Book Image

Mastering Adobe Photoshop 2024

By : Gary Bradley
Book Image

Mastering Adobe Photoshop 2024

By: Gary Bradley

Overview of this book

Unlock the full potential of Photoshop, the go-to app for content creators by mastering its complex tools and features. This book quickly builds on your existing Photoshop knowledge with proven industry techniques, serving as a launchpad to develop professional skills and transformative personal growth. You’ll start by fine-tuning color and tone in your images with non-destructive adjustment layers and conceal content like backdrops with precise masking techniques for fine details like hair. Working through a series of real-world editing projects, crafting realistic brand mockups and traditional marketing collateral, you’ll learn robust methods for building social media assets in Photoshop, from images to animated GIFs and videos. You’ll also be able to bring your typography to life with styles and effects that are simple to edit and store as preset effects. The final section of the book encapsulates all of your learning to create complex montages using advanced masking and compositing techniques. You’ll have fun elevating your designs with surreal art styles and conceptual imagery using retouching, blending, and liquify filters. By the end of this Adobe Photoshop book, you’ll soar to new heights with your designs, creating captivating visuals that leave a lasting impression on your audience.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1:Raising Your Photoshop Game
5
Part 2:Bringing Brands Front and Center
10
Part 3:Building Visual Components
14
Part 4:World Building

Masking and Cutouts

Photoshop is an incredibly versatile application. However, it can be unforgiving if you fail to protect pixel-based content. In this chapter, we’ll explore masking techniques to reveal and conceal layer content, rather than deleting it. Masks can be applied to almost any layer type in Photoshop and are commonly used when applying adjustment layers to control the parts of an image the adjustment affects.

We’ll start by removing a background from an image and then place the “masked” subject into a new background. This will allow you to experience how an accurate selection is used as the basis for a layer mask that is intended to conceal the background while revealing the subject.

Using this masking technique, we’ll then apply it in the context of an adjustment layer to create a black-and-white isolation, with the subject in color and the background in grayscale. Then you’ll have the opportunity to edit the layer mask...