Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [25]
The pen tool group includes the main pen tool, a freeform pen tool (which in essence is not much better than the lasso or magnetic lasso tools) plus modifier tools to add, delete or modify the path points. There are several examples coming up in Chapter 9 where I will show how to use the pen tools to draw a path.
Image editing tools
Starting from the top, we have the crop tool that can be used to trim pictures or enlarge the canvas area. This tool, by the way, now features two new crop preview options: a Rule of Thirds and a Grid mode (you can read more about these in the Image editing essentials chapter). The eraser tools are still there should you wish to erase the pixels directly, although these days it is more common to use layer masks to selectively hide or show the contents of a layer. The background eraser and magic eraser tools do offer some degree of automated erasing capabilities, but I would be more inclined to use the quick selection tool combined with a layer mask for this type of masking.
The clone stamp tool has been around since the beginning of Photoshop and is definitely an essential tool for all kinds of retouching work. You can use the clone stamp to sample pixels from one part of the image and paint with them in another (as shown in Figure 1.65). The clone stamp tools were joined a few years back by the healing brush and patch tool. The healing brush can be used in almost exactly the same way as the clone stamp, except it cleverly blends the pixels around the edges where the healing brush retouching is applied, to produce almost flawless results. The patch tool is similar to the healing brush except you first use a selection to define the area to be healed. The spot healing brush is rather clever because you don't even need to set a sample point: you simply click and paint over the blemishes you wish to see removed. This tool has now been enhanced with a content-aware healing mode that allows you to tackle with real ease what were once really tricky subjects to retouch.
Figure 1.65 I mostly use the healing brush and clone stamp tools to retouch small blemishes or remove any remaining sensor dust marks from my photographs. In this example I am able to show how the clone stamp tool can be used to paint detail from one part of an image onto another. Note how the retouching work here is applied to an empty new layer and the Sample: ‘Current & Below’ option was selected in the clone stamp tool After Options bar.
Providing you use the right flash settings on your camera it should be possible to avoid red eye from ever occurring in your flash portrait photographs. But for those times when the camera flash leaves your subjects looking like beasts of the night, the red eye tool provides a fairly basic and easy way to auto-correct such photos. Meanwhile, the color replacement brush is kind of like a semi-smart color blend mode painting tool that analyzes the area you are painting over and replaces it with the current foreground color, using either a Hue, Color, Saturation or Luminosity blend mode. It is perhaps useful for making quick and easy color changes without needing to create a Color Range selection mask first.
Working with Layers
Photoshop layers allow you to edit a photograph by building up the image in multiple layered sections, such as in the example shown below in Figure 1.66. A layer can be an image element, such as a duplicated background layer, a copied selection that's been made into a layer, or content that has been copied from another image, or you can have text or vector shape layers. You can also add adjustment layers which are like image adjustment instructions applied in a layered form.
Figure 1.66 The above Layers panel view shows the layer contents of a typical layered Photoshop image and the diagram on the right shows