GeekSpeak for February 20, 2004

Scott Kelby

Photoshop is a favorite for home users and design professionals. Scott Kelby, author, Editor-in-Chief of Photoshop User magazine, MacDesign magazine, Nikon Capture User magazine and President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals joins the Geeks for an intimate look at Adobe Photoshop. Hear about the new features in Photoshop CS from Match Color command to Integrated digital camera raw file format support and much more.

Photoshop CS Shadow/Highlight

After the show I was excited to play with some of the features that Scott mentioned durring the show.

Here is an image that was taken in a bad light situation. Note that the camera used the light part of the image, the background, as the focus of the image. But the kid, Wyatt, in the forground is compleatly dark.

I took that bad picture and used Photoshop CS's "Shadow/Highlight" tool to fix the image. And, as you can see, the image looks a lot better. There are some grain artifacts now which are especially noticable in the larger view of the image. But at least the subject, Wyatt, looks a bit better.

Lastly I ran the Auto Levels command to fix the contrast of the photo. I could have used other tools, but I find that Auto Levels is simple and fairly good at it's job.

For a much more drastic example of the "Shadow/Highlight" feature of Photoshop CS take a look at this Bad Photo vs this Fixed Bad Photo.