Free Photoshop Secrets - Learning Photoshop Like A Pro

By David Peters

Want to add some metal and ink to people in your family, well read this: Press SHIFT+M and cycle through the marquee tools until you come to the circle (alright, elliptical marquee tool) . Once that's selected, you'll see some options at the top of the canvas. In the drop down list next to Style, choose 'Fixed Aspect Ratio'. This of course gives us a perfectly round circle selection every time. Go ahead and drag one out now. Not too big, though. Good. Now we need to go Select->Modify->Border. A screen pops up asking you how many pixels wide you want it to be. I put 3 here. Now we need to put something in it. Stop! Before we fill it with color, we have to make a new layer (CRTL+SHIFT+N). Now press SHIFT +F5 to bring up the Fill screen, and from the drop down menu choose '50% grey'. We don't need the selection now, so CRTL+D to deselect. Now a round circle isn't going to be very realistic. What we need to do now is distort it a bit. Press CRTL+T to enter transform mode, then right-click and choose 'Distort' from the menu. Now play around moving the handlebars around the square. Good. We could now just take the eraser tool and get rid of that bit in the middle. A better way, though, is to use a mask. At hte bottom of the layers panel you'll see a little grey rectangle with a white circle in it. Click it and our layer gets a brother. The foreground/background colors also change to black and white. Now if we paint black, it will take away the ring, and if we then paint white, it will bring back what we painted black. Just to the left of the mask icon on the layers panel, you will see as well the Layer Style icon. Click it now and from the list that springs down, choose 'Bevel and Emboss'. This is pops up another screen with lots of options on it. We don't need to change anything for now, though. You will also see that our ring is updated in real time, so we can see the results straight away. To give it more highlights and make it shinier, hit the 'Gloss Contour' box. Another screen pops up where you can alter the mapping. Just click and drag the black line until it is like the example.

Pictures are made up of many things, editing requires knowledge of all 3: 1) Contrasts adjustments (the highlights and the shadows) 2) Neutral tones balance (color cast on grey) 3) Increasing or decreasing the saturation The work flow of the photographic post production can be performed with many adjustment tools as: Brightness/contrast - Color Balance - Hue/Saturation, or Levels - Hue/Saturation, or Auto-Adjustments - Sponge. This tutorial is very brief and introduces a new method to decrease color cast on neutral tones. The picture has a really intense orange color cast. I took this picture of Christopher Columbus' statue along the "lower pavement" in Funchal (Madeira Island). No need to be a colorimetric expert to understand that, the light effect due to the night orange lights is to much. The goal is to decrease color cast, of course, without changing the "meaning" of the picture.First of all we duplicate the background layer. Then we apply Filter>Blur>Average, that will transform the picture's layer into a colored "stain" by the average pixels' color. Then we have to invert (ctrl+i) the obtained color in order to see the opposite color.Now we change blending mode to Color (read also Blending modes tutorial) and decrease master opacity until we obtain our goal. And that's all!

Gradient maps can help your coloring on Photo manipulations a lot. They can be used to help blend things in and to make the colors in things the same. So you should have the same picture from the section Textures open. Okay now looking at you textures picture. You might think. My textures dont really blend in well with my face. So I am going to show you how to blend those in better using gradient maps. So I want you to decide what you want your face to look like (mainly color wise). So to make my textures blend in more I start off by going to Image> Adjustments> Gradient Map. Since I want a green picture I am going to pick a green/yellow gradient map. Then I am going to set it on soft light. After I put the opacity down a bit. Then I added a black and white gradient map. I did this because I wanted to make the picture a bit darker. I left the black and white gradient map on normal and set it on around 50% opacity. It will get rid of a bit of the color but thats what the green and yellow gradient maps were for (they were to add color so it didnt look really bland when we added the black and white one). Here is my picture after adding gradient maps.

It's time to introduce Adobes ExtendScript Toolkit which is the environment which you will work in to create scripts for Photoshop CS2. In this tutorial I will introduce Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit, reference documents that you will need when writing scripts and in the end I will guide you through a hello world program for Photoshop scripts. ExtendScript ToolkitIf you have Photoshop CS2 you probably already have the ExtendScript Toolkit, to test if you have it create a new file and name it test.jsx. When double-clicking the file ExtendScript Toolkit should open.

Start with a blank photoshop document of size 1024*768 and white background. Choose the brush "rough round bristle" from the toolbar. Create a new layer and draw some lines. Right click on the new layer and choose "blending options". Choose the values. DROP SHADOW INNER GLOW BEVEL AND EMBOSS; For "texture", choose "satin" as the pattern. TEXTURE Now add some motion blur to this layer from filters > blur > motion blur. Similarly, add gaussian blur also to this layer with the radius around 72. Not so catchy yet. Well try this. Change the background color of the default layer as black by choosing Edit > Fill from menu. Now look at the output. Ahh, that looks much better, isn't it ? You can add some text to this texturized background if you wish.

This section describes how to use some of the basic tools that you will need to use in the tutorials. This section in particular will be added to over time.The airbrush is the favourite tool of most digital artists. The tool options (just below the drop down menus) can be altered very subtly to achieve a range of effects - this is the most creative aspect of many of these tutorials. The tool shape selection menu at the left of the tool bar can alter the brush's shape - soft to hard edges, as well as special shapes such as blades of grass. The size can also be altered with obvious effects. The layer style for the brush can be altered - for more information see the section on blending layers elsewhere in the tutorial. The opacity slider will affect the opacity of the paint that is applied. The flow slider effects the speed at which the paint is applied.

Our eyes can sometimes deveive us. Everyone's eyes see slightly different colors. One person will see a purple color, while another will see a blue. Those that are colorblind cannot distinquish some colors from another. While we see it to be a good skintone, it may not be seen as one to someone else. Also, depending on the monitor that you own, you may see a different color than other computers. Making pallettes straight from photos heightness the chance greatly of realistic, more accurate works. Also, these color pallettes are used professionally. Those who work with color correction use this to help them with their vocations. Even the printing press use this. You can also take colors from the lips, eyes and hair to help with realistic color of those. You would use it the same way as you did for the skin. Finding the darkest, the midtone, and the lightest before creating a pallette to use.

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