Photoshop News

Posted by Jennifer | February 22, 2007 | Leave A Comment

News reports about the release of Creative Suite 3 are mentioning a release date of around the 27th of March.

Betanews quotes an expert from Merrill Lynch:

“Jay Vleeschhouwer, the analyst who wrote the report disclosing the release date, says he expects about six different CS3 product suites, and 14 individual products overall. Core CS3 products would include Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.”

As an instructor in New Media Creative Design, this is very exciting but also means lots of hard work learning the new programs. (Although, realistically, it’s not tooooo hard, having to play with Photoshop and checking out its new features).

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Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Design Stuff!

Design Inspiration : DesignersWhoBlog.com

Posted by Jennifer | February 22, 2007 | 1 Comment

DesignersWhoBlog.com
This is a super blog that I’ve only just discovered and it’s fair to say it’s bursting with inspiration for anyone with an interest in art, design, advertising and more.

DesignersWhoBlog.com is a jumping off point to (what seems like) hundreds of cool blogs from designers all over the world.

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Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Design Resources

Photoshop Tutorial : Make a badge for your website

Posted by Jennifer | February 21, 2007 | 5 Comments

Badges or flashes are a bit of fun decoration that you can add to your site and they are appearing more and more on the web. They’re also very useful for drawing attention to specific parts of your page. It’s a good way to set up a call to action like “Buy Now” or “Join Here”. So in this tutorial I’m going to show you how to make a badge using one of Photoshop’s vector tools.

The Vector tools in Photoshop allow you to create all kinds of lines and shapes and their advantage over raster images is that you can scale the Vector paths up as much as you want and there is absolutely no loss of quality.

Create a new document - 400 x 400 pixels.
Select the Polygon Tool from the toolbox.
On the tool options bar at the top of the screen, select the Shape Layers option.
Again, on the tool options bar at the top of the screen, click on the down arrow for Polygon Options.
Check the Star check box to ensure that you draw a star rather than a polygon shape with lots of sides.
In the “Indent Sides By” field enter a percentage. To get a very pointy star enter a high number such as 60 - 70. For a less pointy star enter a lower number, say 20%. You will get very different effects with these numbers. I’m using 50% for this example.
In the colour picker, choose a foreground colour. I picked a red for mine.
Click and drag out a Star shape to the size you want. When you release the mouse you notice that a new shape layer had been added in the layers palette. This new layer consists of a red fill linked to a star shape mask.

Don’t worry that the edges of the star appear jagged. This is because the path around the star shape is selected. Click on the background layer to deselect the shape and you will see the nice sharp edges of the star appear.

Now it’s time to add some text to your badge. Select the Type tool, set the font colour to white and choose a solid, heavy-looking font. I used Arial Black, size 30. After you have typed in some text, commit it by clicking on any other layer on the layers palette.
Select the type layer again by clicking on it in the layers palette. Press Ctrl + T (windows) or Cmd + T (Mac) to free transform the text. Run your mouse over one of the corner handles so that the cursor changes to a double-headed arrow and drag to rotate the text. Press Enter (Windows) or Return (Mac) to apply the transformation.
The last thing to do is to add a drop shadow to the badge. Click on the star shape layer to select it, then click on the layer style button at the bottom of the layers palette.
Leave the blend mode at multiply, the shadow colour to black and set the angle to 90 degrees. Adjust distance, spread and size to your own taste or use the values I used in the Illustration below.
Click OK and Voila!

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Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Photoshop Tutorials

Photoshop Quick Tip: Time Yourself!

Posted by Jennifer | February 20, 2007 | Leave A Comment

Photoshop can tell you how long you are spending on different commands as you work. To find out (if you really want to know how long you play with each toy, I mean tool), then click on the right-facing triangle at the bottom of the document window. Usually you will see document info here, such as the file size but when you click on the triangle, choose Show from the menu and then choose Timing. This is effectively a stop-watch which times your actions on each tool or command.

So now you can start working towards your personal best, painting a circle in under 0.5 seconds.

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Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Photoshop Tips

Photoshop Tutorial: How To Create A Vignette or Soft Fade Edges in a Photo

Posted by Jennifer | February 19, 2007 | 4 Comments

A vignette is a photograph or illustration in which the background fades gradually away until it blends into the paper on which it is printed. In this short tutorial, I’m going to show you one method (because in Photoshop there is nearly always more than one way to do things) to create this effect.

1. Open your image. I’m using a stock image of a family out skiing.

2. Double-click on the background layer to convert it to a “normal” layer. You can rename your layer in the New Layer dialog box that opens and I named mine “vignette”.

3. In the toolbox, select the Elliptical Marquee tool.

4. Drag out a circular marquee selection around the area of the image that you want to hold on to.

5. Click on the “Add layer mask” button at the bottom of the layers palette.

6. Click on the layer mask thumbnail in the layers palette.

7. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and make sure the Preview option is checked.

Play with the radius values until you are happy with the amount of fade and then click OK.

You should now have a vignette with a transparent background. If you want to add a colour background, all you need to do is add a layer underneath your current layer and fill it with whatever colour you like.

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Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Photoshop Tutorials

Photoshop Video Tutorial : Setting a specific crop size

Posted by Jennifer | February 17, 2007 | Leave A Comment

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to set a specific size for cropping and printing your pictures from Photoshop. In a previous video I showed you how to create a basic crop using the Crop tool in Photoshop. In this video tutorial we’ll take a look at how to set definite dimensions for your crop, rather than just using a freeform crop.

Cropping To A Specific Size For Printing In Photoshop

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