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ASU English Home > Computing Support > Workshops and Tutorials > Tutorials > Adobe Photoshop 5.4 Basic tutorial

Photo editing

How to edit, improve and manipulate photos in Adobe Photoshop 5.5

When working with images in Photoshop you have a number of toolbars at your disposal. The most used one is probably the Basic toolbar. This can be used for a number of things, like adding text to a photo.

Color, brightness, sharpness, and other quality enhancing features

• Let's start with a basic, unedited photo.

freja.jpg

• This photo can be transformed into Black/White by selecting the Image menu, then Mode, and then Grayscale. You will be asked if you want to discard color information. Say yes. When you save your image, do so under a new name so that you will still have a copy of your old color original. I named this one freja2.jpg.

• Now open up your old original (the color photo) again. Photoshop has a nice feature called Auto levels. It will optimize the color balance and brightness of your photo without you having to do the fine tuning yourself. To optimize your photo, select the Image menu, then Adjust<Auto levels. Again, save it under a new name to preserve your original (in this case I called it freja3.jpg) My original photo now looks like this:

Special effects, filters, and other creative features

Photoshop offers many special effects and editing features. I will show some here that you might find visually interesting and/or amusing.

Again, here is our basic photo. Under the menu filters you will find a multitude of artistic filters, some of which I will apply to this image to give you an idea of what can be done. Remember to always keep an unedited original copy of your image in case something goes wrong and you want to start from scratch.

• All of these filters can be applied to selected areas of an image. For example: if you have a photo of a person, but you think that the face is a bit too blurred, you can select the face area using the selection tool (see top of this page) and then apply the sharpen filter to that area only. Example:

filter: none (original)	filter: sharpen, applied using the selection tool on the face area.
filter: blur. Applied to the face area.

• On how to add text to a photo, or any image, please refer to our first Adobe Photoshop tutorial.