Photoshop Exercise Files

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The material offered for download in this section of the site is copyright. You may not publish any of this material in any form, reproduce it on public Web sites, or pass it off as your own. It is supplied for use in private and institutional study only.

The files supplied here are mainly Photoshop (PSD) files, and some are quite large. The photographs are not necessarily at their original resolution – in many cases we have downsampled to produce more manageable file sizes, where this does not interfere with the purpose of the exercise.

These exercises are supplementary to the "Try This" exercises in Digital Media Tools, but relate directly to sections in the Photoshop chapter. Please choose a topic from the list below to see the range of exercises for that section:

• Resolution and resampling
• Making and using selections
• Adjustments and retouching
• Effects and filters
• Erasing and fills
• Animation

Making and Using Selections

You will often find it helpful to zoom in to the images when making precise selections. Make a habit of saving the selections as well as keeping an unchanged copy of the original file.

Download the photograph of a red flower [PSD:2.5MB]

Refer to pages 109–110 and experiment with using Select>Color Range… to see how much of the red flower you can select in this way without including the background. Invert the selection and delete everything other than the red flower, then fill the inverted selection with a background colour and observe areas of partial transparency in the flower.

Download the photograph of a fish under water [PSD:10.7MB]

Use the pen tool to select the fish in the way described on page 111. Invert the selection and delete the background; compare your result with Figure 4.32.

Download the photograph of the Bishop's Palace in Wells [PSD:2.0MB]

Read the section on masks (pages 118–123). Experiment with making a feathered selection using the Refine Edge adjustments, and save the mask as an alpha channel or a layer mask.

Download the photograph of a buddleia [PSD:1.1MB]

Use the magic wand to select all of the plant in the foreground and none of the sky behind. Save the selection.

Download the photograph of a butterfly [PSD:2.3MB]

Try to select only the butterfly using the magnetic lasso. Save the selection as an alpha channel and compare that channel with the black and white image shown here.