A Photographer's Dream And A Photograph's Makeover

The many exciting features of Photoshop range from retouching photos all the way to graphic design. Simply retouching a photo to enhance the light or subject through changing the brightness levels and correcting little 'imperfections' in skin or clothes may make the photo more pleasing to the artist or audience. From enhancing the dimensions and depth to configuring a graphic design based from multiple images strategically placed to advertise a company to doodling with the 'pen' there are quite a few interesting ways to edit or construct an image.

There are over a dozen tools to use on an image that include: the lasso tool, quick selection tool, crop tool, eyedropper tool, spot healing brush tool, brush tool, clone stamp tool, history brush tool, eraser tool, gradient tool, blur tool, dodge tool, pen tool, type tool, path selection tool, rectangle tool, hand tool, and zoom tool. These tools are located on the left hand side. The toolbar on the top of the screen is composed of sizing brushes or erasers, what mode the artist is detailing with, the opacity, the flow, and the search bar. Another great thing that Photoshop has is the ability to have multiple projects open, just on different windows. With this great power, comes great responsibility... Once you start using Photoshop and realize all the editing that can be done a few clicks of a button, you need to remember that there is such a thing as too much editing.

A little bit goes a long way, not just when using butter on your toast, but when blurring itty bitty sections of your photo to draw attention to your subject. There is a certain amount of editing that can be done to an image that doesn't distort the subject and you won't realize you are possibly ruining the image until you take a step back and look at the edited version with a fresh mind. DON'T PANIC! You can go use the 'undo' button to remove changes that you have made to less the impact of some excessive editing. However, you might not want to click undo a billion and three times, so maybe starting from scratch will work best especially now that you know what doesn't look good on that image. While there is such thing as too much editing, be aware that there are some projects where it is okay to pile on the details or pile on a lot of images onto one background. Personally, my taste in photography is the natural, scenic site where a bit of enhancing is needed but not too much after that. Of course, everyone has their own style so explore Photoshop and your skills to determine what kind (and how much) editing your style warrants.