jfriend
Mar-06-2006, 08:12 PM
Photoshop Masking & Compositing, by Katrin Eismann
Chapter 1, The Creative Process and Configuring Photoshop
This book is considered by many to be one of the classics for teaching how to build selections or masks in Photoshop. Katrin divides the book into four main sections: selections, masks, selecting to preserve fine detail (like hair) and compositing (putting multiple images together).
The first section consists of four chapters that are about configuring photoshop and making selections. In this particular writeup, we will summarize Chapter 1, The Creative Process and Configuring Photoshop.
This first chapter one covers two main things. First, it’s an introduction to composites and some of the artisitic possibilities made possible by composites. Second, it’s a recommendation for how to initially configure all your Photoshop preferences. I’ll leave the first part for you to read yourself in the book. What we’re going to cover here is how Katrin recommends you initially set up your Photoshop preferences. Even though I’ve been using Photoshop and it’s cousin Photoshop Elements for many years, I still found useful information in the review of all the preferences and decided to change a few of mine after reading this.
Some of this chapter is a bit mechanical as she goes through most of the preference settings possible in Photoshop. The book appears to be written for Photoshop CS. The preferences in CS2 are nearly identical so the book is useful for either Photoshop version. If you have CS2, you may notice a few screen shots that are a little different than what the book shows.
I tried to make it so you can just page through this summary and stop when you see a screen shot of an interesting preference screen or you can check out the settings that I found particularly interested even though I’ve been using Photoshop for a little while:
Image Interpolation. How the default image interpolation setting works and how to override it in normal Photoshop use
History log. I didn’t even know about the history log feature.
.PSB file format. What is this format and what does the preference control?
Maximize PSD file compatibility. What does this really do?
Default Color Settings. How to understand and set the default color settings in Photoshop.
Configuring Profile Mismatch Warnings. How to configure the warnings for profile mismatches and what they mean.Here are the preferences that she covers:
General Photoshop Preferences
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363879-O.jpg
Image Interpolation. Interpolation is the process for changing the resolution of a photo and it can be either upsizing (making more pixels) or downsizing (reducing the number of pixels). Different techniques can be used for interpolation and this preference controls which technique Photoshop will use by default when you upsize or downsize. Katrin recommends Bicubic Smoother for upsizing and Bicubic Sharper for downsizing. After setting these preferences, these will be the default options in Photoshop For some operations like the Image Size command, you can still override these in the dialog, but for others like Free Transform, there is no dialog to control them so the default is always what is used.
Since I rarely upsize images and frequently downsize images (for web display or to send in email), I set this default to Bicubic Sharper.
History States. You can think of this preference like the number of undo states that Photoshop will remember. The advantage of having a higher number here is that Photoshop will remember more undo states. The disadvantage is that each undo state requires memory (bigger changes take more memory) and each open document has it’s own set of history states. While 20 undo states might sound like quite a bit, it depends upon the type of operation. It is a lot of states if what you are doing is creating adjustment layers, but it is not a lot if you are painting on a mask or cloning. Each brush stroke takes a separate undo state and 20 can get used up very quickly.
In my own personal opinion, if you use Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS2 and have less than 1GB of RAM, you probably don’t want to set this number higher because with both of those programs running and a few open images, you will start to become RAM challenged which will cause disk swapping which can really slow Photoshop down. At 1GB of RAM, I set this to 30 to give me a few more bursh strokes in the undo stack. If you have above 1GB of RAM, you could even set this higher.
Export Clipboard. If you don’t have a lot of memory (<1GB) and you don’t copy/paste much between Photoshop and other applications, you probably want this setting turned off because that enables Photoshop to use a much more memory efficient mechanism for cut/copy/paste clipboard handling. If you turn this setting on, the Photoshop will put an entire copy of whatever you have copy or cut to the clipboard onto the Windows system clipboard. This has the advantage of making the clipboard more interoperable with other applications that you might want to copy/paste with, but it has the disadvantage that Photoshop can’t use it’s internally efficient clipboard mechaism and must use the less efficient Windows mechanism.
If you do have plenty of memory (>1GB), you probably want to turn this on to enable better clipboard interoperability with other applications.
History Log. This is a feature that was introduced in Photoshop CS and it’s one I didn’t know existed until I read this book. Turning this on, tells Photoshop to keep a log of every change you make to an image and store it in the image’s metadata, a separate text file or both. You can further control how much detail is recorded by specifying one of the following:
Sessions Only – just records when you open and close a file
Concise – Keeps a record of every step you perform, similar to what you see in the history palette
Detailed – Surprisingly detailed record of everything you do, similar to what you see in the actions palette (includes detailed dialog settings, etc…).File Handling
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363866-O.jpg
Image Previews. This controls whether image previews are saved with your files. This is not the same option as Adobe Bridge has for saving image thumbnails in a cache. To tell you the truth, I still don’t quite understand what this option really does or know what we should really set it at and Katrin doesn’t explain much more than this.
Ignore EXIF sRGB tag. This option tells Photoshop to ignore an sRGB color profile tag embmeeded in an image. Normally you would not want to do this, but apparently this preference was added to deal with some cameras that were tagging images as sRGB even when the camera was set to aRGB and the image was actually aRGB. So, you would only need this preference if you purposely set your camera to aRGB and found that it was tagging the images as sRGB. I suspect this is not needed with most modern cameras and you will not need this option if you shoot in sRGB.
Ask before saving layered TIFF files. This option is here because some other programs or printers have historically had problems with TIFF files containing layers. Apparently this problem is not as common as it used to be and many systems that use TIFF files now support layers. You would only want to turn this on if you think you need a reminder before saving a TIFF file with layers.
Enable large document format (.psb). The PSD file format is limited to 30,000 pixels. If you want to save a file larger than that, you can save it as either the new PSB format (up to 90 billion pixels) or as a TIFF file (up to 4GB). The PSB files are not backward compatible with older version of Photoshop. If you don’t anticipate making files larger than 30,000 pixels, it doesn’t matter what you set this to. If you might make files that large without intending to and don’t want Photoshop to let you save files that won’t be compatible with older versions of Photoshop then don’t enable this preference. Otherwise, don’t worry about it.
Maximize PSD file compatibility. This preference controls whether Photoshop saves (in your PSD file) an extra composite layer that contains a merged copy of what your finished image looks like (e.g. what you would see on screen or print). The problem with this option is that this extra layer takes space and makes your PSD files noticably larger (as much as 33% larger). The main reason to use this option is for compatibility with 3rd party applications that read PSD files, but don’t know how to process all the layers in them. Those applications will often look for this merged composite layer to use that as what they render when showing you the PSD file. Katrin recommends that if you don’t know that you need this on, then turn it off to save disk space in your files. If you run into some non-Photoshop application that is having trouble displaying or operating on your PSD files, you can always come back and turn it on and resave the offending files.
Display and Cursors
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363859-O.jpg
Color channels in color. This option controls whether color channels are display in color or black and white. Katrin recommends that you leave color channels in grayscale because it’s harder to see the detail in color than grayscale.
Painting cursors. Katrin recommends setting your cursor preference to Brush Size because this lets you see the size of the brush you are painting with. She points out that you can always temporarily switch to a precision cursor by pressing the capslock key when painting.
Transparency and Gamut
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363894-O.jpg
Transparency Settings: Grid Size & Colors. This setting controls how transparent pixels are represented. Katrain recommends just leaving this at it’s default setting.
Gamut Warning. When you have any out of gamut warning enabled for your image (such as the option in the View menu), this preference controls how the out-of-gamut is displayed. The default is a battleship gray. Katrin suggests that gray works for some images, but some people may want to change it to a color that is less likely to occur in nature such as a lime green or magenta.
Units and Rulers
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363904-O.jpg
Units. This controls what units are used in rulers. Pick what you want. A tip that Katrin shares is that you can double click in the rulers and it will bring up the preference dialog to change the units temporarily.
Column Size. This controls column sizes if you are doing work for newspapers or magazines.
Plug-ins and Scratch Disks
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363891-O.jpg
Scratch Disks. This tells Photoshop which disks to use for extra space when Photoshop runs out of RAM memory. Katrin recommends picking your fastest drive for your scratch disk. I’ve heard other people recommend that, if you have multiple fast hard disks, you should put the Photoshop scratch disk on a different drive from your OS swap file and from the disk that you normally save your Photoshop files to.
Memory and Image Cache
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363886-O.jpg
Cache Settings. The image cache helps improve your screen update speed by maintaining several different sizes of your image in RAM at different zoom levels. When you make a change to your image, Photoshop can make the change to the cached copy at your current zoom level first and update the screen fairly quickly. This setting controls how many different sizes Photoshop caches for this purpose. The default is 4. If you have a lot of RAM, you may want to increase it to 6.
Use Cache for Histogram in Levels. Katrin strongly recommends turning this preference off. It’s purpose is to speed the rendering of histograms when you are working on your image at views other than 100%. She reasons that if you need to look at the histogram, you need it to be accurate, not based on a cached smaller version of your image. For some reason, I don’t see this preference in my copy of CS2. I wonder if it’s no longer in Photoshop or has moved somewhere else.
Memory Usage. This controls how much of your total available RAM Photoshop is allowed to use. There appear to be a lot of different theories on how to best set this as I’ve read a number of them in various internet articles. Katrin recommends setting this to 90 percent of available RAM. If you are running other programs at the same time as Photoshop, you will probably need to set this significantly below 90 percent. I’ve personally found that Adobe Bridge takes a significant amount of memory (particularly if you are using ACR for RAW files) so you need to make sure there’s enough memory available for Bridge.
[[Due to length limits on a single posting, this is continued in the next posting in the thread]]
Chapter 1, The Creative Process and Configuring Photoshop
This book is considered by many to be one of the classics for teaching how to build selections or masks in Photoshop. Katrin divides the book into four main sections: selections, masks, selecting to preserve fine detail (like hair) and compositing (putting multiple images together).
The first section consists of four chapters that are about configuring photoshop and making selections. In this particular writeup, we will summarize Chapter 1, The Creative Process and Configuring Photoshop.
This first chapter one covers two main things. First, it’s an introduction to composites and some of the artisitic possibilities made possible by composites. Second, it’s a recommendation for how to initially configure all your Photoshop preferences. I’ll leave the first part for you to read yourself in the book. What we’re going to cover here is how Katrin recommends you initially set up your Photoshop preferences. Even though I’ve been using Photoshop and it’s cousin Photoshop Elements for many years, I still found useful information in the review of all the preferences and decided to change a few of mine after reading this.
Some of this chapter is a bit mechanical as she goes through most of the preference settings possible in Photoshop. The book appears to be written for Photoshop CS. The preferences in CS2 are nearly identical so the book is useful for either Photoshop version. If you have CS2, you may notice a few screen shots that are a little different than what the book shows.
I tried to make it so you can just page through this summary and stop when you see a screen shot of an interesting preference screen or you can check out the settings that I found particularly interested even though I’ve been using Photoshop for a little while:
Image Interpolation. How the default image interpolation setting works and how to override it in normal Photoshop use
History log. I didn’t even know about the history log feature.
.PSB file format. What is this format and what does the preference control?
Maximize PSD file compatibility. What does this really do?
Default Color Settings. How to understand and set the default color settings in Photoshop.
Configuring Profile Mismatch Warnings. How to configure the warnings for profile mismatches and what they mean.Here are the preferences that she covers:
General Photoshop Preferences
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363879-O.jpg
Image Interpolation. Interpolation is the process for changing the resolution of a photo and it can be either upsizing (making more pixels) or downsizing (reducing the number of pixels). Different techniques can be used for interpolation and this preference controls which technique Photoshop will use by default when you upsize or downsize. Katrin recommends Bicubic Smoother for upsizing and Bicubic Sharper for downsizing. After setting these preferences, these will be the default options in Photoshop For some operations like the Image Size command, you can still override these in the dialog, but for others like Free Transform, there is no dialog to control them so the default is always what is used.
Since I rarely upsize images and frequently downsize images (for web display or to send in email), I set this default to Bicubic Sharper.
History States. You can think of this preference like the number of undo states that Photoshop will remember. The advantage of having a higher number here is that Photoshop will remember more undo states. The disadvantage is that each undo state requires memory (bigger changes take more memory) and each open document has it’s own set of history states. While 20 undo states might sound like quite a bit, it depends upon the type of operation. It is a lot of states if what you are doing is creating adjustment layers, but it is not a lot if you are painting on a mask or cloning. Each brush stroke takes a separate undo state and 20 can get used up very quickly.
In my own personal opinion, if you use Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS2 and have less than 1GB of RAM, you probably don’t want to set this number higher because with both of those programs running and a few open images, you will start to become RAM challenged which will cause disk swapping which can really slow Photoshop down. At 1GB of RAM, I set this to 30 to give me a few more bursh strokes in the undo stack. If you have above 1GB of RAM, you could even set this higher.
Export Clipboard. If you don’t have a lot of memory (<1GB) and you don’t copy/paste much between Photoshop and other applications, you probably want this setting turned off because that enables Photoshop to use a much more memory efficient mechanism for cut/copy/paste clipboard handling. If you turn this setting on, the Photoshop will put an entire copy of whatever you have copy or cut to the clipboard onto the Windows system clipboard. This has the advantage of making the clipboard more interoperable with other applications that you might want to copy/paste with, but it has the disadvantage that Photoshop can’t use it’s internally efficient clipboard mechaism and must use the less efficient Windows mechanism.
If you do have plenty of memory (>1GB), you probably want to turn this on to enable better clipboard interoperability with other applications.
History Log. This is a feature that was introduced in Photoshop CS and it’s one I didn’t know existed until I read this book. Turning this on, tells Photoshop to keep a log of every change you make to an image and store it in the image’s metadata, a separate text file or both. You can further control how much detail is recorded by specifying one of the following:
Sessions Only – just records when you open and close a file
Concise – Keeps a record of every step you perform, similar to what you see in the history palette
Detailed – Surprisingly detailed record of everything you do, similar to what you see in the actions palette (includes detailed dialog settings, etc…).File Handling
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363866-O.jpg
Image Previews. This controls whether image previews are saved with your files. This is not the same option as Adobe Bridge has for saving image thumbnails in a cache. To tell you the truth, I still don’t quite understand what this option really does or know what we should really set it at and Katrin doesn’t explain much more than this.
Ignore EXIF sRGB tag. This option tells Photoshop to ignore an sRGB color profile tag embmeeded in an image. Normally you would not want to do this, but apparently this preference was added to deal with some cameras that were tagging images as sRGB even when the camera was set to aRGB and the image was actually aRGB. So, you would only need this preference if you purposely set your camera to aRGB and found that it was tagging the images as sRGB. I suspect this is not needed with most modern cameras and you will not need this option if you shoot in sRGB.
Ask before saving layered TIFF files. This option is here because some other programs or printers have historically had problems with TIFF files containing layers. Apparently this problem is not as common as it used to be and many systems that use TIFF files now support layers. You would only want to turn this on if you think you need a reminder before saving a TIFF file with layers.
Enable large document format (.psb). The PSD file format is limited to 30,000 pixels. If you want to save a file larger than that, you can save it as either the new PSB format (up to 90 billion pixels) or as a TIFF file (up to 4GB). The PSB files are not backward compatible with older version of Photoshop. If you don’t anticipate making files larger than 30,000 pixels, it doesn’t matter what you set this to. If you might make files that large without intending to and don’t want Photoshop to let you save files that won’t be compatible with older versions of Photoshop then don’t enable this preference. Otherwise, don’t worry about it.
Maximize PSD file compatibility. This preference controls whether Photoshop saves (in your PSD file) an extra composite layer that contains a merged copy of what your finished image looks like (e.g. what you would see on screen or print). The problem with this option is that this extra layer takes space and makes your PSD files noticably larger (as much as 33% larger). The main reason to use this option is for compatibility with 3rd party applications that read PSD files, but don’t know how to process all the layers in them. Those applications will often look for this merged composite layer to use that as what they render when showing you the PSD file. Katrin recommends that if you don’t know that you need this on, then turn it off to save disk space in your files. If you run into some non-Photoshop application that is having trouble displaying or operating on your PSD files, you can always come back and turn it on and resave the offending files.
Display and Cursors
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363859-O.jpg
Color channels in color. This option controls whether color channels are display in color or black and white. Katrin recommends that you leave color channels in grayscale because it’s harder to see the detail in color than grayscale.
Painting cursors. Katrin recommends setting your cursor preference to Brush Size because this lets you see the size of the brush you are painting with. She points out that you can always temporarily switch to a precision cursor by pressing the capslock key when painting.
Transparency and Gamut
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363894-O.jpg
Transparency Settings: Grid Size & Colors. This setting controls how transparent pixels are represented. Katrain recommends just leaving this at it’s default setting.
Gamut Warning. When you have any out of gamut warning enabled for your image (such as the option in the View menu), this preference controls how the out-of-gamut is displayed. The default is a battleship gray. Katrin suggests that gray works for some images, but some people may want to change it to a color that is less likely to occur in nature such as a lime green or magenta.
Units and Rulers
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363904-O.jpg
Units. This controls what units are used in rulers. Pick what you want. A tip that Katrin shares is that you can double click in the rulers and it will bring up the preference dialog to change the units temporarily.
Column Size. This controls column sizes if you are doing work for newspapers or magazines.
Plug-ins and Scratch Disks
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363891-O.jpg
Scratch Disks. This tells Photoshop which disks to use for extra space when Photoshop runs out of RAM memory. Katrin recommends picking your fastest drive for your scratch disk. I’ve heard other people recommend that, if you have multiple fast hard disks, you should put the Photoshop scratch disk on a different drive from your OS swap file and from the disk that you normally save your Photoshop files to.
Memory and Image Cache
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/photos/58363886-O.jpg
Cache Settings. The image cache helps improve your screen update speed by maintaining several different sizes of your image in RAM at different zoom levels. When you make a change to your image, Photoshop can make the change to the cached copy at your current zoom level first and update the screen fairly quickly. This setting controls how many different sizes Photoshop caches for this purpose. The default is 4. If you have a lot of RAM, you may want to increase it to 6.
Use Cache for Histogram in Levels. Katrin strongly recommends turning this preference off. It’s purpose is to speed the rendering of histograms when you are working on your image at views other than 100%. She reasons that if you need to look at the histogram, you need it to be accurate, not based on a cached smaller version of your image. For some reason, I don’t see this preference in my copy of CS2. I wonder if it’s no longer in Photoshop or has moved somewhere else.
Memory Usage. This controls how much of your total available RAM Photoshop is allowed to use. There appear to be a lot of different theories on how to best set this as I’ve read a number of them in various internet articles. Katrin recommends setting this to 90 percent of available RAM. If you are running other programs at the same time as Photoshop, you will probably need to set this significantly below 90 percent. I’ve personally found that Adobe Bridge takes a significant amount of memory (particularly if you are using ACR for RAW files) so you need to make sure there’s enough memory available for Bridge.
[[Due to length limits on a single posting, this is continued in the next posting in the thread]]