Author Archive

The Toolbar And Layers In Photoshop

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.

Adobe Photoshop Example Effects

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. 

Clear Navigation

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.