Photoshop Bluffs

Photoshop is an excellent image manipulation program brought out by Adobe. Many professional digital photographers swear by it. So you want to show your friends that you know Photoshop and want to bluff your way through. Then here are some tips.

Unsharp Mask
In order to bring out the details, most scans need to be sharpened. For this, most pros use Unsharp Masking. There are three parameters in the Unsharp Mask filter: Amount, Radius and Threshold. Threshold deals with levels of tonal seperation. Radius is the amount of sharpening you want. The Amount controls how effective your choice of Radius will be.
Is it too difficult to remember? I too find it the same.

Blending modes
These need two or more layers for any effect to work. You need at least two layers to blend together. A layer with a blending mode specified will blend with all other colors from layers underneath it. Photoshoppers call those original layer colors the base colors. The colors on top layer are called the blend color. The result is called the result color.
That was an easy one.

Texture Mapping
This is a favorite of wannabe Photoshoppers. They often say something that sounds like the following: "I've been having problems with using texture maps in my renderings. I'm trying to render a brick building using a texture map, but when it renders, I get these weird patterns all over my image. I've tried to increase the actual scale of the text-map, that didn't work. I tried to increase the size of the tiling, that didn't work. It happens for every image map I use for brick. It's getting frustrating..."

Just throw something like that at someone while you are looking frustrated, and they'll think you're a Photoshop pro!