Julieanne Kost's Blog

As many of you  know, this morning Adobe announced Photoshop CC. Although it’s not yet shipping, here is a video of my favorite features that will be available soon!

In this episode (Adobe Photoshop: Favorite Features for Photographers), Julieanne Kost will demonstrate her top 5 favorite features in Photoshop CC including the new Upright perspective correction, Radial Filter, and Spot Removal  features in Adobe Camera Raw 8, Image Upsampling and Smart Sharpening, Live Shapes for Rounded Rectangles, and Camera Shake Reduction.

If you own Photoshop CS6 and are moving to Photoshop CC, you might also want to watch this video (Julieanne’s Top 5 Features for Photographers in Photoshop 13.1 ), to learn about the new features that were added to Photoshop 13.1 (released back in December exclusively for Creative Cloud Members).

In addition, here is a great article with insights about Breaking from Tradition written by Maria Yap, Sr. Director of Product Management at Adobe.

And if you have questions, Jeff Tranberry provides answers in this FAQ – for Photoshop and Lightroom Customers.

And the Creative Cloud FAQ.

And information about Lightroom and Creative Cloud.

I mention a number of shortcuts that are new to the Spot Removal Tool (B) in this video (Adobe Photoshop: Favorite Features for Photographers), but thought that it might be handy to also include them in list form:

• Tap the “V” key to toggle the visibility of the spot overlays.

• Shift -drag constrains the brush spot to a horizontal or vertical stroke.

• Shift -click connects the selected spot with the new spot via a straight brush stroke.

• Command -drag (Mac) | Control -drag (Win)  will create a circle spot and allow you to drag to define the source.

• Tap the Forward Slash key (/) to select new source for existing circle or brush spot.

• Press Delete to delete a selected spot.

• Option -click (Mac) | Alt -click (Win) on a spot to delete it (the cursor will change to a pair of scissors).

• Option -drag (Mac) | Alt  -drag (Win) in the image area over multiple spots to batch-delete (the icon changes to a marquee while dragging.

• Tap the “Y” key to toggle on/off Visualize spots. Note – this is also available as a checkbox and slider in Toolbar.

In the LR 5 beta, we can now click-drag to create a Brush Spot.  As in previous versions a single click will create a circle spot and auto-find a source.

• Tap “Q” to access the Spot Removal tool.  Shift + Q toggles between Clone and Heal modes.

• Command -drag (Mac) | Control -drag (Win) creates a circle spot and allows you to drag to define the source.

• Command + Option -drag (Mac) | Control + Alt -drag  (Win) creates a circle spot that scales from the center.

• Command + Shift -drag(Mac) | Control  + Shift -drag (Win) creates a circle spot that scales from anchor.

• Holding down Shift (before starting to paint with the Spot Removal tool) constrains the brush stroke to horizontal or vertical.

• If you click to set a circle spot and then Shift + click in a different area Lightroom will connect the first spot with the new spot via a straight brush stroke (a great way to remove telephone lines).

• To enlarge a brush spot after drawing, use the Size slider in the Spot Removal  options panel.

• Backslash (/) – select new source for existing circle or brush spot.

• Tap “H” to hide the interface.

• Option -click  (Mac) | Alt  + (Win) -click  deletes a spot (the icon displays as a pair of scissors).

• Option -click  (Mac) | Alt  + (Win) -drag over multiple spots will batch-delete spots.

• Tap “A” to toggle the Visualize Spots feature (manual controls are found in the Toolbar)

Here are links to my top 3 features in the Lightroom 5 Beta!

Upright (Automatic perspective correction) - Discover how to automatically fix common problems such as tilted horizons as well as converging verticals in buildings using Lightroom’s new Upright controls for perspective correction.

The Advanced Healing Brush - Discover the new enhancements to Lightroom’s advanced Healing Brush including the ability to heal and clone non-circular brush spots as well as remove easy to miss sensor dust using the new Visualization slider.

The Radial Filter - Learn how easy it is to apply any and all of Lightroom’s existing local adjustments including dodging and burning, adding vignettes, selectively sharpening and more to one or more completely customizable, nondestructive, circular Radial filters – anywhere in  your image.

For additional information, check out the Lightroom Journal and the photoshop.com blog.

When you click in an image with the Spot Removal tool, Lightroom sets down the source spot (where you clicked) and automatically selects an area to sample from. If you click and drag with the Spot Removal tool, Lighroom sets down the source spot (where you clicked), but by keeping the mouse down and dragging, you are able to control the area (dragging to reposition) from which Lightroom selects its source information.

Don’t forget that you can use the Spot Removal tool in Lightroom and Camera Raw in either the Clone mode (where you will get an exact copy of the retouched area) or the Heal mode (where Lightroom automatically adjusts the tonality of the sampled information to evenly blend the retouched area). And both of these modes support variable opacity so that next time you’re using the Spot Removal tool to retouch an image (as opposed to removing dust from the sensor), you might want to try decreasing the opacity of the retouched spot so that you’re simply reducing a distracting element, not removing it.

When using the Spot Removal tool (Q), tap the “H” key to hide and show pins.

Use the Page up and Page down keys navigate (up and down) through an image (screen by screen) reducing the possibility of missing spots. Use the Shift key to move left/right. To move to the upper left of the document, tap the Home key. Tap the End key to go to the lower right.

Note: on a laptop, press the function key (fn) plus the up/down arrows to move up or down through the image. Press the function key (fn) plus the left or right arrow to go Home or End.

Once the dust spots are removed from one image, select similar images (similar because they all have the same dust) and use the Sync button to apply the Spot Removal settings to others. Of course you should check each image to make sure that the clone/heal is seamless – as the photographic content will (most likely) vary from one image to another!

The Spot Removal tool has two options: Clone and Heal. The Clone option will always have a soft edge so that it can blend the edges of the area being duplicated. The Heal option will always have a hard edge and uses tone and color to blend the area being repaired. The Option (Mac) / Alt (Win) + “[“ or “]” increases/decreases brush size, “H” Hide/Show Pins, and the Page Up/Down keys move through an image screen by screen (when zoomed in) to help avoid missing any areas that need to have spots removed. The Arrow keys nudge the source point (add the Shift key to nudge in greater increments).

In this episode, I will demonstrate how to streamline Lightroom 3’s Develop module by taking advantage of my top 10 favorite shortcuts & time-saving features in order to eliminate many of the repetitive image adjustment tasks when editing large volumes of images. Check it out here…