Photoshop® CS3 Layers Bible

Chapter 15. Manipulating Photos by Using Layers

Photoshop has always catered well to the needs of photographers, but the CS3 release introduces yet more photo-friendly features such as the Black & White adjustment, the Exposure adjustment layer, and the new, much-improved Adobe Camera Raw.

In this chapter, you apply layer techniques to some real-world photography situations, hopefully demystifying some of the more esoteric features of Photoshop along the way. You'll be looking at:

• Retouching landscapes: Here you'll be using layer masks to separate land and sky. You also learn how to really make your landscape "pop" out of the page.

• Correcting color casts: Has your camera let you down by misjudging the white balance of a scene? Or do you have a photo with a particular color cast? You learn how to get perfect colors within a photo, using the Levels adjustment on a channel-by-channel basis.

• Retouching a portrait: You start with an ordinary portrait and apply multiple techniques to bring the exposure back on track and flatter the skin tones.

• Converting color images to black and white: You compare the main layer-based techniques for converting a color digital photo to black and white, and learn how to get the most out of your monochrome images.

• Aligning handheld photos: Finally, you look at the new Auto-Align Layers feature in Photoshop CS3. You learn how to take two handheld photos of the same scene and line them up perfectly in seconds.

You'll concentrate on producing great end results, and ...