Reviewing New Features in Photoshop

 

Some years we just don't get a lot of snow, and when we do it is not necessarily when I'm available to photograph it. In December I visited our historic downtown area in St. Charles and took a photo of their lovely, decorated tree and sleigh. I thought to myself that it would sure look great with a little snow around it.

Winter Scene in Photo Shop

When I got home and edited my photos from my trip on Main Street, I decided to try some of the new Neural Filters in Photoshop.  I opened my photo in PS and then went to the filter tab.  I clicked on Neural Filters and when that box opened up, I looked down the left column and clicked on the landscape feature.  I now had several options at that top showing various landscape scenes.  I clicked on one showing a winter scene with snow and it was quickly applied to my photo with the result you see in the photo above.  Here is what the original photo looked like.

I really think this feature could work well in creating a winter holiday card.  Here is another before and after in using this feature.  This one is a photo of the visitor center all decked out for the holidays.

Here is the before photo.

St. Charles Visitor Center

The photo below is after I applied the neural filter in Photoshop using the landscape feature and then choosing the winter scene.  I used it for a photo challenge called "cold as ice" and I certainly think it gives you that feeling.

Photo with Winter filter Applied

More Neural Filter Choices in Photoshop

There are quite a few different filter choices in the 2021 updates.  Along with the winter scene there are also landscape choices where you chose what season you would like to make your photo.  Here is a photo I took at a farm at the beginning of autumn before the colors were really popping.  I used the autumn filter to give it a real autumn color scheme.

Autumn at the Farm

Another series of filters in the neural filter line is the artist series.  In this group of filters, the styles are changed to fit various artists styles.  You might find a Monet style or a Van Gogh style among many other styles.  The artists are not listed, you just have to recognize their styles.  That is one thing I hope they will change in the future.  I would love to know what artists style each filter is emulating. Here is a barn door photo that I took at a farm and then edited it using the first artists filter available in the artist section.

New Artist Style #1

Purchase Creative Cloud Subscription

I love my Creative Cloud subscription.  It gives me access to Photoshop and Lightroom and gives me all updates as they become available.  It is cost effective at only $9.99 a month.

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Reviewing New 2021 Updates in Lightroom

Tractor Edited with Vintage Preset

In October of 2021 Adobe Creative Cloud introduced a series of updates to their photo editing programs.  My favorite program in the Creative Cloud is Lightroom Classic and I am very excited about all of the updates that were included in the latest version.

Presets

One of the updates in Lightroom Classic is a number of new presets that are available to the user.  Presets are a series of editing features that are put together to give a certain look or feel to a photograph.  With these presets the photographer can give a slight change to the photograph in just one click.  Some of the presets included in the new update were ones for portraits, landscapes, vintage looks, retro looks, black and white and many more.  In the photo at the top of this page I took a photo of an old tractor and used one of the vintage presets on it. In deciding which preset to use I merely ran my mouse over each choice and a preview of the photo with that preset was displayed.  I then chose the one that I felt best fit the mood I was looking to create.

Masking

The biggest and I believe the best new feature is the Masking feature.  In this feature all of the local adjustment tabs were merged into a single masking icon.   The existing adjustment tools were all moved to this icon and in addition two new options were added.  These are the options I am really excited about and feel I will use often.  They are Select Sky and Select Subject.  These options use artificial intelligence to select the sky, people, animals and other object in the photo.  You then have the ability to easily adjust just the selected objects.  Let me show you with a few examples.

Select Subject

Often, I have a great photo of a subject, but the background is too cluttered.  In this photo my husband is seated in front of a busy looking bookshelf.  I was able to use the Select Subject and with just a couple of clicks I selected his photo and then was able to pull the exposure all the way down on the background to turn in black.

I will give you another example.  In this photo you see a bird but it is really not standing out in the photo.  Here is the original.

Here is the same photo with the bird really standing out.

Here are the editing steps I took to create this look.  First of all I cropped the photo to pull the bird in close.  Next I used the mask feature and did a Select Subject to isolate the bird.  After that I inverted the mask to have the background selected and I played with the various sliders to get the background I wanted.  In this case I used the exposure, temp, tint, clarity and dehaze sliders.  All of this took just a couple of minutes and I believe I went from a mediocre photo to one I really like.

Select Sky

I have often gotten a great photo of a subject but was very disappointed with the sky.  I knew I could fix the sky, but this was often very time consuming.  With the new Select Sky feature I can now change the sky in seconds.  Here is an example of one photo I took on a day when it was very cloudy but the direction the photo was taken from made the sky appear very plain.  First the original photo.

I took this photo and went into the Masking feature and did a Select Sky.  I then used the dehaze and texture sliders to give more depth to the sky.  Here is the resulting photo, which I like much better.

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