Digital Art Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 15. Using Photoshop for Special Effects

In This Chapter

• Using Photoshop filters to enhance your art photos

• Advanced Photoshop special effects

• Creating backgrounds in Photoshop

Photoshop has literally hundreds of effects that you can use to manipulate an image. The choices available range from subtle to dramatic to (in my opinion) downright bizarre and surreal. How far you want to take your art photography from its original state is a matter of your taste and the outcome you desire.

For making saleable images that are superior prints, keep in mind the printing process as you move through your editing process. And with the special effects you can achieve with the special effect filters Photoshop offers, you can take a great photograph and tweak or twist it into something spectacular.

Experimenting with an image in Photoshop is a trial-and-error process; you won't really know the potential of the final result until you print the image (discussed in Chapter 17). However, you can twist and turn and tweak an image in Photoshop with a minimum amount of processing. In this chapter, I discuss using filters, creating a new background, and applying color enhancement.

Note

Pick your finest images to tweak in Photoshop. Otherwise, you run the risk that your image won't have clear lines, shapes, and forms. Too, you're likely to get more image degradation when you run it through the various filters ...