Photoshop CS2 provides the option to create a web photo gallery along with many layout options through their Photo Gallery wizard. In this tutorial, Linda walks you through the steps to create a gallery, and she points out the benefits and disadvantages to this WYSIWYG tool along the way. You’ll need a folder filled with several images (up to ten or more) to play with this tool and to learn how to utilize Photoshop CS2’s Bridge.

Yes, it’s WYSIWYG, but it works – mostly…

Photoshop CS2 provides a means for people who don’t know the ins and outs of HTML to set up a personalized photo gallery online. But, if you do know HTML and CSS, you have the advantage. You can tweak the final project so that your site is a bit more clean, clever, personal, usable and accessible. Remember – this is WYSIWYG after all…

The first thing you’ll need is some photos – up to ten is fine for this project contained in a folder. I’m sure that you’re SO organized that you have your own photos to use for this project, right? To be honest – I’m the worst at organization, but over the weekend I used PhotoShop Bridge to help me sort out all my files (not just photographs). You’ll see how easy this will be for you as well as you go along.

The Bridge is also necessary for you to build this gallery, because it helps you to define the photos and to create the gallery’s structure. So, choose your photos, open Photoshop CS2, and away you go…

Photoshop CS2: Simple Compositing

Within the past few articles about Photoshop CS2, Linda has illustrated how to use several tools in this program to brighten up old images. In this article, she begins to work with several recently-taken photos at once to create one new image. This process, called compositing, may seem simple at first glance, but several factors – including tricks with selection tools – can help to save time and can also help to create a more believable image. Linda covers these compositing tools and more in this article…

Bring Out Those Boring Photographs

In the first article about Photoshop, I talked about how to spot fake photographs, or “fauxtography.” If you’re interested in photojournalism, the practice of altering photographs or creating composites is unethical, illegal in some situations, and just plain wrong. However, if you want to create photographic or artistic images for postcards or greeting cards, as “illustrations” for fictional works, or as digital artwork for sale or just for personal enjoyment, then you can create composites for fun and/or profit.

Compositing practice is perfect for those less-than-wonderful images that you have stashed on your hard drive. Yes, I know the reason why you haven’t tossed those photos – at least one or two features within those images are valuable to you. Even the dark, blurry, and otherwise defective images can work if you know how to fix those features.

The first project is a simple one, where I chose three rather boring vacation photos to create one composite:

Photoshop CS2: Optimize Your Photoshop Experience

Photoshop CS2 is filled with little mysteries, and sometimes the best tools for completing a Photoshop job are hidden right under your nose. In this article, Linda passes on some of her tips and tricks that will make your experiences with Photoshop a bit more fantastic, including a short tutorial on Smart Objects and Shapes. This is a veritable potpourri of tips and tricks along with links to online resources for FREE tutorials, brushes, and photographs that you can’t afford to miss, and that weren’t covered in her previous articles!

Outsmarting the Photoshop Manual

You could spend years learning all the nuances contained within Photoshop CS2. My suggestion is to learn everything you can from the Adobe Photoshop CS2 manual, and then pick up a Photoshop magazine every once in a while to learn from the folks who play with this software all day long. After you sample one or two of the many magazines out there, you might pick a favourite and subscribe to learn more.

I wish that I could somehow sort the tips and tricks below a bit better so that they’ll be easier to access, but so many of these tools fall into more than one category – I did, however, try to file them under vague headings to make it a bit easier for you to skim through. Just sit back, read, enjoy, and note the tools that will provide you with the most satisfaction when you work in Photoshop.

You may want to create artistic images from your photographs with Photoshop Filters, but you soon discover that your images seem too simplistic or “digital” for your taste. In this tutorial, Linda explains that the reason behind this problem often lies in the background, or in the canvas or paper that you choose to use for your artistic adventures. You’ll receive artistic canvas and paper backgrounds for your use with this article, as well as steps on how to create more realistic pastel and watercolour renderings from your photographic images with these backgrounds.

Study the Masters

If you attended an art school (not a graphic design school), you probably spent most of your first year replicating masters’ works in a museum setting. These lessons were necessary to help you learn how the “pros” created their drawings and paintings. From this point, you could then develop your own style.

While Photoshop filters provide the digital artist with a variety of tools to create a ‘painting’ from a photograph, these filters are either simplistic or they overdo the obvious. Even the addition of “just one more filtered layer” often falls short from your goal. So how do you know what looks “right” as you begin to add filtered layers to achieve an artistic effect?

Only in Photoshop CS2 can you alter the distortion created by a camera lens with the Lens Correction filter. In this article, Linda shows how to get the most out of this filter. She illustrates how to correct images that appear distorted, but she also shows how to create some special effects through the options contained within this filter. Additionally, she compares this filter’s options to other Photoshop tools that may create the same effect.

Lens Correction: Exciting New Option

Most of you are already familiar with the Warp transformation tool, the Perspective tool, and the distortion filters like Pinch and Spherize that are contained in Photoshop CS2 as well as in previous Photoshop versions. The Lens Correction filter, introduced for the first time in Photoshop CS2, mimics many of the attributes contained in all the previously mentioned tools and filters; but, the Lens Correction tool can take your creativity a touch further, because you can control many options at the same time. When you combine this tool with other options, you often can correct what you thought were unsalvageable images.

However, there’s only so much that the Lens Correction filter can accomplish. If you have a photograph like the one shown below, there’s not much you can do to fix it with the Lens Correction filter (or with any other tool for that matter):

The image above, taken in Chicago, contains every problem that the Lens Correction filter can fix – but when a photograph contains all of those problems in one image, the “fixing” is stymied. Instead, I’ll use this shot to explain various photo distortions and – at the same time – to introduce you to the Lens Correction filter.