoothing, and various display settings, I believe this new combo will cut down on my masking and selecting time in a quantifiable way.

* Photomerge with advanced alignment and blending

Ever tried to stitch together a series of images that you took, that you intended to "put together" into a panorama? Even with some of the stand alone tools that have been available over the years—even those for doing quicktime VR's—are clunky and difficult to use - with mixed results at times. I have always wanted something built into Photoshop to let me do these "photo merges" - I never expected that Photoshop would actually be able to automatically do it for me. This feature floored me. The technologies involved in my number four choice "Automatic layer alignment and blending" are at work here in this feature as well, and the new auto layer alignment features in CS6 are far-reaching and crop up again and again in different areas of the application. It's really one of the revolutionary things about this new version.

All of the things that have made making panoramas a difficult task in the past are all done automatically. The primary among these being 1. those times when you have to actually distort, rotate, skew or transform one of your elements because the perspective is screwy, 2. those times when the sun or lighting or a window made the white balance, color space or over all wash of brightness and contrast different from one image to the next (especially when doing 360's) and of course 3. actually finding and aligning those overlapping areas of consecutive elements. Photoshop CS6 does these all for you and with surprisingly amazing results. It's not just about the typical "panorama" either... I saw a demo of someone standing "too close" to a building, and taking pictures zoomed all the way out, of the front door, windows and window-boxes, front brick walk way, tilting upward and taking a picture of the balcony and roof line of the second floor - in other words, many elements that were WAY out of whack in terms of perspective, lighting and color space, and these 4 or 5 images were distorted, tweaked, rotated, matched, blended, lighting and color density matched... and I was amazed in like 5 seconds, there was this "wide angle" almost "fisheye" photomerge of the front of the building, from brick walkway to roof-line, and it looked incredible.

* Automatic layer alignment and blending

Another powerful application of this new alignment and blending technology is with a series or stack of images of the same subject. Let's say you wanted to take a picture of a statue in a park somewhere, or a huge fountain, or the front of a monument or building. There are always people walking through the frame - if you can't close down the area and still need a picture of the statue, in the park, in it's beautiful setting, but with no people or birds or random elements - what are you to do? In the past, it was a painstaking process of shooting a bunch of images, selecting the "closest" one to your vision of a nice, clean, tourist-less frame, and begin the hours and hours of painting, cloning, healing, brushing etc., to remove all of your "randoms." There are artists who are very good at this process, but I'm fairly certain they would agree that if there was a way to not have to spend all that time, they'd take it. Well, it's here. Photoshop CS6 can take your stack of images and by analyzing all of them, figure out which things are permanent (things that appear in all the images like that building in the distance, the big tree, the sidewalk, and which parts of the image are obscured in one of the frames but not all of them, are healed automatically by borrowing pixels from other images in the stack and building an advanced composite of all the images and doing 90% or more of the work for you. There's even a set of "fuzziness" sliders letting you say "eleminate things that are in X% of the images in the stack or less." This is so impressive to see in action. You have to try it on some of your own images. It's really hard to believe that it's this easy to do this sort of process now. This is one of those new areas that I'm sure we'll see artists finding incredibly creative ways to utilize this feature. Again, this one floored me when I first saw it.

* Vanishing Point with adjustable angle

One of the most powerful new features of Adobe CS5 was the vanishing point feature. One limitation it had was that you only had one set of right angles to work with in the vanishing point interface. Adobe took it one exponential step further by adding multiple, adjustable angle perspective planes to this vanishing point feature. What this enables you to do is copy, paste and clone in far more complex image planes than just the "clone parts of a building in perspective" job that the first iteration of this feature offered (impressive and powerful, but not very flexible). One of the big examples Adobe is pushing with this feature is to simulate 3D packaging and work on multiple planes at various angles in the same image. Like an open box for a new product, or even for experimenting with your final package art by seeing it in its real-world context. Again I think this feature has so many far reaching implications for inventors, prototypers, 3D modelers, visual effects artists... and can give Photoshop artists the ability to render full blown mockups of product packaging art for clients in a whole new way - getting us to sign-off, green-light and on to the next project at hand much more quickly. I like that a lot.

1) CONTENT-AWARE MOVE

One of the most impressive features in this version is the content-aware move. I shot this photo (below) in a recent project, and I remember the client wanted me to move the girls closer together. With content-aware move, all I have to do was select the object… and well, move.

I have to admit, this was one of the features in my wishlist that I didn’t really expect to materialize. I do have to mention though that it works best on photos with simpler backgrounds. And if you’re one to pixel peep, you will find some warped textures resulting from the move, but this is easily remedied by the heal tool.

2) ADOBE CAMERA RAW 7

I was wandering around an area in Chinatown beside a Hindu temple filled with loitering pigeons… when suddenly, this old man walked in the middle of the street and threw a handful of rice grains. The pigeons went crazy.. and with no regard to my camera’s settings, I just tried to snap as much photos and as quickly as I could. Unfortunately, the photos came out totally under exposed:

Fortunately, with extended controls in Adobe Camera Raw 7.0 on highlights and shadows, I’m able to bring out the details in the shot.

So now you can worry less about getting the exposure right in sudden unexpected situations like this… just focus on composing and capturing the moment.

Oh and yeah, this is the main reason why I prefer shooting in RAW.

3) SELECTIVE BLURRING

I’m not a big fan of simulating bokeh or background blur in photoshop because it never comes out right. But with the new ‘Field Blur’ function, you can select multiple points from an image and dictate the amount of blur or (non-blur) for each point. If you have a good understanding on how bokeh works, with careful analysis, you can simulate better background blur thus making your portrait subject stand out more naturally.

This is a portrait I took on a past client project. For this shot, I used a 24mm lense wide open at f1.4. Although I’m happy with the shot, I sort of wished there was a bit more blur in the background to make the subject stand out more.

I used photoshop CS6′s field blur function to select several points to blur and points to not blur.

This is a preview of the blur mask. Areas in white are in blur, areas in black are not.

Although this is not perfect, and I still prefer bokeh straight out of the camera, it’s nice to know this kind of feature exist in case you’ll need it for some few quick tweaks.

OTHER COOL FEATURES:
The features I listed above are only some of the new features and upgrades in Adobe’s latest Photoshop release. There’s a whole slew of new stuff which I think make this upgrade probably the most significant one so far through the years.

New User Interface – This was the very first thing I noticed… and I instantly fell in love with it. I love the dark background, I think it gives focus to the image in hand.

Adaptive Wide Angle – Another awesome new feature. It’s not a personal fave though, since I don’t do landscapes. But photographers who use an ultra-wide angle or fisheye lens will get a kick out of these.

New Cropping Workflow – This is another pretty significant upgrade. The previous workflow makes it hard to preview your angled crops… now, they’ve applied the same cropping workflow as with Lightroom. Plus, they introduced the option to not delete the cropped pixels. Which means cropping is not non-destructive!

Edit Video – This is not meant to replace video editing software like Adobe Premier or After Effects. In fact, the controls are pretty basic. But I’ve played around with it and it’s a pretty nifty feature for some quick editing. And it’s a good start.

Auto-Save – I’ve been burned so many times for not saving more often than I should. I’ve had my share of recreating complicated digital work because of system failures – auto save is a potential hero.

I still use Photoshop CS4 in the office at my day job as a graphic designer, and every time I go home to CS6, I can definitely feel the world of difference. Of the years that I’ve used Photoshop, I can say that CS6 is one of the largest leap forward in terms of features and usability. A lot of it’s new features are definitely geared towards making your work faster and easier, allowing you to focus more on creativity.

There are numerous new features in the application, especially when you dig down deep into the Photoshop Extended editions (sounds like a Peter Jackson DVD...) and as the week progresses here, I'd like to look into some of what PsCS3 Extended has to offer. The versions of PsCS3 that are available are the Film & Video, Medical & Science, AEC (Architecture, Engineering & Construction), and Manufacturing editions.

Advanced Artistry Photoshop Tutorials

Advanced Artistry Photoshop Tutorials

Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Intermediate. Weighing in at 9 hours and 25 minutes, it represents everything I have to say (for the time being, anyway) on the topics of Content-Aware, sharpening, text, shapes, layer effects, styles, Liquify, black-and-white, and output.

Oh, and I also discuss how to use the Levels command. The attached movie serves as the introduction. I'm really proud of it. Have you ever seen a guy interact with a histogram like that? It's like Minority Report. Except that my gut and man boobs are bigger than Tom Cruise's. Kudos to Will Frazier, Andrew Brown, and the whole graphics and live-action teams at lynda.com. Love you guys!

To view the entire course, mosey on over to lynda.com. Specifically, you'll want to go to Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Intermediate, which contains the usual 10% free movies, not to mention the 100% available to beloved members of the Online Training Library.

Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals precedes this course. Two more, Advanced (which I'm working on now) and Mastery will follow.

If you’re a Photoshop user with a working knowledge of the basics, you may well enjoy the Advanced Artistry Photoshop tutorials. With this intermediate level training package you can hone some very advanced Photoshop skills. Here is what you’ll learn.

The Introductory CD will tell you all about the course and the instructor, including some tips on how best to learn from the Photoshop tutorials. You’ll learn about the technical aspects of the presentation and its variations from Mac to PC.

The next of the Photoshop tutorial CDS is called Utilities. Machine basics are included in this lesson plan, as well as PS preference and essential shortcuts. You’ll learn navigation shortcuts, as well as those for imaging, tools, and workspace.

You’ll get a quick review of all the keystroke and Photoshop super shortcut techniques and help setting up your own workspace.

The next of the Photoshop tutorials tackles the subject of retouching. In this CD you’ll learn the professional retouching techniques, how to assess the Photoshop image, how to analyze the histogram, as well as the contrast, lighting and texture.

You learn how to do an analysis of the focus and to manage the contrast controls. You’ll learn the ins and outs of contrast levels, and the use of each level. You’ll learn to use curves, to enhance color and the advanced techniques to avoid saturation.

These Photoshop tutorials will also teach you to use the patch tool and the healing brush, and to burn and dodge demos without destruction. You’ll also master the technique of red eye reduction.

Advanced artistry tutorials in this Photoshop lesson package will also include a CD that teaches how to adjust for focus and the center of interest, how to sharpen the focus, how to enhance the field depth and how to fish or burn edges.

In the fine art toning CD you learn intermediate and advanced techniques of producing black and white photos from color originals, how to work with and create sepia tones, selenium tones, digital cyanotypes and maps with gradients.

Fine art photograph effects lessons include soft focusing, angelic and dramatic posing, high contrast and high keys and cross processing.

Including in this Photoshop tutorial is mastery of fine techniques for people’s skin, giving them the look of perfect skin, of radiant and dramatically glowing skin, advanced techniques in metal skin looks, infrared and translucent skin, and the use of maps for displacement.

Natural media and landscape techniques are taught in Photoshop advanced artistry tutorials as well.

Enhancing the skies and adding sky from other photos are techniques taught, as well as using the history and art history brushes, and burning and dodging without being destructive.

If you want to create a professional hand drawn look you can master that technique through Photoshop tutorials, and can also learn watercolor, logos, and vector illustration too. Hand tinting lessons are varied and include painting in a color mode and adjusting of layers.

Grid and Tech glows, TV scan lines, pixel drags, and edges and borders that are soft, painted, beveled or burned are all advanced artistry Photoshop tutorial lessons.

Enhancing Photos In Photoshop

Have you ever wondered why the Hollywood stars always look so perfect in the magazine photographs? Why is it they consistently look so good?

Their hair, teeth and skin always seem to be perfect and so beautiful. Is this the magic of stardom or Hollywood? No, this isn’t magic. It’s just Photoshop.

Photoshop is the same photo editing software program being used by professionals in the entertainment industry to make movie stars look younger, slimmer and better.

They have been doing it for years and now you can achieve the same results with a little training and practice using Photoshop for some of these same photo enhancements.

You can learn to make amazing enhancements to any photograph using the tools and functions available in Photoshop.

The following are just a few of the improvements you can make to people pictures.

Whiten stained teeth

Remove unsightly scars

Smooth age wrinkles

Clear up acne

Remove blemishes

Double chin removal

Fill in bald spots by adding hair

Open closed eyes

Remove tattoos

Hide body piercings

Change eye color

Adobe Photoshop is the premier tool for digital artists when it comes to professionally enhancing images. Whether you’re a beginner just learning the ropes or an advanced user looking for unique techniques to add to your Photoshop arsenal, you’ll find some tutorials here that you’ll surely want to bookmark.

you’ll discover plenty of tutorials that deal with enhancing images,adding unique and impressive effects, and recreating digital replications of popular traditional photography techniques.

1. Cross Processing

You can learn how to apply the Cross Processing film-developing technique digitally to your images by reading through this quick and educational tutorial that leverages the powers of the Curves tool in Photoshop.

2. Lomo Photography

Take your ordinary digital photos and simulate the Lomo Photography effect (also known as Lomography) that will apply a dreamy and surreal effect onto your images in this tutorial that uses a Levels Adjustment layer among other Photoshop techniques.

3. HDR Photo Effect

Create a pseudo-HDR image by reading through this popular Photoshop tutorial that uses basic Photoshop tools, options, and techniques such as adjusting Shadows/Highlight settings and changing layer Blending modes.

4. Gritty Effect

Improve your photos with a dramatic gritty bronze effect to make them truly pop though the techniques discussed in this Photoshop tutorial. The tutorial uses a combination of techniques including the utilization of a Curves Adjustment layer.

5. Dave Hill Look Photo Effect

This simple but impressive tutorial takes inspiration from Dave Hill‘s unique photography work to create stunning HDR-like renditions of ordinary photographs using a combination of techniques that involves the Unsharp Mask in Photoshop.

6. Soft Focus Photography

Learn about an image-enhancing technique that you can easily apply onto your images by reading through this handy Photoshop tutorial from photoshoptalent.com that uses a Color Balance adjustment layer as well as other Photoshop options and techniques.

7. Movie Photo Effect

By following along this Photoshop tutorial, even the plainest photos can embody a stylish Hollywood film look-and-feel. The technique involves a few Image Adjustment (Image > Adjustment) options like tweaking Exposure and Hue/Saturation settings.

8. Extreme Contrast Photo Effect

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, you will learn how to add some noise, how to take advantage of Photoshop’s sharpening tools, and how to add a simple Adjustment layer to give a photo an "extreme contrast" effect.

9. Infrared Photo Effect

The infrared photo effect can be a unique and stunning way to create one-of-a-kind photos. Learn how to simulate this photography technique digitally through this helpful Photoshop tutorial that takes advantage of Photoshop’s Channel palette.

10. Soft Focus & Glow Effect

Do you want to change a plain and boring scene into a dreamy and surreal photo? If so – check out this wonderful tutorial on applying a soft focus and glow effect onto your photos using the Gaussian Blur filter and adjusting layer Blending modes.

11. High Pass Filter

In this straightforward image-editing tutorial, you will learn a quick technique for enhancing your images to give them a subtle HDR effect by using Photoshop’s handy High Pass filter and adjusting layer Blending modes.

12. Vintage Photo Effect

Renowned graphic/web designer Veerle Pieters discusses a method for putting on a vintage photography effect on images in this tutorial that uses a few techniques like adding a Brightness/Contrast Adjustment layer and utilization of Smart Filters.

13. Split Toning Black & White Effect

Learn to apply the split toning (a variance of sepia toning) photography effect which takes ordinary photos to produce a vintage-style photo effect. This tutorial uses several Photoshop options like adding a Color Balance Adjustment layer and the Channel Mixer.

14. Change Hair Color Tutorial

If you want to add a bit of spice in your photos – one way to do so would be to change the subject’s hair color. Learn about a method for coloring hair in this tutorial that shows where Photoshop’s notoriety for digital manipulation comes from.

15. Coloring Effect Tutorial

In this quick and simple Photoshop tutorial, you will get a chance to discover some methods for coloring your images using a few tools and options such Adjustment layers, modifying Blending modes, and the Blur filter.

16. Light Effects

Enhance your images by adding a few cool lighting effects; learn how in this Photoshop tutorial. The tutorial uses various Photoshop tools such as the Gradient tool and taking advantage of the Pattern Overlay layer style.

17. Snow Photo Effect

Add some weather into your photos by viewing this tutorial that teaches its readers how to add falling snow onto a photograph. The tutorial adds in the snow by using the Add Noise Photoshop filter, blurring it, and overlaying it onto the image’s layer.

18. Streams Of Dusty Light

This interesting Photoshop tutorial shows you how to add a surreal stream of light to make your photos truly unique and eye grabbing. The tutorial leans on the Radial Blur filter to create the streams of light.

19. Photo Color Correction

If you have an image that you would like to correct for color, Photoshop is here to help! Read this PSDTUTS tutorial in order to learn about one of Photoshop’s strongest tools: the Curves Adjustment tool.

20. Enhance Skin Tutorial

In this Photoshop photo-editing tutorial, you’ll come across a process for effectively improving your subject’s skin. One of the Photoshop tools you’ll be encountering in the tutorial is the Healing Brush tool.

21. Gaussian Blur

Using the Gaussian Blur filter on images can result in unique photo scenes. If you’d like to know how you could use this Photoshop filter in a manner that enhances your photos, you should read this excellent tutorial.

22. Tilt-Shift Miniature Fake Technique

If want to use the Tilt Shift photography technique without spending boatloads of cash in purchasing the equipment to do so, read through this helpful tutorial on how to fake the popular technique.

Have a good Photoshop tutorial to add to the mix?

The comment section is a great place to find other resources that didn’t make the cut. If you know of a good image-editing tutorial that we somehow missed – share it with all of us in the comments!

With Photoshop you can easily make yourself or anyone look better. You can even change the colors of the clothing people are wearing.

You will be amazed by the results you can achieve with Photoshop. You will not only be able to improve the appearance of people but you will be able to completely remove people from the photograph, add people from other photos or change the background.

Master these Photoshop techniques and you will be in demand for photo editing and graphic design projects.

People with these types of skills are in needed for photo retouching, web design work, logo design, advertising, and more. Not only can you have fun touching up your own photos but you could start a business doing photo enhancements.

Photoshop Fast Track makes it easy to learn how to find, install and use Photoshop plug-ins. Master The Basics Of Adobe Photoshop With My 2 Hour Easy To Use Photoshop Video Tutorial.