Image Editing

Layer masks are an incredibly powerful feature in Photoshop, enabling you to apply targeted adjustments and create impressive composite images. However, at times you may find yourself frustrated by a layer mask that just won’t come together to produce a good result.

eBook author and photographer Denise Ippolito shares some tips with us from her e-book A Guide to Creative Filters and Effects, available for sale through the NatureScapes Store.

I recently purchased a Wacom Bamboo pen tablet to use in retouching photographs and doing photo manipulation. The tablet would make these chores much faster and easier than using my laptop's touchpad, which is what I've used for years. I had my chance to really test my new tool when I had to create a complex mask for a photograph I made at the Gold King Mine and Ghost Town in Jerome, Arizona.

I made various adjustments in my RAW viewer, and in Photoshop, to have the foreground look like it does below. But I wanted to darken the view out of the window so you could more easily see what's outside while keeping the foreground properly saturated.

Back in the film era, when film was the only medium to capture photos and digital was still mostly avoided for various reasons, life was, relatively speaking, easier. Many hobbyists and amateur photographers were conservative about the amount of film exposed. Good slide films were expensive and developing film was even more so. This led photographers to be very selective about the number of images made, which in turn meant relatively easier sorting back at home. Most photographers were happy to get a small set of decent images which they either used for slide-shows or digitized to present as a digital slide-show. However with digital capture there is no such linear progression. Memory cards and storage media are getting cheaper every day, increasing the amount of clicks in the field and leading to more chaos. Everyone tends to think, “I'll fix it later using Photoshop” and takes many images. Imagine a wonderful image of your kid taken this year dumped in a cryptic folder which the camera created for you. Fast forward a few years and you want to show it to your kid or relatives. Can you locate it? It is like finding a needle in a haystack – possible but very time consuming and frustrating. Enter the buzzword 'workflow'.