This tutorial was written using Adobe Photoshop CS2 in order to reach a wider audience; however, the same techniques may be applied in Photoshop CS3.
There are many factors that can affect the quality of a photo on your website. The clouds, the sun, even the light-bouncing qualities of the objects in focus. Often times, it may be better to take a dark photo that can be corrected by computer, rather than risking over-exposure to achieve a vibrant image. Here is a “before and after” example of what you’ll be learning in this tutorial.
 |
 |
Step 1 – Adjusting Levels
Changing the levels of a layer is really just a quick way to adjust the brightness/contrast of an image. First, let’s apply a new adjustment layer. To do this, click the ‘create new adjustment layer‘ icon from the layers window, then select ‘Levels…‘
You’ll see what looks like a black bar-graph. The graph gives an overview of the light and dark levels of the image.
The left end shows the blackest blacks while the right shows the whitest whites. As you can see in the image, there is a decent sized gap on both sides of our graph. This means that the black in our image is really more of a gray, and our white isn’t very bright.
There are three markers below the graph; one for black, white, and mid-tones. By moving the black marker to the beginning of the graph’s “wave,” we make our shadows appear more black. The same can be done with the white arrow on the right to brighten the highlights of our image. It’s usually best to adjust the mid-tone marker last. I suggest keeping it in its original position (1.0) in most cases as it tends to make the photo look faded. Use your judgment.
Step 2 – Masking Mistakes
When we changed our highlights we made the sky appear to be over-exposed. This is easily correctable by applying a layer mask to the levels layer we just created.
Ensure that the “levels” layer is selected in the Layers window, then click the ‘add layer mask‘ icon, located directly next to the ‘create adjustment layer‘ icon.
Using a black paintbrush, paint over the sky area. You’ll notice that the original color reappears. If you make a mistake, simply change the brush color to white to reapply the mask where necessary. You can also use gray if you want to partially apply the filter in certain areas.
 |
 |
loading...
New to Flash Player 10 is the native 3D support. Previously, Flash only allowed us to move images around on a 2D workspace by changing the ‘x’ and ‘y’ position of an on-screen object. The ‘z’ position has been introduced in Flash Player 10 as a way to move images in a 3D workspace by adjusting the depth.
In addition to depth control, there are also new rotation properties. In Flash Player 9 and earlier, the ‘rotation’ property would rotate an object using the z-axis as its guide. This is useful if you want to turn the hands on a clock, but in a 3D world we want to be able to do much more than that. 
