Photo Nerd-Out: Photoshop

I never claimed to be a whiz at Photoshop, but I was never really incompetent at it either. I took a class on the software in college - back when I had grand plans of becoming a graphic designer - and haven't touched the program much since then, mostly because I just didn't have the money to buy it.

When I started delving more deeply into photography, I realized that using Picasa as my editing software just wasn't going to cut it any longer, so I got an older version of Photoshop on the cheap. Because of the class I took in college I had an idea of how to get my photos to look halfway decent, but wasn't confident that I could use the program to its fullest potential. Plus, I prefer my photography to have a more natural look, so I usually try to avoid over-Photoshopping by all means possible.

As time wore on, I realized that although my photos were getting better SOOC (read: Straight Out of Camera), I found that it's still useful to know some of the basic fixes in Photoshop to make the shot really pop (and to establish my photographic style). Plus, I just bought a fancy new Mac Book Pro (I have named her Fiona - a post is coming on her soon, I promise!!) and installed Photoshop CS6, and I wanted to test its true editing prowess.

I did some digging and discovered some great editing tools - one of them was the super-duper-awesome Color Range Tool. Essentially what it does is lasso the area you want just by clicking on it with your mouse. It's not always perfect, but it's a heckuva lot easier than constantly having to use the magnetic lasso tool every time when you want to select a certain area to edit (especially when you have a cat demanding attention at the same time you're trying to lasso a subject...).

Once I began discovering new ways to edit in Photoshop, I started thinking about some of my past photo shoots and what I could do to spruce them up with my new-found knowledge. I remembered some photos from a wedding I shot last year that were a bit underexposed in the foreground. At the time I tried fixing it the generic way by increasing the exposure overall, but it made the background severely overexposed. I didn't know how to fully fix it, so I spruced it up as best I could and called it a day.

Armed with my newly acquired photo editing skills, I decided to go back and re-edit a couple of the photos that had the issue I described above. The results:

Notice the difference? Still not by any means perfect, but a lot better than they were before!


For this next photo, the exposure/colors/everything was to my liking - except for an annoying light pole that looked like it was hanging out on the bride's shoulder like a parrot. It bugged me for the longest time that I didn't know how to fix it, until one day I re-remembered the following magical Photoshop button:

Clone. Stamp. Tool.

I cloned. I stamped. And made the evil lamp fly away.

Now there's nothing distracting from the bride and her rock star bridesmaids! :)

Even though I'm more adept at Photoshop than I was before, I still don't claim to be an expert (don't even get me started on layers, eesh!) but at least I'm learning more and more everyday. And who knows....maybe someday I can call myself a whiz. ;)