Image Manipulation refers to a process of bringing changes to a digitized image for transforming it to a desired image. The changes are made possible by resorting to image processing. Image manipulation is utilized to create magazine covers and albums from photographs.
Photo manipulation has been used to deceive or persuade viewers or improve storytelling and self-expression. Often even subtle and discreet changes can have a profound impact on how we interpret or judge a photograph, making it all the more important to know when or if manipulation has occurred.
To “crop” an image is to remove or adjust the outside edges of an image (typically a photo) to improve framing or composition, draw a viewer's eye to the image subject, or change the size or aspect ratio. In other words, image cropping is the act of improving a photo or image by removing the unnecessary parts.
In photography and image processing, color balance is the global adjustment of the intensities of the colors. An important goal of this adjustment is to render specific colors – particularly neutral colors – correctly. Hence, the general method is sometimes called gray balance, neutral balance, or white balance.
Brightness refers to the overall lightness or darkness of the image. Increasing the brightness every pixel in the frame gets lighter. Contrast is the difference in brightness between objects in the image. Increasing the contrast makes light areas lighter and dark area in the frame becomes much darker.
The other major component of image resizing is compression. Simply put, image compression is a way to optimize images to reduce their file size, ideally without reducing (or noticeably reducing, anyway) image quality.
The Color blend mode is actually a combination of the first two modes in the Composite group, Hue and Saturation. When you change a layer's blend mode to Color, only the color (that is, all of the hues and their saturation values) from the layer is blended in with the layer or layers below it.
LAYER MASKS LET YOU COMBINE MULTIPLE IMAGES WITHOUT ERASING PARTS OF THE IMAGE. If you think back to Chapter 1, we combined several images together in “Using Multiple Layers” by bringing them all into the same document and erasing parts of each layer away.