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Thursday, July 3, 2008

Photoshop Software...Quick and Easy techniques for Photoshop

By David Peters

1. First, create a new image 2x2px and using the Pencil Tool (set to 1px), draw image as you can see it below. Try to Zoom In ( View -> Zoom In ) to do it easier. Define your pattern ( Edit -> Define Pattern ) and close the image 2. Open two images. One you want to hide and the other you want to hide first in. In my example, I took to hide recycle logo in Leonardo da Vinci portrait. 3. Create a new image the same size as your other two images and paste both your images onto it. The two images should be on two separate layers. Move the cover image layer above the hidden image layer. Create a new layer and move it above the hidden image layer but below the cover image. Fill ( Edit -> Fill ) this layer with the pattern you made in Step 1. Change the Blending Mode of this layer to "Exclusion". 4. Change the Blending Mode of this layer to "Exclusion". 5. Click on the image you want to hide on the Layer palette, and invert the colors, by going "Image -> Adjustments -> Invert (or press Ctrl-I)" 6. Change to opacity of the cover image to change how well you can see the hidden image (Recycle logo), I used 70% opacity.First, create a new image, 200x200 pixels and fill the background with white. Create a new layer [Shft+Ctrl+N]. Then; use the Rectangular/Elliptical Marquee Tools [M] to create any shape you want. Now we need to select our shape. Do it by holding Ctrl and clicking on this layer with the left button of your mouse. The next step is to add layer mask to our shape. Click on button, this will add layer mask. Then, deselect the layer [Ctrl+D]. On the top toolbar, go to Filter| Blur | Gaussian Blur... The window with options will open; select the value of the Radius that will make your shape smooth. I used 4.0. To make our job easier, we need to make our layer mask visible. Do it by holding Alt and clicking on the layer mask with the left button of your mouse. Now, we need to adjust levels of our image. To do it go to Image | Adjust | Levels... The window with options will open and you will see 3 triangles. Use your mouse to drag all of them to the center and you will notice that your shape will start to look smooth. Play around with different triangle positions to get the result you want.

In this example we will take picture of the Planet Earth (round), and reshape it into a Square! 1. First, open starting image. In this case, I'll reshape picture of our Planet EarthOne of the things i will do is to play with a shadows a little, so to give our object sense of dimensionality. 2. Second, we will start by simple reshaping, as it is usually easiest thing to do. Go to "Filter -> Liquefy" and start morphing. Don't be frustrated if it is not perfect, as it is not the point of this step, but try to make it similar to the picture below. 3. Now that we have made our basic shape, we need to take care of the second part. If you have any shiny parts on your picture, you should flatten them out by using "healing brush".As we do not have that type of problem, we can move to next step. 4. Here, it will be helpful if you draw your square outlines on new layer on top of original picture, as to give you some guide in future steps.Also, don't worry if the picture doesn't fit perfectly into the square. 5. Now this step is going to further emphasize the role of light in completing the cubed effect. Using the guide layer above, get the polygonal lasso and select a single face of the cube as shown.Next get the eye dropper and take a midtone color from that area. Next get the paint bucket tool and fill in the selected area on a new layer above the Planet earth. Do the same for each face on the cube. As you usually don't need to blur top face, you can go to "Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur". When you are done blurring change the layer mode to "Overlay" and this will allow the detail of the image to show through while maintaining your adjustment to the light. Final step is to load the image back into the Liquify Filter and adjust the cube once more so that all of the faces fit the dimension of a cube. After that, you can see the final result! Excellent!

Digital art is a fun thing to experiment with, you have all probably sometime seen picture that is entirely made of text. Here's how to do it... 1. Go to "Image -> Adjustments -> Threshold", and move the slider left or right, until you get satisfying picture... 2. Open the notepad, and type the words you want to it like this: 3. Next, copy that text, and paste it in new text layer you have created. After that, set up style and size of font, and rotate text until you are satisfied. 4. Next, right click on text layer, and click "Resterise Layer". Select the template layer and with the magic wand at a tolerance of 32 select the white area. Go to select>similar to select all of the light areas and then select the text layer from the layers palette. Next select text layer, and hit delete to clear the excess text and drag the template layer into the bin icon. Back the image up in white by making a new layer (Go to "Layer -> New Fill Layer -> Solid Color") with a white fill and dragging it underneath the text layer.

While you are running though photos you may find one that you absolutely hate because of the acne, well there is a way to cure that by touching up your photo. First open your photo which you want to cure the acne on. Next, click on your "Healing Brush Tool" and set your brush to the size of 5px for this tutorial. When selecting your brush size, set your "Hardness" to 100% and your "Spacing" to 25%. Now press Alt+Click The Mouse over a non-blemished area and then clicked over the blemished area to replace it. To clear up areas where two distinct colors of acne are near, set your "Hardness" to 66% so you can blend the areas more naturally. Next, click on Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation to balance the colors. I increased the Hue slider by 12 points to even out the reddish blemishes.

when you are creating photo effects you can change the color of a photo without actually selecting the color. At the bottom of the layer palette click at the icon - create a new fill or adjustment layer(a ball half white/half black) and choose Hue/Saturation. At the Hue/Saturation window, choose any color at the edit, as an example yellow; Point at the image, with the eyedropper, the color that do you want to change. Move the Hue slider and choose a color. Now , with the shift key, fix the color(eyerdropper +) where the changed was not good .......... click OK. With the mask active, paint with the brush(with the set foreground black) where is no good(at that example the face and arms).

Adding texturing and smoothing texture out is helpful to photos. To add a seamless texture you would start with a simple ground texture here - 320x320 big. As you can see when we try to make a horizontal pattern an ugly seam is visible. We'll try to fix that. Go to the filter menu and choose filter/other/offset.. Our texture is 320 wide so +130 value for horizontal -that will move our image 130 pixels to the right. After that we can notice seam -place where ends of image meet. What we have to do know is make seam invisible by over painting cloning parts of image and so forth. I covered seam mostly with 1px brush picking colors with eyedropper tool When done, we have to move image to its base position by moving it 130px to the left -choose filters/other/offset.. and write "-130" value. Now we can see how it works. Repeating texture gives us nice pattern without seams. We can of course do the same thing vertically when needed. Ok, hope it's good enough for doing some textures...

Learn how to create a mac clock. Now we will have to create the shiny look. Please add noise both to your glare and your base as it will look more official compared to the Dashboard Clock. Now we have to create the clock it self so take out your Eliptical Tool and draw in a circle on top of your glare layer and fill it in with black. Now add the border around the black circle with the hex indicated below. Now we have to create the glare so if you want to get more detailed view, you can just follow my way. Place the original clock design near yours and draw a white circle inside the black circle about 1 or 2 pixels apart. After that grab your eraser tool and set the opacity to 75% and slowlu brush from the top until you get something like mine. I also added a small tiny border around the glare just to make it look a little nicer. Now we have to add all the digits inside. I personally liked how Arial Narrow looked on it so i added that font although i think Mac's designer used some other font that i am not familiar with or maybe just missed. Create a white circle in the center of the digits. Following that draw another red circle inside the white's circle center. Now by the alignment of the arrows on the clock, use your white circle as the base and grab your pen tool to draw out one of the arrows. Just by connecting to one side of the base of the circle and extending towards the numbered digit and then following back to the opposite base of the circle, you can easily acheive those fancy arrows. Repeat the steps again to create the short arrow as well. Now place the long arrow layer underneath the white and red circle layer. Following by going to the Settings of the circle and adding a drapshadow of about 75% opacity with the color filling of black. After you have done that, grab your line tool and set th weight to 2px and draw a line from the red circle to the selected digit on the seconds. Now your basically done, just grab your text tool and add the State and the AM/PM indicator on top. If your curious about the colors, you can just take the hex of the original design. Your final result should look like this:

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