Digital Art Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Combining and Manipulating Images

In This Chapter

• Merging files automatically in Photoshop

• Identifying color for use for picture backgrounds

• Using symmetry to create new pictures from photos

You can think of Photoshop as an image processing program in either two or three dimensions. In two dimensions, Photoshop can take many photos and place them side by side in a collage or montage. That you can discover in this chapter. In three dimensions, Photoshop can meld one image on top of another to create three-dimensional effects that awe. (No, no Twilight Zone or Sixth Sense here, just old-fashioned photo layer manipulation that's been around ever since Photoshop introduced layers in version 3.) That you can discover in Chapter 14.

The fun thing about Photoshop, of course, is that you can manipulate images in all sorts of cool ways. Just like in most any other application, such as Microsoft Word, you can copy and paste images side by side in a new document or add them to an existing one. You can copy and paste tables, graphs, other people's pictures — even a picture of someone's kitchen sink — into Photoshop.

In this chapter, I show you how to position images using Photoshop's Photomerge. It can sew sections of a larger photo into one cohesive image. Think of a broad, panoramic landscape view that's difficult to capture in one shot. With Photoshop, you can take individual shots — ...