Mark S. Johnson Photography

Today is art day on the Photoshop Workbench. For the next several minutes, try to remember how good it felt to be a child in an elementary art class…freely experimenting with the colorful materials around you. Breath deeply and imagine the scent of Elmer’s glue and crayons. Picture yourself holding scissors and carefully trimming away the pointed corners of a drawing that you can’t wait to show to your mom. As you trim, notice how the slender artwork curls in your hands and casts an arched shadow on the table below.

Gradually allow yourself to ease back into reality. You’re sitting at a computer starring at a photograph. The thought of art class lingers in your mind. How can you possibly round the corners of a picture without scissors? Is it possible to create the illusion of a curled shadow in Photoshop? There are so many questions and only one class period. Thank goodness for the Workbench!

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is remarkably popular these days. You can find incredible work on Tony Sweet’s blog and in Ben Willmore’s Best of Ben Route 66 gallery.

There are two types of HDR––photo realistic and photo surrealistic. Today, I’m going to focus on a technique for creating the surrealistic look. Characteristics of this look include intense detail in the shadows and highlights and strong global and micro (edge) contrast. Saturation can vary from intense to almost non-existent.

True HDR requires multiple bracketed exposures that you creatively blend in a program like Photomatix Pro (www.hdrsoft.com). In this Workbench, however, I’ll show you a technique for achieving a similar look using just one well-exposed image and a handful of sliders in the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) dialog. For the best results, begin with a Camera Raw image (not a JPEG) and edit in 16-bit mode.

For many, Photoshop’s Histogram and Info Panels are mysterious, foreboding places never to be explored. To the enlightened, however, these panels possess information that sheds valuable light on the tonal and color information in their images. I find these panels absolutely indispensable.

I use the Histogram panel as a spyglass into an image’s tonal (brightness) values. As I correct an image, I typically use the histogram to ascertain three important bits of information––am I blowing out the highlights, are the shadows blocking up, and am I correcting with too heavy a hand? In other words, is the image beginning to show signs of posterization?

The Info panel is a wonderful tool for making decisions about color. Let’s use the panel to learn about how Photoshop handles color.

If you’ve never used the Patch tool before or if you’re a little intimidated by it, this Workbench is for you. As is often the case in beautiful destinations, such as Chitzinitza, Mexico, tourists can be difficult to eliminate from your compositions. Despite this frustration, today I’ll show you how to zap them quickly from the frame using almost entirely the Patch tool (with just a little help from the Clone Stamp). As you can see, we have much work ahead, so let’s get started. I promise that it won’t take long.