I love Photoshop CS4

[Buleste]

I've been trying Photoshop CS4 today to edit some scans and PDF's I've been creating of rare RPG books and it's wonderful. Simple easy to use etc. With a bit of extra knowledge soon I'll look forward to repairing any physical problems (rips, scuffing etc.) with the stuff I'm scanning in so that soon all the rare stuff will be of almost print quality. I love it.

[Harrison]

Photoshop is an amazing program. I've been using it since version 3 on a Mac back in 1994/5! CS4 is a great release and well worth spending time to learn.

One thing that will really speed up using it is getting to know the keyboard shortcuts. I generally never touch the menus, instead just doing keyboard shortcuts to switch tools and access features.

A couple of useful ones are:
M to select the marquee selection tool
V to select the select and drag tool
S to select the clone tool (something that is very useful when touching up scanning images.
Ctrl+ and Ctrl- to zoom in and out of the image quickly.
Hold Alt and press I followed by P - this crops the image to the current marquee selection.
Ctrl+L to open the levels window. The most useful adjustment window to adjust the light, contrast and brightness of a scanned image in one go. Takes some playing with to get to grips with it, but it is worth it.

And if you need to sharpen a scan use the "Unsharp Mask" filter. It allows more control and gives the best results.

Also get to grips with layers. They are the key to success in Photoshop, as you can then use layer masks and adjustment layers for more advanced image editing.

I'm an advanced Photoshop user so if you need any help, advice, or hints on how to do something in Photoshop please ask.

[Buleste]

I've just discovered the "Spot Healing Brush Tool". It's awesome. I'm getting rid of blemishes on scans and repairing creases and tears left right and centre. Only problem I have now is I feel like going through all my old scans and repairing them. If I only do the stuff I've scanned that's about 10GB or around 10,000 pages plus I have about another 4,000 pages to scan in to edit. I thank the gods that I don't have a life.;)

[Harrison]

I prefer to use the normal clone tool most of the time rather than the healing tools. They are OK for certain repair jobs, but I find they don't work correctly when you are trying to repair areas with high contrast or colour differences. When that occurs it tries to guess and clones the wrong parts and colours, or makes a light area dark.

But I think it depends on which tools you have used the most. Different people prefer different tools, and achieve the same results in different ways.

Wait till you start using actions! There are really cool. You can record any series of actions you like in Photoshop by creating a new action and starting it recording. Then once you have performed whatever you wanted to do you can then stop the acton being recorded and then play the action to perform the same series of actions to any other image. Great if you need to resize, sharpen, colour balance and save a load of images. And combine that with the Batch tool and you can batch convert a whole directory of images in a few seconds using your created actions. And you can even edit the recorded actions, delete parts or change settings.

[Buleste]

The tool I use now depends on the image.

I have a question. I've had a requester popping up when I open some images saying
Pixel aspect ratio correction is for preview purposes only. Turn it off for maximum image quality. How do I turn pixel aspect ratio correction off?

Thank you in advance for the Photoshop master class. I've done one scan and already had many compliments saying it looks like an OEF and that's before I know what I'm doing.

[Harrison]

I can't remember ever getting an aspect ratio correction message in photoshop. My only guess is that you mght have the current image open in the CMYK colour space instead of RGB. I will have a look in the manual for you tomorrow and let you know (yes, I do own a real copy! ;)).

[Harrison]

I have a question. I've had a requester popping up when I open some images saying
Pixel aspect ratio correction is for preview purposes only. Turn it off for maximum image quality. How do I turn pixel aspect ratio correction off?

Did you work this one out?

Pixel Aspect Ratio is related to Video. So, if your work is not intented to video you have to disable it.

1. Under Image>Pixel Aspect Ratio select Square.

And, when you create a NEW document, look at the bottom of the New dialog box and set the Pixel Aspect Ratio to Square.

[Harrison]

Thought I would also comment on something new I've been using this week. Photoshop CS4 Extended 64-bit edition!

As you probably know, all 32-bit applications are normally restricted to 32-bit memory addressing space, so have a maximum accessible memory limit of 4GB, which is normally knocked down to about 3.5GB due to system resource management and other things. This is also true of Photoshop. But with the 64-bit edition, running on a 64-bit OS, this restriction is lifted and you have access to all available system ram (if your system is lucky enough to have more). In my case the 64-bit edition lets me access about 7GB of the total 8GB available (due to other system resource use).

What are the advantages of accessing more ram in Photoshop?

If you get to the point where you are working on large scanned images that are 1000's of pixels in dimension then Photoshop has to hold all of this data in memory while you are working on it. I single layer image of this size will probably use a couple of hundred meg up in memory, but start to add layers to an image to do more work on it, or as part of a design and the memory being used starts to increase. And then performing any filters on the image such as sharpening, scratch removal, blurring etc and memory needs to be used to process the data. So the more you have available the faster and smoother it will all happen.

The 64-bit edition also, thanks to 64-bit processing, does seem more responsive and faster at rendering filters. I haven't actually timed it to test if this really is true yet, but as installing Photoshop on a 64-bit OS installs both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions I am going to do a couple of tests when I get time to see how long it takes to run through a fairly complex set of actions (this will include enlarging an image, removing dust and scratches, sharpening the image, and then adding a blur effect). I will perform the same set of actions in both versions and see what the time differences are. I will be interested to see how they compare on the same system.