In This Issue

1. Welcome
2. This Month's Tutorial
3. Resources

This Month's Tutorial
Here is question/answer that is a huge help for me since I am slowly going through some of my parents old photos and scanning them. How do I fix a yellowish (or greenish or bluish) scan of a photo? This tutorial comes from a tip in Photoshop User magazine. First off, this problem is called "color cast" and can sometimes be fixed pretty easily.

1. Find an old oddly colored photo.

2. Click Image...Adjustments and then click either Curves or Levels. Then you want to click on "Set Gray Point" - hint - I highlighted it in yellow in the screenshot below. No just click on an area of the image that should be neutral gray. Not so easy, huh? Well follow along and I will show you how.

3.  Click "Create a New Layer" icon (hint - look near the bottom of your layers pallette (highlighted in yellow below). Make sure your new layer is above the photo (if not, drag it up - see second example).

4. Now fill it with 50% gray (Edit...Fill then change the first drop down to 50% gray).

5. Now go back to the layers palette and change the mode for this layer to difference. You are now finished - Just kidding

6. Now from the Create New Adjustment Layer menu (in your layers palette click the little circle that is half black/half white) choose Threshold and yank the little slider to the left until the image turns white. Now pull back to the right and the first areas to appear as black are the areas that should be neutral grey (the whole point of these last few steps). Click on the eyedropper tool, hold down shift and then click on one of these few black areas.  This adds a color sampler. Delete the adjustment layer and the grey layer and you should see this (notice the circle with the crosshair on the trees above and left of the hoopty-mobile).

7. You can now go back to the Curves or Levels menu to Set Gray Point.  Image...Adjustments...Levels (or Curves) then click the middle eyedropper (hover over them, one will be the gray one) then click on our color sampler. You might try clicking around in it a little until you get the best results. I first did this in Levels menu then I did it in Curves.  Here is the result - remember, we are dealing with a picture that has been sitting in a hat box for 30+ years, it is not going to look like a brand new picture - the colors have faded (there are some tweaks we could do to further improve this though - if someone requests it I may go over it in a future lesson).

Resources
Here is where I will tell you about resources for learning Photoshop.

NAPP
Membership for one year is only $99 and in addition to getting 12 issues of their magazine, you will often get a free dvd, booklet and cd filled with training videos, samples and tutorials. You also get various discounts on car rental, services at Kinko's, as well as a website filled with thousands of tutorials. If you think you might be interested, pop on over - you will love it.

Canon Photoworkshop
Canon has some online learning for their EOS camera.  Some of the training is generic enough for any camera.  You may want to give it a look.

Free Web Seminars
I came across a bunch of seminars from Adobe - check them out.

Stock Photos
Some people have asked me about using photos from the web and other sources in their work.  Please remember to always ask permission before using images from a website just like you would from a book or magazine.  If you cannot get permission from someone, you may have to buy some images - if so, here are some possibilities.

Closing
Here ends our newsletter - I hope you found it to be helpful and interesting. I am willing to go in whatever direction everyone wants just take a moment to send me your thoughts. Was this too basic? Too advanced? Just right? Drop me a line at stjacobphotoshop@klompy.net and let me know. If you have a question send it in and I will give you something.

Thank you very much.

PS - we have a couple of winners this month - please send an email with the subject "I'm a winner" to stjacobphotoshop@klompy.net to claim your prize.  This month's winners include: Rick Gray and Alfred (Lupe) Fischer.  You must claim your prize within one week.