Happy Hump Day guys! Hope your Wednesday is going well, today I will be discussing with you all on one of my favorite skills I have attained within Communications Media: Photoshop!

Photoshop is truly a spectacular software in my opinion, and one of my favorites to use in the editing process. Sometimes you may think you have a flawless photo that needs no editing whatsoever, but I can almost guarantee  that there is something that could touch it up and make it look just a tad bit better. I have never used a software that can completely manipulate an image in the ways that Photoshop can.

The neatest thing about Photoshop is how realistic some of the edits can look. If you are proficient with the software, you could photoshop an airplane flying directly over an active volcano being driven by a shark and it could look realistic, even though this scenario is clearly impossible. Now I know that example was a stretch, but my point is you can do some pretty awesome things with Photoshop.

Say that you’re in charge of fixing blemishes on the senior class of your high schools senior photos, what do you do first? How do you soften their faces enough to make they’re skin look perfect, when in reality they may have a lot of acne? With photoshop, you can erase all flaws on people and just about anything.

In this scenario, one tool in Photoshop that may be beneficial to you could be the clone stamp tool. The clone stamp tool essentially allows you to click your mouse over one part of  the image, perhaps the cheek, and copy that over a part of the image that may not be picturesque (a zit). Using this technique is simple, but if not done properly, the edited photo will clearly look manipulated, making it worse than before.

To ensure that you edit this photograph properly with this tool, you can follow a couple of guidelines to stay on track. The first: make sure your editing brush size is small enough to keep the picture looking natural, and make sure you don’t clone an area that has a lot of shadows or noticeable blemishes that could be picked up as copies.

You’re editing someone’s senior picture, and you want them to look as good as possible in that final yearbook photo, so how do you finalize it? You definitely want to make sure you do not go over the top! Photoshop can be a  very helpful software to touch up pictures, but it can also get ugly very quickly by over editing. It’s very obvious when something has too much saturation, or too many shadows, or when the light is shining perfectly on someone’s skin so they appear to be glowing. We live in a society where we are afraid to post our actual photos without any edits because we want to appear more “flawless” than we can admit to being.

There are very quick fixes with Photoshop that can make an image still look good, but not extravagantly perfect. Adjusting the lighting and creating layers on the photo for subtle edits can help enhance the overall quality without looking overdone. Another easy tip could be to soften or sharpen specific parts of an image to make objects appear more crisp and stand out, or to make some objects blend in to keep the main focus on another object.

Photoshop can be your best friend, but can also be your enemy. How would you utilize Photoshop if you were working for a well known photography company like National Geographic? What would you want to share with your audience and how would you make that stick out without looking “too edited to be real”? I want you all to think of something you would showcase for the cover of a Nat Geo magazine and what tools you would use in Photoshop to create the best image!

Thanks for catching up on the latest cup o’ Joe for today! I hope you learned a couple of things about Photoshop if you did not know any or perhaps just enhanced your knowledge on the software!

-Joe