Photoshop Brushes : High Resolution Celtic Designs
Posted by Jennifer | May 29, 2007
Here’s another set of brushes I’ve made for your photoshopping pleasure… These are high resolution (close to 2000 pixels wide) celtic design images. There are some celtic circles, birds and a few other bits and pieces - 6 brushes in all.
Comments welcome!
31 Online Tests for your website
Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 29, 2007
The Aviva Directory team have put together a great list of FREE online tests that you can perform on your website. The tests cover Download Speed, Search Engine Optimisation, Code Validation and Browser Simulations.
Try putting your website through the ringer with this batch of tests. I did with Laughing Lion Design and it’s a good eye-opener and gave me lots of information about things I may have, ahem, forgotten about.
The full list of online tests can be found here.
Photoshop Tutorial : Adjusting the tonal range of a photograph
Posted by Jennifer | May 28, 2007
When we talk about the tonal range of an image, what we’re referring to is the amount of contrast or detail in the image. Every single image you work with, whether it’s from your digital camera or an exiting print that you scan in, will have a range of pixels from the lightest pixels, which are white, to the darkest pixels which are black.
You can improve an image very quickly by adjusting it’s tonal range and one of the tools we use in Photoshop to do this is the Levels. The Levels control allows you to adjust highlights, midtones and shadows of an image.
1. Open the image that you want to improve or adjust the tonal range of.
For this example I’m using a picture of a partial face of a smoker which looks a little faded. The blacks in the image are not truly black and the midtones are also a bit “wishy-washy”.
2. Choose Image > Adjustments > Levels to open the Levels dialog box.
When the Levels dialog box opens make sure that the Preview check box is selected so that you can see how your image is affected when you make changes.
The ideal histogram is one which extends across the full width of the graph with reasonably uniform peaks and valleys in the middle portion. If you’re want to get some special effects the Levels tool is great for playing with, but for this exercise, you’re just trying to improve the contrast overall.
The leftmost or black triangle (A) below the histogram corresponds to the shadows, the middle or grey triangle (B) corresponds to the midtones, or gamma, and the rightmost or white triangle (C) corresponds to the highlights in the image.
3. In the Levels dialog box, drag the left triangle to the right until just as far as the histogram indicates that the darkest pixels appear.
You will notice that when you drag the slider, the image starts to change. The Input Levels above the graph change too. Take a look at the Histogram palette, the left portion of the graph now stretches to the edge of the frame. This indicates that the darkest shadow values have shifted closer to black.
4. Drag the middle triangle a short distance to the left side to lighten the midtones.
Watch the changes in the image window and in the Histogram palette graph to determine how far to drag the middle triangle.
5. Drag the right triangle to the left to the point where the histogram indicates that the lightest colors begin. In this particular image there is a peak on the right hand side of the graph. This is caused by the light area behind the man’s shoulder and ear in this image.
6. When you’ve played around with the sliders and the image looks good to you click OK to apply the changes. The picture should look much improved.
To give you another example of how effective the levels can be, I took this old photograph which looked very faded and used the Levels to add contrast. Obviously the image could do with some more retouching to lose the yellowness and some other problems but you can see the vast improvement in the image on the right just from taking the same steps as above.
Wordpress Theme : Dark Grey and Bluey-Green
Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 28, 2007
Here’s a clean and simple theme I designed for wordpress. Please feel free to use it for your own blog. It’s two columns, dark in colour, clean and simple with rounded corners.
You can preview it here and download the zip file here > DarkGreyandBluey-Green.zip
Website Design : Nice set of Icons
Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 25, 2007
A huge icon pack (over 100 of them) is available for free download from deleket. The icons are bright and colourful and would be a nice addition (in moderation) to any webpage.
Photoshop Tutorial : Whitening Teeth
Posted by Jennifer | May 24, 2007
This is one lesson I wish I could use permanently on myself - how to get pearly white teeth. In Photoshop it’s pretty easy to do this using the dodge tool. The main thing to remember is not to go too mad whitening, the teeth should still look natural.
1. Open the image of the person (or animal!) whose teeth need a bit of whitening.
2. Choose Image >Duplicate to make a copy of your original image in case of accidents. (I named my copy “White Teeth”. Close your original file.
3. Choose Window > Arrange > New Window For White Teeth. A duplicate window will open up.
4. Zoom into one of the windows so that the teeth are as large as possible.(Our model in this example is not exactly Shane McGowen in the teeth department, her teeth are very nice but we’ll still whiten them a little bit.) Leave the other window at 100% magnification or a magnification which allows you to see most of the image.
5. Make sure you can see both windows at the same time.
6. Select the Dodge tool from the toolbox. 
7. On the tool options bar, choose a small soft brush. Pick a brush size that is smaller than the teeth. Set the range to midtones and set the exposure to 15%.
Start painting on the teeth with the dodge tool and work around each of the teeth. You may need to make the brush smaller for some of the smaller teeth at the back.
9. If you feel the teeth have become too white and look a bit unnatural, choose Edit > Fade Dodge tool to reduce the opacity.
Before (on the left) and After.
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About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
