Photoshop Brushes : Eyelashes
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 31, 2007
This is a great new set of Photoshop brushes from Obsidian Dawn. This set has several high resolution brushes of upper and lower lashes. They also include a left and right eye so you don’t have to fiddle around with brush direction to make a pair. Most of the lashes are about 900 pixels in width. Great stuff.
Here’s an image I made earlier with a set of fancy Priscilla style lashes for the U.S. Pres and a border made of simple lashes.
Photoshop Tutorial : Designing With Paragraphs of Type
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 30, 2007
In Photoshop, you will often use point type - a few discrete words or lines – which are added by clicking once with the Type tool and then adding some text. Often, however, a design may call for full paragraphs of text. You can design complete paragraphs of type in Photoshop and you don’t have to switch to page-layout program to get paragraph type control. In this short tutorial I’ll show you how to do it.
1. Open or create an image that you want to add a paragraph of text to. I’m using this picture of a couple of pears.
2. Select the Horizontal Type tool (
), and in the Character palette, choose a typeface. I’m using Century, I’ve set the Size to 12 points, Leading to Auto, Tracking to 0, and text Colour to white.
3. Click the Paragraph tab to bring the Paragraph palette forward, and click the Justify Last Left button.
4. Select the Horizontal Type Tool from the toolbox and instead of just clicking once on the document window, click and drag out a rectangular marquee.
This creates a text box into which your text will flow.
You will notice a small flashing cursor inside the text box. Start typing in your text, or if you have copied some text from another document or web page, press Ctrl+V (windows) or Cmd + V (mac) to paste the text that you copied into the text box. Your text will now flow neatly from one side of the text box to the other, because you selected Justified from the paragraph palette.
5. Once your text is in the text box, you can use the Move tool to drag the text to wherever you want on the image.
Photoshop : Quick Tip - Sample colour from anywhere
Posted by Jennifer Farley | July 27, 2007
Up until Photoshop 7, you could use the Eyedropper to sample colour ONLY from within an open image. This colour would then become the Foreground colour.Since then the Eyedropper tool has grown up and left the nest and will now let you sample colours from anywhere - the open image, the palettes, the toolbar. You can even sample colours from outside Photoshop.
So if you wanted to pick a colour up from a website (very useful) or from your desktop, there is a little trick to it.
1. Make sure that you have one open document inside Photoshop.
2. Make sure that Photoshop is not fully maximised so that you can see other applications open behind it.
3. (Here’s the trick). Select the Eyedropper tool, then click once in the open document and drag the eyedropper tool outside of Photoshop. Let go of the mouse key over the colour you want to sample and voila!
Photoshop Tutorial : Making a dotted line brush
Posted by Jennifer | July 23, 2007
The dotted line is a very useful tool in graphic and web design for separating areas of information. If you’ve used Illustrator or InDesign, you’ll know that it’s simple to stroke a line so that it appears dotted. However, Photoshop doesn’t offer this as a standard feature. For today’s Photoshop tip, I’m going to show you how you can easily create a dotted line by making a custom brush.
1. Select the Brush tool from the toolbox.
2. Open the Brushes palette by choosing Window > Brushes.
3. Click on the pop-up menu at the top of the Brushes palette.
Choose Square Brushes from the list of brush types. You’ll be asked if you want to replace or append the Square Brushes. Choose Append.
4. Choose the Hard Square 3 pixel brush tip.
5. Drag the Spacing slider to 150%. You’ll be able to see a preview of the line at the bottom of the brushes palette, so if you want more space between the “dots”, then drag the slider farther to the right.
6. Once you’ve got your brush set up, you can start painting. Hold down the Shift key as you drag with the paintbrush to get a straight line.
When Photoshop attacks …
Posted by Jennifer | July 22, 2007
You may have read or heard some of the fuss about the pictures of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook magazine. Original picture below on the right.
Firstly, let me say, it’s a great Photoshop job. Nicely airbrushed face, new right arm placed in the picture, a fair amount of flesh removed from the left arm and back. If you didn’t see the “before” picture, you may not even think twice about it.
The thing that I find really bizarre is that there was any need to retouch the woman in the first place. She looks brilliant to me. Unfortunately this is where Photoshop gets a bit of a bad rap. Since the first pictures were taken with a camera, manipulations have been made, there’s nothing new there. But in recent times we’re getting these ridiculous images of women and men with unobtainable bodies and skin, many created with Photoshop.
In some of the trashier magazines (not sure about America but definitely on this side of the Atlantic) the Photoshopping is used to make the “celebrities” look worse by making them look sweatier, hairier and blobbier.
Needless to say, I love Photoshopping images and changing things around as much as the next person but should there be some code of conduct for magazines? What do you think?
Check out this article from Photoshop News in 2005, which discusses “Digital Ethics“. It’s a very interesting read.
Cool Photoshop Brush
Posted by Jennifer | July 18, 2007
I found this Photoshop brush set from Invisible Snow and I think it contains some very cute, yet very cool artwork.
Here’s one I made earlier using a couple of the brushes …
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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 .
