Pre-CS Workaround for Reducing

If you are working with earlier versions of Photoshop you can simply zoom out so that your window and image are at either 50% or 25%, and then take a screenshot of the image window at this new reduced size.

You will be amazed to find that the image maintains its sharpness. Once you have done the screenshot open it in Photoshop, crop, and save. The trick to making this work is to use either a 50%, 25%, or 12.5% view size before taking the capture. If you view the image at 66.7%, 33.3%, or 16.7%, the image will not be as sharp due to the way Photoshop draws images at those sizes.

Reducing the Size

How many times have you looked at your photos and thought of how beautiful they are? It is a great feeling to look at your work and recognize how good your photos are.

However, when it comes time to print or send the photo you undoubtedly have been in the situation where you need it much, much smaller; after working on resizing you probably have found that the image has begun to take on a blurry look.

If you have ever been there you know how frustrating this problem is, fortunately in Photoshop
there's a very simple solution.

When you want to reduce the size of your image without compromising the clarity of your photograph click on the Image> Image Size menu. Next choose the Resample Image submenu and choose Bi-cubic Sharper from the drop-down menu.

If you want to make sure your photos don’t blur this is the best possible setting. You can play with your image by changing the numbers slowly and see what happens. If you are unsure of yourself please remember you can always save the original then save it again as a test image. To enlarge your images simply select Bi-cubic Smoother.

Take a look at this Video from You Tube:-

Crop Tool

You may notice that, after you rotated your image in order to straighten it, we now have some white canvas areas around the outside of the photo. We need to fix this problem by removing those areas; for this we use Photoshop's Crop Tool. You can find the Crop Tool from the Tools palette, or simply press the letter C on your keyboard to select it with the shortcut:

With the Crop Tool chosen click near the top left corner of your image and drag down towards the bottom right to create a border around the part of the image you want to keep. Fine-tune your selection by dragging any of corner handles or by dragging the top, bottom, left or right sides of the selection:

Use the Crop Tool to drag out a selection around the part of the image you want to keep. Once you've dragged out your cropping border, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to have Photoshop crop the image.

Have a look at this Video from You Tube on how to use the Crop Tool

Straighten Crooked Photos Using the Measure Tool

I have found the best way to straighten images in Photoshop is to use the Measure Tool, which fortunately takes all the guess work out of the process. As long as you have something in the photo that needs to be straight, Photoshop will do almost all of the work for us!

The Measure Tool is hidden behind the Eyedropper Tool in the Tools palette and you'll need to click and hold your mouse button down on the Eyedropper Tool for a second or two. A fly-out menu appears and shows you the other tools hiding behind it. Click on the Measure Tool to select it.

To straighten something all you need to do is click and drag with the Measure Tool along the edge of something in the photo that should be straight horizontally or vertically. You can look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen and see the angle of the line you've just drawn

The Options Bar should be showing the angle of the line you have drawn with the Measure Tool. Photoshop now uses this angle to find out how far to turn the image in order to straighten it. To find the “Rotate Canvas - Arbitrary" Command
Click on the Image menu at the top of the program, choose Rotate Canvas, and then select Arbitrary.

Once you click on "Arbitrary", Photoshop pops up the Rotate Canvas dialog box,
then all we need to do is click on the OK button in the Rotate Canvas dialog box to exit and have Photoshop rotate and straighten the image for us.

Take a look at this Video from You Tube about Straightening Photos

Vanishing Point

Adobe has also perfected the incredibly handy Vanishing Point command, which was first introduced in CS2, with a couple of great new features.

First of all, you can now Alt/Option+drag a resize handle on a flat surface to rotate that plane about any angle relative to its neighbor. Basically, you're no longer confined to creating planes that are perpendicular to one another. This gives you much more flexibility and control over the types of perspective shapes you can create.

Next, and this is perfect for making package mock-ups and so on, in CS3 you can stretch your selected image over multiple planes; the image hugs the contours of each plane, twisting and turning as it goes. You may remember that the CS2 Vanishing Point limited you to moving your selection over one plane at a time.

Have a look at this excellent Video from You Tube:-

Improvements to Current Features

The people at Adobe have been working hard to perk up existing Photoshop functionality, as if all those new CS3 features weren't enough.

Save for Web
The dependable Save for Web feature now has the interesting name of Save for Web & Devices. The Edit in ImageReady button in the bottom corner of the dialog has been replaced with the Device Central button for previewing your image on an emulated device. Other than that there haven’t been many changes to the CS2 Save for Web.

ImageReady
So why is there no ImageReady button? ImageReady is gone! It's moved on to software heaven. The more functional ImageReady features such as animation, slices and so on have been absorbed into Photoshop itself while other features, such as image maps, have been dropped.

Personally I always thought it was always a bit awkward when constantly flipping between Photoshop and ImageReady to create things like animated GIFs (which, let's face it, aren't as popular as they used to be anyway).

The Save for Web feature Part 2

Three basic image formats exists in the presets - GIF, JPEG and PNG. The rule of thumb is to use JPEG's for photos and GIF's for all else. For a full guide on choosing the right image format.

Optimizing GIFs
If you're creating a GIF you will want to start off with a preset such as GIF 32 Dithered, which works well for most GIFs. From there you can fine-tune the optimization to suit your needs.


Colors
This is where you choose the size of your GIF palette. A palette of 32 colors is often sufficient for web images, but if your image has loads of detail and looks too fuzzy/blurry/banded with 32, up it to 64, 128 or 256. If your image has very few colors in to start with, or doesn't look too bad with fewer colors, select 16, 8, 4 or even 2! This will make the GIF file size smaller.

Optimizing JPEGs
If you're creating a JPEG you will want to start off with a preset such as JPEG Medium, which typically works well for most JPEGs. From there you can fine-tune the optimization to suit your needs. Some of the important optimization options are as follows:

Quality
Two ways to alter the compression quality include the Low/Medium/High/Maximum list (for quick access) and the Quality slider (for fine control). The lower the quality setting, the more blurry and bitty the JPEG will appear, but the resulting file size will be smaller.

Progressive
A progressive JPEG is similar to an interlaced GIF. The image loads gradually on the Web page - a low res image first and then the full, high-resolution image. Again, this is great for keeping your viewers on slow modems from getting bored, but it does mean a slightly larger file size. Please note that older browsers don't support progressive JPEGs.

Matte
If your Photoshop image has transparent areas, you can fill them with a specified matte color with this drop-down box.

Optimizing PNGs
Your options for optimizing a PNG-24 are much the same as those for optimizing a JPEG. Similarly, the options for optimizing a PNG-8 are very similar to those for optimizing a GIF. See the GIF and JPEG sections above for details.

And, if you really can't be bothered...
...you can always allow Photoshop to optimize the image for you! Select the little arrow just to the right of the Settings... box and select Optimize to File Size...:


In the dialog that pops up, choose Auto Select GIF/JPEG then enter your desired file size. Click on OK and Photoshop will do the rest for you! If you're not pleased with the results you can tweak the settings as described in the sections above, or just choose a slightly larger file size and try again.

Saving the image
Once you're happy with your optimized image, click OK to save it to disk. The file saved will be a copy of your original image, unless you specifically overwrite the original with the optimized file.

The Save for Web feature Part 1

If you have version 5 or greater you have the ability to use Photoshop’s "Save for Web" command. This handy feature gives you to ability to save a copy of your image that is optimized for use on the Web. By doing this your image file will be as small as possible, and that the image will use only Web-safe colors (if desired). The “Save for Web” feature can produce GIF, JPEG, or PNG format images.


Using Save for Web
When your image is ready to be put onto your web page, select “Save for Web”... from the File menu. The "Save for Web" dialog appears:

This dialog box allows you to tell Photoshop how you'd like to optimize your graphic for the internet. You have the ability to select the file format to produce (GIF, JPEG or PNG), what size palette you'd like to use, how to cut down the colors to fit the chosen palette size, how much to dither the optimized image (if at all) and how much image quality to sacrifice in order to produce a smaller file size.

Image views
You will see four tabs above the image view pane on the left side of the screen. These options allow you to view the original image, the optimized version (this is the default), the original and optimized versions side-by-side ("2-Up") and the original, optimized and two variations on the optimization all together ("4-Up").

You can use the Zoom tool to zoom in and out of the image; the Hand tool to move the view around; and the Eyedropper tool to select a color from the image which can be used by various color options on the right of the dialog.

Presets
There are many options in the Save for Web dialog, and the choices here can be quite bewildering! Fortunately, there are lists of presets you can choose from to make it easier. Select the Settings: drop-down list, which is located just below the Cancel button, to bring up the list of presets