3. Image Editing Basics

THE IMAGE WINDOW OPENS BEFORE YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME, and you take a deep breath as you look it over and realize all the little things that need to be fixed before the image can be unleashed upon the public. What to do first? How to turn this into a masterpiece? Many images need only tone and color corrections plus a little sharpening before they’re ready to go out the door. Other images need a few physical adjustments such as cropping and straightening, or may suffer from lens distortion that you’d like to remove. For these images, it’s good to take care of physical corrections before you start adding layers and elements that depend on where things are in the image.

Before we get into the tone and color corrections in the following chapter, we want to spend a little time covering the ins and outs of image editing basics: resolution, transformations, and selecting areas and objects. Once you get a handle on these methods, it becomes much easier to apply tone and color corrections exactly where you want them.