Basic Image Editing Techniques in Photoshop

Introduction

This tutorial is designed to address basic image editing techniques useful when working with digital scans of slides like those created at the Office of Instructional Development’s Teaching and Learning Center via the Media Conversion Grant Program. However these very basic techniques can be applied in a wide variety of image editing situations.

The digital image files you received via the Media Conversion Grant Program from the Teaching and Learning Center were created with the utmost care to ensure that your digital images are as true to the original slides as possible. This process involves calibrating hardware (scanner and monitor), making use of color management software, and manually monitoring the results.

Nonetheless, there may be many reasons for which you would like to perform additional editing and adjustments on the digital images, such as:

• The original slides have faulty exposure, have aged, or are photographs of imperfect documents.
• Images of predominantly one color, Kodachrome stock, and other highly-saturated images are difficult for the slide scanner to interpret and can return digital images that are slightly dark or with “skewed” color.
• You want to resize or crop you digital image to fit into a PowerPoint presentation or web page.

To address these issues, in this tutorial we will cover:

• Adjusting tonality, the black, grey and white Levels in an image.
• Adjusting the range of colors within an image, its Color Balance
• Cropping an image, creating a new file containing only a portion of the original
• Resizing an image, creating a new file with different proportions than the original
• Saving or Undoing changes you have made

Working With Your Media Conversion Grant Image Files

Digital image files created via the Media Conversion Grant Program are returned to faculty members on a non-rewritable CD ROM disc. To edit these images and save the results, the files should first be copied to a hard drive or some other rewritable media.

As a general rule: work with the TIF file version of the image if you intend the final image to be printed; work with the JPG version if the image is intended for PowerPoint, website or other computer-based display.

We strongly suggest that you calibrate your computer monitor before you make adjustments to color and contrast values. This will insure that your images will look reasonably similar via other calibrated monitors and/or printers. Please see our tutorial on color management and monitor calibration for instruction.

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Or Jump To:

• Basic Image Editing Techniques in Photoshop
  
• About Photoshop
• Adjusting Levels (Light / Dark)
• Adjusting Color Balance
• Adjusting Saturation
• Comparing Our Results
• Cropping an Image
• Image Size
• Resizing/Resampling
• Undoing, Layering and Saving Changes
  
• For Further Information