Photoshop Exercise Files

Buy the Photoshop CS3 chapter in full colour PDF: now available from the MacAvon Media Downloads Store.

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

Adjustments and Retouching

Download the photograph of a sailing boat [PSD:455.6kB]

Using any selection tool of your choice, select just the sails (make sure you include the bits in shadow), and nothing else in the image. Save the selection as an alpha channel, and make sure that the selection is still loaded. Change the colour of the sails to a strong dark colour, such as red or purple. Now, using whatever means you find appropriate, change the colour cast of the whole image to give a distinctive but still naturalistic result, without altering the new colour of the sails. (Red sails in the sunset?) You may find it helpful to read the section on colour adjustments, starting on page 133.

Download the photograph of the red door [PSD:5.2MB]

Start by making as complete a selection as you can of the red colour in the door, without selecting any of the rest of the image. (You may need to use a combination of tools to do this.) Experiment with changing the door's colour by using the Hue/Saturation dialogue, as described and illustrated on pages 137–140.

Download the photograph of roses [PSD:4.2MB]

Read the section on blurring and sharpening, on pages 151–156. If you haven't got a suitable photograph of your own, download this one for the "Try This" exercise on page 156. See whether you can achieve a better result than the one shown on the right-hand side of Figure 4.73.

Download the photograph of a foghorn [PSD:4.6MB]

Experiment with using both the Spot Healing brush and the Clone Stamp tool to remove the unsightly rusty streaks on the wall. Make sure that you retain the wall's texture and lighting. See which tool does the better job. Refer to the section on retouching by hand, pages 142–146, and to Figure 4.64.