Digital Art Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 20. Ten Digital Art Tricks

A fantasy is a dream that comes true. Digital art tricks can be those dreams, and they can come alive, beginning with thoughtful shots augmented with your creative use of Photoshop (or other image processors), from processing your Raw format photos to changing the hue and saturation of your image.

Real art begins with your imagination. In this chapter, I list a few tricks to help you to master image processing technology to get the best creative product possible.

Overexpose and Underexpose

As I discuss in Chapter 5, you can do a lot to make your image stunning while you shoot outdoors. When the sun shines on your subject, change your exposure compensation so that it reads in the minus column (underexposure) to deepen your colors. When you're shooting in deep shade, try upping your exposure compensation to the plus column (overexposure). You'll get an artsy effect that's almost impressionistic.

Photoshop CS2 comes to your aid also, letting you do anything you want with your exposure by just sliding the exposure slider when your image is in Raw format (if your camera shoots in that file type) just as if you were shooting. That's right! You can open and tweak your image in Raw format and get a chance to fool with your camera controls just as if you were on the shoot. (Yeah, that's right — no pixilation or image deterioration that you get when you tweak ...