I have already posted reasons why I think CS3 is a substantial advance over CS2, but in a nutshell, Adobe Bridge is much quicker and more stable than Bridge in CS2, and the sharpening tools in Camera Raw 4.1 are much better than in previous versions and perhaps better (certainly different) than in Photoshop ‘proper’.

For those not familiar with how Photoshop is bundled; it comprises a Photoshop ‘proper’ module, Camera Raw, and Bridge.

If one is processing RAW images then Photoshop ‘process’ comprises at least two elements – Camera Raw, and Photoshop ‘proper’ – because the image has first to be converted to a Photoshop document (PSD) before it can be further processed in Photoshop ‘proper’.

And if one wants to browse a number of images then the bundle also includes Bridge, which allows one to view large preview jpegs of images of many types, including RAW images.

So what does Lightroom offer?

Well today I found one reason to prefer Lightroom when I wanted to produce a collection of jpegs for the web. Some of the images were jpegs, some were PSDs and some with RAW files.

Lightroon swallowed them all and spat out webpegs in short order. It will also produce high quality jpegs from a variety of source files if you ask it to.

Compare Photoshop where, if the original file is a RAW file, you have to open it and save as whatever format you want – but on a file-by-file basis. There is no batch-process that will cope with RAW files.

Lightroom also offers an additional way of using the tools for adjusting tone and hue/saturation/luminance(HSL). There are sliders as in photoshop, but there is also a Target Adjustment Tool which, once activated, operates by dragging the curser up-down-left-right around the selected area.

If, for example, ‘hue’ is chosen, then as the tool is dragged, the hue changes. It is easier to do (and see the results) than to describe. What the tool does not offer is the ability to isolate the changes to only part of the image. If one chooses to change the hue, then all parts of the image that are a similar hue, are changed.

It is a nice tool but it would be so much better if the chosen area could be set to ‘contiguous’, or selected in some way akin to the marquee tool in photoshop.

In the Technorati current list of ‘the one hundred most popular sites’ there is Mashable.com, which has a wonderfully detailed and useful post entitled “90+ Online Photography Tools and Resources”. The link is here

I am sometimes a fan of making photographs that look as real as I can imagine the scene or the person actually looked. That usually translates into a sharp photograph, or at least that some part of the image is sharp. On the other hand, I sometimes care only about the look of the final image and do not care at all whether it mirrors the scene, or indeed looks like a photograph at all.

These two photographs were made by taking an image and in each case, pasting it over a scan of a sheet of art paper that I had soaked in coffee (and dried beofore scanning it!) then blended in photoshop – with the blending mode set to ‘multiply’.

Wedding gown shop on Route 4, New Jersey

Hampton Court – view between two columns

This is a tutorial about how to enhance an image by laying it on top of a background and blending the two layers to produce a pleasing image.

Click on the thumbnail image below and aquaint yourself with the labels. It will make it easier to understand this tutorial.

This is how to blend two images:

Open two images. I’m going to call the image you want to enhance, the ‘Starter Image’ (SI), and the background image the ‘Background Image’ (BI).

The BI should be something just this side of boring. I mean it should be an image that has interesting tones and colours and textures; but that’s about all. A close-up of a brick showing just the various colours and textures would be a good choice. For the BI in my example, I used a scan of a sheet of art paper that had been soaked in instant coffee and left to dry.

Make sure the two images are the same size or that the SI is smaller than the BI. If the SI is bigger than the BI, part of it will be cut off when it is laid over the BI. (see the end of this tutorial if you are not sure how to tell what the sizes of the images are, and there is a very short tutorial on what you need to know.)

Click on the SI. Select the whole image (Select > All). Then copy it (Edit > Copy).

You now need to move to the BI, so click on it to make it the active image (the one you can work on). Paste the SI over it (Edit > Paste).

You will now have two layers but the image you can see will just be the SI. it is as though the BI is not there. But it is; it is just obscured by the top layer. This will change if you change the way the two layers are blended together. The way to change the way the two layers appear relative to each other, is through the Blending Modes.

The Blending Modes are in a drop-down menu in the Layers palette. If the Layers palette is not visible, go to Window > Layers and the Layers palette will appear.

Examine it closely and you will see a drop-down menu, and below that you will see two small images of the SI and the BI, with the SI above the BI. That’s fine. it tells you there are two layers, even though you can only see one in images you are working on.

The default blending mode is ‘normal’. In this mode, the top layer completely obscures the layer below, which is why you can only see the SI. We can change that by changing the blending mode in the drop-down menu. Try ‘multiply’ and see what you think of the result.

See how the SI and the BI have interacted to produce something quite new and interesting.

Also try ‘overlay’. In fact, try all the blending modes to see what effect each of them has. ‘Multiply’ is a good one though.

The effect may be too strong, and if it is, just cut back on the percentage of the opacity slider at the top right of the Layers palette.

There are things you can do to blend different parts of the image by different amounts and ways to blend different parts of the image with different blending modes. The extra rectangle in my example – the one to the side of the top layer in the layers palette – is a vector mask which allows you to strip away part of the top layer with the brush tool. More about that in the next tutorial.

Image Size
Click on Image > Image Size and a box will appear that has width and height in pixels, the document size in a variety of units of dimension, and tick boxes for Scale Styles, Constrain Proportions and Resample Image.

To check whether the SI is no bigger than the BI, you need to look at both the number of pixels in the Pixel Dimensions and at the Resolution in both images. Make a note of what they are for both images.

If the Resolution of the SI is very different from the resolution of the BI, you can alter the Resolution of the SI (or the BI if you prefer to change that) BUT whichever image you change, uncheck the Resample Image box. Click OK and then if you still need to change the Pixel Dimensions of the SI or the BI, check the Resample Image box and the Constrain Proportions box and alter the Pixel Dimensions.

That’s it except for one thing. Don’t Save the image with the changed image dimensions unless you really know you want to. If you have downsized your image and then saved it and quit the image, you will not be able to go back and recapture the pixels you threw away in downsizing the image.

If there was one and one only reason to get Adobe Photoshop CS3, the new sharpening tool in Camera Raw 4.1 would be it.

There are now sliders for Amount, Detail, Radius, and Masking, as well as sliders on the same ‘page’ for luminance and color noise reduction.

The first and most important tip to know is to set the view to 100%. Anything less and you will not be able to see the changes that the sliders make with anything like the detail needed.

At the same time, another tip is to climb down from the 100% mountain after one has made the changes that seem right, and look at the shot at around 25% view, which will give a better impression of what tones look like in ‘normal’ view and will show how sketchy versus how photographic the finished image looks.

To see what the sliders do, I recommend dragging them to the middle position, and then moving individual ones to the left and right in various combinations. The changes that result have to be seen to be appreciated – words could not do them justice.