If you don't have Photoshop, or are contemplating an upgrade, the best path to take is a fully functional trial version. If you're not sure if Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or even Photoshop Lightroom is going to serve your purpose, or you want to compare and balance out which variation best suits your specific needs, or even if you just want to play around and figure out if image editing is for you - my top tip would be to download a trial version. In this article I'll show you how it's done, completely legally and with Adobe's blessings.
I've been using Photoshop for many years. I've written articles and recorded over 30 minutes of video on the subject of sharpening using the wealth of excellent sharpening techniques Adobe provide, so I figured I'm qualified to bring up one of the most negatively discussed and ubiquitously bemoaned tools in the existence of image editing, that's right - not just Photoshop but the whole image editing world - the Sharpen Tool. Here I plan to explain what its purpose is, what it really does do, and when and why it might come in useful.
There are stacks of tutorials on the web that guide you through the process of making signatures and avatars. Most of them focus on the design side of things - how to pull off that effect? How to add this face? How to blend the colours? Considerably fewer detail what I consider to be the technical side of the creation - how to work out the right dimensions? Achieve the right file size? Keep it active and visible on a community? And the mysteries of saving to the right format? In this tutorial I'm going to provide answers to all those technical questions, and others along the way.
Interlacing is a technique used by video recorders and television sets to ensure a smooth and fluid display on screen. It splits each frame into two sets of fields, an upper field and a lower field. Each field carries half the picture in horizontal rows, which when added together creates one interlaced frame. When viewing these frames in motion they are played too quickly for the eye to pick up any trace of interlacing, however, if you pause the video the effect becomes more prominent, growing even more if you happen to export a frame and view it on a computer screen.
In this tutorial I’ll not just show you how to create the effect of TV scan lines on your artwork or photographs, I’ll show you how to achieve it in a non-destructive way using layers, patterns and blending modes. Our mission for this project is to take a photograph captured on any camera (below left) and tattoo the interlacing found on many older-style television sets across the world (below right). High definition this isn’t!
The Basic Animation video tutorial I released a few years ago has been one of the most popular videos on the site, consistently being in the top 5. In that video I demonstrate how to build up basic animated scenes in the full version of Photoshop using options and techniques such as the animation panel and tweening. In this tutorial things will be a trifle different – we’ll work in Photoshop Elements, we’ll make a block of text flash using a simpler technique, and we’ll use layers instead of a frame-based animation panel.
The whole idea behind this article is to cover the bits that are not demanding or detailed enough for their own tutorial but still something every Photoshop user should know about. Whether they save you time, make it easier to get the job done, or offer alternative ways of working – I’m quite confident that every Photoshop user should know they exist, and that each and every workflow will be stronger and more proficient in their use. How many do you know?
First off, when you read you’re going to be learning how to prepare an exactly sized web graphic you should know that I’m referring to size as in size of the file, not size as in dimensions. There are many instances where this may be necessary - ranging from uploading photographs to a social networking site to uploading an avatar or signature for an online forum that stipulates a maximum file size.
There’s plenty of ways to turn a full colour photograph into a crisp line drawing, to prove my point, I already have a video tutorial entitled ‘Photo Sketch’ available on the site which shows you one way to accomplish the task. In this tutorial, I’ll show you a quicker and easier way to produce a similar effect, here goes-
The GIF format was introduced in 1987 and contains one eight-bit channel of data giving it the ability to reproduce up to 256 colours at any one time from a palette of 16.8 million. This means that although a GIF is no good for saving continuous tone imagery such as photographs, it is extremely well suited to images that contain large blocks of colour such as logos and line art. The advantage of saving so few colours is found in the sharpness of detail and the ability to keep file sizes low.
Spell checking is more commonly associated with word processing and desk top publishing programmes such as Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign, but did you know it's possible inside Photoshop as well. Here's how it's done-
A colour cast can be defined as an overbearing tint towards one particular colour, it’s usually an unwanted effect caused by certain lighting conditions such as incandescent or fluorescent lighting.
If you're worried about you or somebody else messing around with some of your most complex or valuable actions then it's worth taking a look at the button mode. If you know you're actions, then you'll know that it's the little things that can cause the major headaches. If a step gets accidently deleted, or a minor setting gets changed, then it's easy to spend hours trying to find a fix. The button mode is capable of keeping danger at the door by switching out the live editable actions complete with all your steps for a simple button.
By default Photoshop allows you to switch between tools of a specific group by holding down the SHIFT key and pressing the letter that represents the tool. So for example, the Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools can be activated by pressing the letter ‘O’ on the keyboard, and then to move between the tools, use the SHIFT +O combination. So if the letter ‘O’ activates the Dodge Tool then pressing SHIFT + O will activate the Burn Tool, and pressing it again will activate the Sponge Tool, you get the idea.
The Brush Tool comes with plenty of options. In fact, it has so many options it gets its own dropdown dialogue box and panel where you'll find all the controls split into sub panels. One of the most useful options available to any Photoshop user (not including the resizing controls) is brush hardness. Here I've prepared a few illustrations and a little bit of text to show you how it works.
