Channel Mixer in Drag

I always believed if you're going to teach something to somebody that's technical that you have to have fun with it. One way to do this in digital photography is to use the wild and wonderful images that you can find from day to day.

This one is a photograph of a drag queen in Palm Springs.

The best way to convert in Photoshop is the by using the Channel Mixer.

You could just desaturate (Image>Adjustments>Desaturate), but you have more flexibility by using the Channel Mixer's sliders.

Here's how you do it.

1. In Photoshop use Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Channel Mixer
2. Click okay in the New Layer dialog box.
3. Click on Monochrome in the Channel Mixer dialog box.
4. Tweak the slider bars till you get good contrast.
5. Use Layer>Flatten Image

Playing Around With Paths

Paths are kind of an elaborate selection tool where you can create selections of all shapes and sizes. Raindrops, for example.

Here's something I did with light beams using paths and lots of playing around with the blur tools.

Feathering and Moving

When I started my sign gig (selling pictures of mid-century signs); I worked in Photoshop 4.

I hadn't learned how to take the background of one pic and put it into another.

Well, I have now.

All you gotta do is:

1. Open both images in Photoshop or Elements,
2. Click on the lasso or magnetic lasso selection tool.
3. Input a feathering value in the top part of the window. (I'd type in 2 or 3 for starters).
4. Click and drag around the part of the image you want to move.
5. Click on the move tool and move the part of the image to the background image (the other image you have open).

Whadaya think?

Differences Between Photoshop and Elements

Curvy architecture processed for the Web in Photoshop Elements


When I bought my new Mac I got a free CD of Elements 2.0.

I'm finding that using it there are some interesting differences between the basic set-up of Photoshop and that of Photoshop Elements:

Elements vs Photoshop

1. I found it surprising that Elements has features that Photoshop doesn't (because Elements is much less expensive).
2. Photoshop Elements has a very effective Browse option. I like it better than Photoshop because Photoshop CS 2's Bridge program (Photoshop has a separate program packaged in called Bridge) because it's faster. While the images aren't as big in the preview; I find that speed is more important under my work circumstances.
3. Elements has a sidebar window where you can locate your files from a list of file names. It's easily seen, fast and very accessible.

Photoshop vs Elements

1. The drop down menu bars in Photoshop have more options and are easier to navigate to.
2. There are fade options in Photoshop CS 2 where you can lessen a previously made change with a slider.
3. There's a channel mixer in Photoshop which allows for better control of the gray tones when changing a color photograph to black-and-white.

These are some I've found. Please comment if you've found a couple...