Photoshop : Tutorial - Adding a moon to your photographs
Posted by Jennifer | June 28, 2007
Today I have a really quick and easy Photoshop tutorial that shows you how to add a moon from one picture to another and make it look authentic. All you need is the move tool, a bit of blending and a bit of transforming.
1. Open up the two photographs – one of the moon and the one that you want to add the moon too. To keep things nice and simple, use a sky with little or no clouds. I picked up this moon shot and the dishes from http://www.sxc.hu/ .
2. Select the Move Tool and click and drag the moon picture onto the other picture.
In this case, not only does the moon look massive but the sky is quite obviously a very different colour.
3. To fix the different sky colour, select the moon layer in the layers palette and set the blend mode to Lighten. This will hide the black sky and leave the moon visible.
The craters and areas of the moon that were dark now look a little bit transparent but once we resize the moon and then move it into a dark area of the sky it will look fine.
4. With the moon layer still selected, hit Ctrl + T (Windows) or Cmd + T (Mac) to transform it. You’ll see a bounding box appear around the moon. Hold down Shift and drag one of the corner handles (holding down Shift makes sure that object is resized proportionally) and resize the moon to a more suitable size. Drag the moon into a dark part of the sky. Press Enter or Return to complete the transformation.
And voila! I see a bad moon rising …
It looks pretty good when it’s resized and positioned in the darkest part of the sky.
Photoshop Tutorial : One Click Red-Eye Removal
Posted by Jennifer | June 26, 2007
We’ve all seen photographs of people where the subject has “red eye”. Sometimes it’s mild or there is just a hint of red-eye, other times it makes the person look like the Terminator!
Red eye happens when the light from a flash enters the subject’s pupil and is reflected off the retina at the back of the eye and comes back out to the camera. The reflection appears red because the retina is full of thin blood vessels.
Many cameras now have a “red-eye” reduction option which fires a burst of flashes just before the actual flash is fired and a photograph is taken. This can certainly help prevent red-eye but it doesn’t always stop it. Another way to help reduce red eye, is to tell the subject not to look directly at the camera or if possible, increase the room lighting.
Of course, if these tactics fail, you can always use our beloved Photoshop. It literally takes one click with the Red eye tool.
The Red Eye Tool
The Red Eye tool in Photoshop removes red eye in flash photos of people and white or green reflections in flash photos of animals.
1. Select the Red Eye tool
from the toolbox. It may be hidden beneath the Spot Healing Brush tool.
2. Click in the red eye on the image
The eye should change to a dark pupil.
Severe Red Eye
Sometimes the repair doesn’t work out as you expected, so try setting one or both of the following options in the options toolbar and click in the red eye again:
Pupil Size sets the size of the pupil (dark center of the eye). Darken Pupil sets the darkness of the pupil. Open an image of a person with severe red eye.
With the red eye tool selected, click on the red eye area on the image.
The results can be seen below.
It’s not perfect, BUT, it still is a dramatic improvement on the initial red eye problem.
Adobe Lightroom Workspace Overview
Posted by Jennifer | June 22, 2007
If you have used a program such as Adobe Photoshop before, you’ll notice that Lightroom looks a little bit different. The workspace is an elegant dark grey and black, allowing your image to be the most important part of the proceedings.
Lightroom Menu Bar
The main menu commands sit at the top of the screen. If you choose to view the application in full screen mode, the menu bar will disappear but you can view it again by rolling the mouse up to the top of the screen.
Modules
This section lets you switch between the five different modules.
Image Display Area
The Image Display area is the main section of the workspace where you work with the images you’ve imported into Lightroom. When using the Library module, you can view a selection of thumbnail images in a gridlike structure – known as Grid mode. You can also view images in Loupe mode in the Library and Develop modules. Loupe mode means the images can be displayed at a 1:1 scale size or a “view to fit” size.
In the other modules – Slideshow, Web and Print - you can see previews of how images or screen pages will look when they are output from Lightroom.
Toolbar
The toolbar contains several tool options and appears in all Lightroom modules.
Filmstrip
The Filmstrip sits at the bottom of the screen and displays thumbnails of every image currently in the Library. Any images that are currently selected will be highlighted. The Filmstrip is visible in every module allowing you to pick out any images you want without having to go back to the Library module.
Right Side Panel
The panel on the right hand side of the screen shows controls for adjusting images. The “Quick Develop” palette lets you apply settings across multiple images. This panel will change change depending on which module you are working in.
You can expand or collapse the Panel options by clicking on the panel bar. Holding down Alt and clicking on a panel bar toggles between expanding to show the contents of that panel only or expanding to show all panels.
You can open and close individual panels in the order they are listed from the top down by holding down the Ctrl (windows) or Cmd (mac) key in combination with a keypad number (1, 2, 3, and so on).
Left Side panel
The panel on the left side of the screen contains palettes for managing your images and presets. The image on the right shows the palettes available in the Library module. In the Develop, Slideshow, and Print modules, it is used for storing and quickly accessing saved settings.
So that’s the interface of Lightroom. There’s certainly plenty of panels to play with and buttons to press but it has been designed in such a way that it doesn’t feel cramped or cluttered
You can download a 30 day trial of lightroom here
Free Photoshop Brushes from Magurno
Posted by Jennifer | June 21, 2007
If you haven’t come across Gabriele Magurno’s brushes before now, you should check them out. They are abolutely superb and a bit different from many of the brushes you see. There are five free sets of brushes and also some vector images that are free to take away.
The illustration below is one I made in Photoshop using a few of Magurno’s brushes. The guy in the picture is our Taoiseach (Ireland’s Prime Minister), Bertie Ahern who has just been re-elected for the third time. Apparently he spends over €20,000 on makeup services every year! I’ll just state now for the record that I am willing to be his official photoshopper for half that.
Ten Commandments for Photoshop Users
Posted by Jennifer | June 20, 2007
I heard this morning that the Vatican has just issued ten commandments for drivers. I could probably learn a thing or two from them. Anyway, I decided to write a ten commandments for Photoshop Users.
1. Thou shalt worship Photoshop and shall have no other image editors before it.
(Well maybe Illustrator. Ok, maybe GIMP too because it’s Open Source. But that’s it!)
2. Thou shalt remember Ctrl + Z (Cmd + Z) because thou will need to undo.
3. Thou shalt not drop shadow or reflect everything.
4. Thou shalt remember that the Lens Flare filter should be used only once - when thou first gets Photoshop and think it’s cool. After that, thou should pretend it does not exist.
5. Honour thy father and mother, husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend and do not forget they exist when thou just want to try out “one more thing”.
6. Thou shalt not murder a good photograph by over-using filters.
7. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain when Photoshop crashes and thou hast not saved.
8. Thou shalt not copy other Photoshop designs, thou shalt steal them.
9. Thou shalt not covet your neighbour’s wacom tablet. Get thine own.
10. Thou shalt occasionally turn off Photoshop, go outdoors, get fresh air and inspiration.
I’d be delighted to hear your commandments
Photoshop Vs Lightroom
Posted by Jennifer | June 19, 2007
For a long time now Photoshop has been THE image editing program for rasterised or pixel based images. With each new version of the program we have seen superb advances and wonderful tools which improve the workflow of the many different types of Photoshop user – from graphic and web designers to special effects technicians and illustrators.
Personally, I love Photoshop and I use it every single day either for my design work or for editing my photographs. However, the program has become more and more complex as it becomes all things to all people. What began life as an image editing program for single images has now become a huge beast of a thing. It is now in version 10 (Photoshop CS 3). If you’ve been using Photoshop for the last few years, many of it’s tools will have become second nature. However, if you are just joining in the fun now, there really is a very steep learning curve.
Now we have Adobe Lightroom and things have become a little bit simpler. Lightroom is aimed directly at Photographers and although, I’ve only been using it for a couple of months, I can say that Lightroom could be considered an ideal solution for users who want to do a little bit of editing on their images, without have to learn the many tools in the Photoshop toolbox. The powerful image processor and image database in Lightroom is designed to emulate the typical workflow of a photographer.
Lightroom is a brand new program, we’re on version 1 now, and it was designed with very specific needs in mind and tested by the general public for several months as a free downloadable beta version.
One of the major differences between the programs is how they deal with image adjustments. In Photoshop, when you apply more than one adjustment, the image is increasingly degraded with each consecutive change. In Lightroom, you can make as many changes to the image as you want, but it is only when you save your image as a PSD, JPEG or TIFF that a final, single adjustment is applied.
Another big difference is how the interface looks. The new program has a stylish, dark grey workspace broken down into 5 modules. It’s easy to move around the program and there are far fewer tools and sections to get your head around.
The program is incredibly efficient and allows the photographer to take in large folders of images, make adjustments and quickly produce contact sheets, a web gallery or setup printing options.
Realistically, I don’t believe it will come down to an “either, or” situation. Lightroom is certainly a standalone program but it is also tightly integrated with Photoshop. For many photographers, Lightroom should offer all of the image management and processing capability that they’ll need. For other’s, Photoshop with it’s highly developed capabilities is the only choice. That’s the important thing, it’s all about choice.
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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 .
