The Edit Tools

The edit tools, rather than applying color ; influence existing colors in an image. Figure 1-3 shows the effect of dragging with several of the edit tools. Future sections cover all the individual edit tools in more detail, but here's a brief introduction:

image from book
Figure 1-3: The effects of dragging with five of Photoshop's edit tools. The boundaries of each line are highlighted so you can clearly see the distinctions between line and background.
  • Blur: The first of the two focus tools, the Blur tool blurs an image by lessening the amount of color contrast between neighboring pixels.

  • Sharpen: The second focus tool selectively sharpens by increasing the contrast between neighboring pixels.

    Note  

    Although the Blur and Sharpen tools are all right for little scrubs here and there, they lack the degree of control afforded by the Blur and Sharpen filters (discussed in Chapter 8).

  • Smudge: The Smudge tool smears colors in an image. The effect is rather like dragging your finger across wet paint. Although simple, this tool can be effective for smoothing out colors and textures. See "Painting with the Smudge tool" later in this chapter for more information.

  • Dodge: The Dodge tool is named after a traditional darkroom technique. By dodging, a technician waves a hand or paddle over the photographic paper to decrease the amount of light that hits it, decreasing the exposure time of the affected areas. In Photoshop, the Dodge tool lightens the portion of an image you drag the tool across.

  • Burn: The Burn tool is the Dodge tool's opposite , darkening an area as you drag over it. Returning once again to the darkroom, the technician would create a mask by, say, cutting a hole in a piece of paper or cupping his hand. Doing this would protect areas of photographic paper that had already been exposed and darken the area inside the hole.

  • Sponge: The Sponge tool has two modes: Saturate and Desaturate. In Desaturate mode, the Sponge tool robs an image of color when working inside a color image, or contrast when working in grayscale. If you switch to Saturate mode, the Sponge tool adds more color in color images or contrast in grayscale images.

    Tip  

    You often use tools like Blur, Sharpen, Dodge, and Burn in tandem and therefore you hop from one to the other, wishing you could do so more quickly. The secret to hopping from tool to tool is the Alt key (Win) or the Option key (Mac). For example, to toggle between the burn and dodge tools, just hit the appropriate key for your OS. The nice thing about toggling is that the settings of one tool stay active during the switch to the tool's counterpart . Say you want to burn the image using the settings configured for the Dodge tool. Rather than switching to the Burn tool and changing its settings, you could select the Dodge tool and Alt- or Option-drag.



Photoshop CS2 Bible
Photoshop CS2 Bible
ISBN: 0764589725
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 95

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