design3

Imagery
179
Finally, the image is just about ready for posting!
Notice how the figure in Figure 5.27 stands
out from the background, and the shading is
more even than before. These subtle details
make a big difference to the overall effect of the
image. To adjust a little more of that detail, I
applied an outline stroke around the background
block by accessing Layer > Layer Style >
Stroke… and giving the block an inside black
stroke.
Besides making brightness, contrast, and saturation
adjustments, another way to give an image
a Photoshop face-lift is by using filters.
In photography, a filter is a physical attachment
Figure 5.27. Final image after Photoshop tweaking
for your camera lens that alters the way a photo
looks. These filters are used to capture richer colors, compensate for bad lighting, or make an image
feel warmer or cooler. Photoshop filters follow this basic idea, although they do much more than
a camera lens attachment. They can be used to create artistic effects, distort images, add texture,
and much more. Photoshop comes stocked with a great variety of filters. Some of these can be very
useful, and some … well, I find them less useful, but suffice to say that there’s something for
everyone. For an idea of what’s possible with filters, I opened a picture of some orchids and ran it
through a few of the standard filters in Photoshop. Figure 5.28 shows the results of my experiment.