ImagesMagUK_Digital-Edition_Nov17

TIPS & TECHNIQUES www.images-magazine.com 56 images NOVEMBER 2017 This will become your new secret weapon It takes just a few clicks in Photoshop to elevate print images from good to amazing, reveals Marshall Atkinson on the top menu and then choose ‘Convert to Profile’. From the dialogue- box drop down, choose ‘LAB Color’. You won’t see any immediate change to your image, but you are now poised like a Photoshop ninja to strike and make some fantastic improvements. Third, create a curves Adjustment Layer. Just click on ‘Layer’ from the top menu, and choose ‘New Adjustment Layer’ on the pull-down, then ‘Curves’. Click ‘Ok’ in the box that pops up. This step creates a new layer in the file so you can toggle back and forth and review your handiwork as you change the image. You could skip this step and just alter your original file layer without it, but that’s like working without a safety net. But if you like living dangerously, or just love the History tool, then skip away. Now comes the fun part. There is a drop down menu near the top of your Adjustment Layer. Click on it and you will see three choices. L Channel, A Channel and B Channel. To start, click and select the A Channel. (If you aren’t using the Adjustment Layer, just do the steps below by choosing Command M and go to ‘Curves’.) The Photoshop Histogram will appear. If you normally use this tool, it will look dramatically different from what you usually might see, as the graph will show a huge spike the middle. That’s normal in LAB mode. For our exercise, we are just going to adjust the endpoints of the Histogram graph. Simply click and drag the black endpoint of the diagonal line in the graph until the input number reads -90. Now do the same for the white endpoint, but you want 90 instead (i.e. +90). Your input numbers should be the same, but because they are on opposite ends of the graph, one will be negative and the other positive. Don’t worry about what your image looks like at this point, because it may look a little weird as you’ve only finished half of the correction. We’ll need to adjust the B Channel next to balance everything out. M any creative digital artists struggle with Photoshop because there are simply too many options to choose from when adjusting the image; they just don’t know the tools or get caught in a rut when processing their files. What if I told you there was some secret Photoshop magic that’s easy to use, has only two steps and takes two minutes or less to get amazing results? Meet the LAB channel. It’s a very powerful image colour space in Photoshop that can save you hours of time tweaking your files for print. RGB to start Here’s how it works. Start with your image in RGB – the red, green and blue channels. This is the traditional additive colour space (meaning that the three colour channels added together form the basis for the total colour gamut). LAB uses that same colour space, but divides it up into three completely different channels: Lightness, A and B. The Lightness channel is simply the luminosity or the greyscale, if you will, of the image. The A and B channels are all the colours of RGB, but divided into two colour channels instead of three. There are a few things you can do immediately that will improve any image and save you hours of time. The first is tweaking the image using some simple curves with an Adjustment Layer, and the second is implementing an Unsharp Mask step. Before we get too far into this, I want you to open a photo in Photoshop and play along. Use one that’s a raw file and unprocessed or not improved yet. Learn by doing, it’s the only way. Don’t screw up a file you need though. Open something that you can use, and then make a copy of it. Save it as ‘LAB Test’. LAB colour space Next, convert your image to the LAB colour space. To do that, just click ‘Edit’ LABmode mojo Figure 1: The right side of the tiger after some tweaking by Marshall