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Creating A Pattern Silhouette With A Layer Mask

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

This tutorial works with images that have a good range of hightlights/midtones/shadows but lack of shadows obscuring any parts of the face if you are using this effect on an image of a person. Other images may need a lot of color correcting before they could be made suitable for use in this tutorial, especially as regards shadows on the face. Choose your images wisely before starting the tutorial. 

1.) Open your image. Duplicate the background layer and give it a useful name. Save to PSD to get your working file established.

2.) Make sure your new layer (not the background) is highlighted and run menu option Image > Adjustments > Threshold… The default value in the Threshold dialog box is 128 and then increase or decrease the threshold until you are satisfied with how it looks then press OK. 

3.) Highlight the threshold layer and go to Filter > Stylize > Diffuse then Select Anisotropic mode and press OK.

4.) Run menu option Select > Color Range and use the eyedropper to sample the black portion of the image, then run the Fuzziness slider in the Color Range dialog box up to 200. Press OK. The black portion of the image should now be surrounded by marching ants.

5.) Run menu option Select > Save Selection and give the selection a name and press OK. Press CTRL-D to deselect. You will reload the selection later.

6.) Make a new layer on top of the others. Select the Paint Bucket tool. Set the tool to fill with a pattern rather than a color and fill the new layer. You can use one of Photoshop’s built-in patterns. 

7.) Make another new layer on top of the others and fill it with white. Add a layer mask to this layer by pressing the Add Layer Mask button on the Layers palette.

8.) Run menu option Select > Load Selection and choose the selection you saved earlier from the dropdown menu in the Load Selection dialog box and press OK.

9.) Go to Edit > Fill and fill the selection with black (which should correspond to your current background color if the mask layer is highlighted). Though you’ve filled the selection with black, you won’t see black in the image. What you should see is the pattern fill from the layer below showing through where the selected mask was filled. Press CTRL-D to deselect. 

10.) With the mask layer still highlighted, select the Brush tool and choose a large, hard-edged brush - around size 19. Painting on the mask with white as the foreground color, paint over those parts of the image you might not need, assuming you see extra stuff that doesn’t need to be there.

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Posted in Photoshop, Photoshop Filters, Tutorials | 1 Comment »

Photoshops Auto Tools

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Auto Color

Image > Adjustments > Auto Color (Ctrl + Shift + B) For those of you that are professionals in the color-correcting field, this is a great feature to sometimes fix the poor colors a digital camera can capture.

Auto Levels

Image > Adjustments > Auto Levels or (Ctrl + Shift + L)?This is another quick way to do some minor color-correcting on your images. What this does is correct the black point and white point in your image automatically. It’s looking for the nearest-to-white color and setting that as the white point, then finding the nearest-to-black.

Auto Contrast

Image > Adjustments > Auto Contrast or (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + L) Auto contrast is another quick adjustment for Photoshop to automatically color correct your image. You usually don’t need to use this with Auto Levels, but sometimes it helps for images that look a bit more washed-out than you’d like.

Auto-Align Layers

Edit > Auto-Align Layers This feature is pretty cool as it attempts to align the content on your layers as close as Photoshop can figure out. When you run this command you’ll get a set of options as to how you want Photoshop to try to align. You’ll need to have your layers selected in the Layers palette by Ctrl-clicking or Shift-clicking on the layers. This is pretty much your savior for stitching together panoramas.

Auto-Blend Layers

Edit > Auto-blend Layers ?Like Auto-Align, this feature is probably most useful in photography situations. When stitching together a panorama, it will attempt to match and blend the color across all of your layers to make sure your stitch looks seamless.

Vertical + Horizontal Centering

Layer > Align > (options)…?This one is great when mocking up a new website design. This will allow you to align things vertically and horizontally to the center, left, right and top. Make sure your text layer is higher in your layers palette than the one you want to align with. Click on both layers by control-clicking or shift-clicking.

Vertical + Horizontal Centering (to a selection)

Layer > Align to Selection > (options)…?If you don’t have another layer you want to align something to, you can make a section and align your object to the selection. Just make sure the layer you want to align is selected in the Layers palette before going to the Layer menu.

Straighten Crooked Photos

You’ll want to start with the Ruler tool (located under the Eyedropper [I]) and draw a line for your horizontal axis to be straightened. After drawing your line, go to Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary. Photoshop will have automatically entered the angle in degrees needed to straighten your image, so just click OK. After running this you will have white areas in the corners, so be prepared to crop a bit.

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Posted in Auto Tools, Photoshop, Tutorials | 1 Comment »

Creating A Two-Tone Silhouette Effect

Monday, January 19th, 2009

This tutorial will show you a quick way to use photoshop to create a trendy, effective, two-tone silhouette effect. Once you have mastered creating the two-tone silhouette effect you can experiment with different colours and filters. 

1.) First you need to start with the photo you want to apply the effect to, any photograph will work well with this effect as long as it is of a good quality. 

2.) You then need to duplicate your layer, this isn’t essential but it helps if you make a mistake when completing the design, then desaturate your duplicated layer, you do this by using Image > Adjust > Desaturate. 

3.) Now go to Filter > Artistic > Cutout and use settings similar to the following:

Number of Levels: 2

Edge Simplicity: 3/4

Edge Fidelity: 3

4.) The next step is to go to Image > Adjustments > Levels to bring up the Levels Dialog Box. Drag your sliders very close to each other, until your image is only black and white.

5.) Your image will probably have some pretty jagged edges. To fix this go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a value of around 2.0 pixels, or whichever makes your edges look smoothed.

6.) Bring up the Curves Dialog Box by going to Image > Adjustments > Curves. Adjust the curves so the edge blurriness is gone, but there is still no jagged edges. You could get a little more advanced with this by masking your subject out (cutting out) first, then running through the steps, this could give you the option to have a coloured background etc. 

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Electrical Currents In Photoshop

Friday, January 16th, 2009

This short tutorial shows you how to create the effect of arcing current in the air. Because it uses the “Difference Clouds” filter, the effect can look different every time you try it, as that particular filter changes each time you use it. 

1. Open a new file. Make it 500 x 500 pixels, this is a nice size to work with for this tutorial. 

2. Next you need to set the foreground colour of the file to black and the background to a light grey.

3. Select the gradient tool and then in the tool options bar, set the gradient to Foreground to Background.

4. Drag the gradient tool diagonally across the image from one corner to another.

5. The next step choose Filters > Render > Difference Clouds, which as said earlier will give a different effect each time you use it. 

6. Now Invert the colours in the image by pressing Ctrl + I.

7. After doing this you need to choose Image > Adjustments > Levels to open the Levels dialog box. Drag the black slider to the right to dramatically darken the image, when doing this the effect of “electrical currents” should become apparent.

At this stage the electrical current looks very realistic but if you would like to add some extra colour to the image you can play choose Image > Adjustments > Variations. From the Variations dialog you can add colour by clicking directly on any of the preview images. Each time you click on the preview images the colour will change.

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Layering Images In Photoshop

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Layering begins once the image is stored on your computer, the image will usually open itself in the default programme so you will have to open Photoshop and then find the image you want to open using file – open – and then where the image is stored.

This is when you will do all your manipulation, layering and resizing using Photoshop itself. Once you have completed this you will then save your changes, if you save the images straight into Photoshop it will save them as a PSD, PDD or EPS file. If your image is saved in these particular formats your file will stay large and hold the quality whilst preserving all layers, this is the best file format to use if you are going to be reworking the image.

Other choices of formats for your file are TIFF – which will keep the quality but are large files and best used in design for print, BMP or bitmap is a windows file that creates good photos but creates large files and a PDF is a adobe acrobat file which locks texts and images so they cannot be further manipulated, usually used as a file for sending information or important documents. 

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Image Formats In Photoshop

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

Photoshop is capable of adjusting to numerous ‘types’ of formats and its tools if used to their full capacity can create some amazing results including even the smallest detailing, It also uses many different formats and there are advantages and disadvantages to which format you choose to save your work in.

Photoshop can also open and save several kinds of files and the more you further your knowledge as to why these files exist you can apply the correct files to the correct image type. When choosing your file format there are three main things you should consider which will help you to determine how to save your file – web use, layering and image quality.

Image quality begins when you first take a photograph with your camera, you should use the highest pixel setting that your camera contains because the higher the level of pixilation the better the quality of the final image, but this also means that the higher the quality of the image the bigger the overall file size will be. You camera will give you the option of how high or low you want the pixilation to be, so change this in accordance to what the final image is going to be used for.

Photographs are best taken as a raw image to begin with as you will have the option to convert them into a smaller file once you have imported them onto your computer, and the larger the image is to begin with I have found, the easier it will be to manipulate using Photoshop’s tools. Photographs can be imported as JPEG’s or as a raw image but if you save as a JPEG you will lose some of the quality of the image from the start. 

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Photograph Restoration In Photoshop

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

This tutorial will teach you how to add colour onto an old photograph that may of lost colour through fading or an image that is originally black and white or greyscale, sometimes this can take a lot of time but the more time spent the better the final result.

1.) Open up the image that you want to use and ensure that the image mode is set to RGB, you can do this by going into Image > Mode and then check its set to RGB.

2.) Press Q to go into quick mask mode and make sure that the quick mask option that is on the main toolbar are set to selected areas. Using the Paintbrush fill in the area that you would like to colourize, this area will then appear in red.

3.) Press Q again and this will send you back into standard mode and a selection will appear around the area you filled with the Paintbrush, when completing the next step your selections will be saved as Layer Masks which you will be able to restore later but you could also save your selections by going to Select > Save Selection and then name the selection after the area which you have just outlined in the image you are using.

4.) Click on Create New Adjustment Layer icon which is at the bottom of the layers palette and choose the option of colour balance from the menu, you will be given a option of highlights, mid-tones and shadows and adjust the sliders for these until you find the colour that you think looks the best, this choice isn’t final you will have the option of going back and editing using your layers palette by double clicking on the adjustment layer icon for the layer that you want to edit.

5.) Repeat this process over again for the other parts of the photo that you need to colourize, when this is al done and you have got colour using your colour balance adjustment layer you can also make further additional adjustment layers to adjust each colour layer more, you will be given a selection of options including Contrast, Shadows, Brightness, Saturation, Hue… Just load the particular selection by clicking CTRL and then clicking onto the adjustment layer, and repeat the process of adding a new adjustment layer.

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Adobe Photoshop Features

Monday, January 12th, 2009

Photoshop has features that adjust your photographs at the click of a button, one of these being the shadow and highlight correction tool that is under the adjustments menu. The shadow and highlight correction tool is a tonal editing option and makes adjusting pictures much easier.

The tool has a set of sliders for shadows and highlights that you adjust until the balance of tones is correct. I have found using sliders is much easier than levels and curves and gives better results.

Match Colour is another feature that will help you to make two pictures that need to be combined look like they have similar colour tones. For example if you have had a portrait taken with flash and want to combine another photograph of someone taken in sunlight. To do this you need to open both images and select the target and destination and then adjust the sliders until it’s as close as you want. The match colour tool also works if you are copying and pasting parts from one image onto another and it is ideal for people who shoot panoramas and want a natural colour transition from one frame to the next so that the entire image blends together perfectly.

Photomerge is another feature that is good for people who want to piece together panoramic photographs. The feature has been programmed to stitch together photographs that have been taken in a series such as a panorama, it automatically finds the edges where a blend should occur and merges them for you without you having to cut and blend the photos yourself.

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Adobe Photoshop Overview

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Adobe Photoshop is one of the most popular design programmes used by Graphic Designers and Web Developers today, this is because of its advanced level of tools and effects when it comes to editing photographs and designing graphics.

The programme was created by Adobe and works with both Windows (PC) and Macintosh. Photoshop’s name portrays it to be a programme solely designed to edit or repair photographs but it is capable of far more than this and once you have practiced tutorials and used your imagination you can create some amazing imagery using Photoshop.

The original versions of Photoshop were produced only for the Mac that allowed image editing to become affordable and accessible on your own personal computers; now Photoshop is industry standard when it comes to image editing.

The programme contains a large selection of image editing tools alongside an advanced capability of producing numerous layers, allowing images to be added, moved and rearranged over and under each other for different effects. It will also read from and convert to a large number of formats but uses its own format for layers, which is PSD. 

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Can A Machine Design

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

I think it is clear that a machine can design and there will  come a time when all the human designer does is supervise  the work of the computer which will be programmed to be  able to complete design work whilst supervised by a human  designer, perhaps computer aided design is actually the  future of the digital world?

If this is the case then there may come a time where the human designers are not even needed to supervise the design process because the work completed by the computer is somewhat better than the human design and human input into the computers work.

Computers continue to shock us with what they are actually able to do, machines are now being able to do things which humans thought only they would ever be able to do, all of these are factors which prove the development of technology and artificial computer intelligence. I think that the design industry doesn’t necessarily want computers to be able to do everything that human designers can do, but setting certain challenges for computers can help to aid the human designers so they can focus on work that needs more human input and information from a human source.      

If machines do become as creative and intelligent as humans, in the future will there actually be any need to further education after school? Education is there to help broaden a persons knowledge of a subject with exploration of certain topics and issues, in order to have an advantage over others when it comes to getting a job, but within the design industry if it is machines that do all the work and there is no need for human input, post-graduates regardless of their knowledge, fresh idea’s and possibility of input to a brief will not be needed, machines may be used for all aspects of the process of design causing knock on effects within the vacancy for jobs in the creative industry. 

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Posted in Design And Technology, Visual Communication | No Comments »

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