Monday, December 15th, 2008
There are several ways of making a drop shadow in Photoshop and this tutorial will show you them all, drop shadows are very simple yet they are used a lot in the design industry and if used correctly are effective.
1.) Begin by finding an object that you would like to add a drop shadow to; drop shadows can be applied to most elements so you can use a logo, text or clipart as long as the object is on its own layer. Once you have chosen your object press D on your keyboard, this will reset yours colours to their default value.
2.) If you have chosen text to apply the drop shadow to, select the type tool and then type your text, make a new layer in the Layers Palette and drag it underneath the layer that contains your text, then name this layer shadow. Hold down CTRL on the keyboard and click on the text layer and this will load a selection around it.
3.) After doing this go to Select > Feather and choose a number and then press OK. The higher the number you choose the softer and more spread out your drop shadow will appear.
4.) Check that the Shadow layer is selected and then go to Edit > Fill > Foreground Colour to then fill the feathered selection with black.
5.) Depending upon the direction your ‘light source’ is coming from you need to move the shadow layer several pixels up/down and several pixels right/left.
6.) Once you have finished this the shadow will look unrealistically dark and to change this you will need to adjust the opacity of the Shadow layer, meaning you make the shadow lighter, do this until you believe the shadow appears realistic.
Tags: drop shadows, Photoshop, photoshop CS3, photoshops effects, Tutorials
Posted in Photoshop, Tutorials | No Comments »
Monday, December 15th, 2008
To view any of your created images it is best to use the file browser in the toolbar menu, different buttons on the options bar will give you a number of ways to view your images one of which will allow you to quickly open up the browser and view high quality images alongside custom-sized thumbnails.
If you are making numerous adjustments to you’re images involving using a lot of layers your best option is to use layer comps, these will let you capture configurations of a document by recording the position, visibility and blending options of the layers which means you can later find a layer comp from the palette and reuse the setting and way everything was set at that stage.
Layers are the building blocks of many image creation workflows, especially if you are building up a document or a image from a number of other images. You may not need to work with layers if you are doing simple image adjustments, but layers help you work efficiently and are essential to most nondestructive image editing.
Tags: layers, Photoshop, Photoshop Effects, toolbar
Posted in Photoshop | No Comments »
Monday, December 15th, 2008
The majority of Photoshop’s effects are most effective when used on photographs, but they can also be used on other types of images. One feature effect that works well on photographs is the lens blur filter, is uses effects that are similar to actually lens used on cameras e.g. focal distance, specular highlights and Iris.
These effects are attached to sliders where you can adjust the size of the aperture, as you would do on a camera, the curve of the blades and the number of blades. And then you apply the adjustment to the area that you want to blur, the effect the acts as a depth of field control tool.
After this you adjust the specular highlight control which then makes the catch lights white again, this process works on a alpha channel by creating a gradient mask and this means you can pin point focus to a certain plane in for example a landscape to make the foreground and background appear out of focus.
The crop and straighten tool is perfect for photos which have been scanned but haven’t been align properly by the scanner, there are scanners available which automatically rotate a skewed photo and crop it but if your scanner doesn’t have this feature then the crop and straighten tool saves a lot of time aligning photographs.
Photograph filters is a feature which professional photographers will appreciate! The photograph filters are automatic colour correction filters and applying these will automatically add a preset filter and then you pick the colour you would like to add using the colour picker option, the intensity of a filter is controlled by an opacity slider and fade option, automated photograph filters will pick which filter would work best for your image without you having to have any input.
Tags: cropping photographs, CS3, filters, Photoshop, Photoshop Effects
Posted in Photoshop | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Most user interactyions with Web pages involve navigating hypertext links between documents. The main interface problem in websites is the lack of sense of where you are within the local organisation of information.
Clear, consistant icons, graphic identity schemes and graphic or text based information and summary screens can give the user confidence that they can find what they are looking for without wasting their time.
The user should always be able to return easily to your home page and to other major navigation points in the site. These basic links should be present and in consistenet locations on every page. Graphic buttons will provide basic navigation links and create a graphic identity that tells users they are within the site domain.
Tags: Clear Navigation for design, Design, graphics, icons
Posted in Content | No Comments »