Basic Photoshop Tips

Welcome to my bi-weekly article about great entertainment images on the Web. In these articles, I try to point you all toward great sites that have lots of entertainment images.

This time, I'll give a few tips on some things that you can do to your images to make them better. As I've said before, there are only two categories of image editing software, Photoshop and everything else. I don't recommend using anything but Photoshop, so that's what I'll stick with.

Before you make any adjustments to an image, there are some things that you should keep in mind. First, be sure that the image is at least decent quality. A blurry, grainy or otherwise flawed image probably isn't worth keeping in the first place. Secondly, you should decide if you're going to leave the image pretty much as is, or if you're going to digitally alter it to any degree. If you're planning on altering the image, the larger it is the better because the general rule is to work big, then reduce. If you're just going to save the image in your collection, or use it on the Web, anything larger than 450/500 pixels tall or 600/650 pixels wide is probably unnecessary. For the purposes of this article, we'll assume that the images are for collecting or Web use.

There are a few very basic things that you can do that will improve the quality of any image. First, decide if it needs to be cropped. If there is a lot of unused image area around the scene or subject, just use the cropping tool to crop the image to your specifications. The next thing to do would be to go to Image/Adjust/Auto Levels. This will improve the image in most cases. Use Ctrl+Z to alternate between the two versions and pick the best one. There are some other things that can be done, but those simple things will probably show the most image improvement. Just remember to save jpegs at the same or greater quality as the original. Lowering the quality that it's saved at will save some disk space, but essentially makes the image ugly and worthless for most purposes.

If you have any comments or questions about this article, or anything else, feel free to drop me a line at Creed@bigfoot.com, or post your ideas in the discussion area.

Have a good one!
Creed Stonegate

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