Photoshop Wishlist
Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 29, 2008
Scott Kelby has a blog post today with a nice idea about how people power could shape the features in the next version of Photoshop. The main gist would be that Adobe would ask it’s users what changes or new features would they like in the next version and the top 10 most requested features would appear WITHOUT FAIL. Scott lists 10 of his own ideas and there are tons of comments with great suggestions for improvements - lots of stuff I wouldn’t have thought of myself, but ideas that make you think, oh yeah, essential.
One thing that I would love to change in Photoshop is the number of Undos that you can make with the Ctrl + Z keywords. In Illustrator you can undo LOADS of times but in Photoshop you have to go into the History palette to go back more than one command.
What would you add to your wishlist?
Photoshop Tutorial: Extracting an image from it’s background
Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 21, 2008
The Extract command in photoshop provides a sophisticated way to isolate a foreground object from its background. Objects with intricate or wispy edges can be selected quickly in a way that would be impossible to do using the selection tools. Here’s how to do it;
1. Open an image in Photoshop. I’m using a beautiful picture of a gorilla taken by PaulMT and available on Stock Exchange for free download.
2. Choose Filter > Extract.
The Extract dialog box appears with the edge highlighter tool (
) selected in the upper left area of the dialog box.
To extract an object, you use the Extract dialog box to highlight the edges of the object. Then you define the object’s interior and preview the extraction. Applying the extraction erases the background area to transparency, leaving just the extracted object. (in theory!!)
3. Choose a brush size for the highlighter. This will vary from subject to subject, but for the gorilla image, try about 35 in the Brush Size text box. It’s easiest to start with a large brush to highlight the general selection, and then switch to a finer brush to fine-tune the selection.
4. Using the edge highlighter tool, drag over the fuzzy ends of the gorilla until you’ve completely outlined, but not filled, the gorilla. Draw the highlight so that it slightly overlaps both the foreground and background regions around the edge.
There’s no problem if the highlight overlaps the edge. The Extract command makes its selection by finding the difference in contrast between pixels. You don’t need to highlight areas where the object touches the image boundaries.
6. If necessary, select the zoom tool (
), or press spacebar+Ctrl and click to zoom in on image. You can also use the hand tool (
) to reposition the image preview.
If you make a mistake and highlight more than desired, select the eraser tool (
) in the dialog box and drag over the highlight in the preview.
7. Select the fill tool in the Extract dialog box. Then, click inside the object to fill its interior. You must define the object’s interior before you can preview the extraction.
The default Fill colour (bright blue) contrasts well with the highlight colour (green). You can change either colour if you need more contrast with the image colours, using the Highlight and Fill menus in the Extract dialog box.
9. Click the Preview button to view the extraction.
At this stage the extraction is often ok, but rarely perfect. If the extraction looks really bad, then you can refine your selection. Choose Original from the Preview dropdown box at the bottom of the Extract dialog box and make your selection again using the highlighter and fill tools.
If you are reasonably happy with your selection, click OK to apply the extraction.
11. Often the selection can be improved dramatically by simply duplicating the layer.
Photoshop Resource : MyPhotoshopBrushes.com
Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 19, 2008
For anyone interested in brushes, patterns and styles for photoshop, a useful resource in MyPhotoshopBrushes.com The site also includes shapes - which are particularly useful because you can size them up as large as you need without loss of quality - and gradients too.
Ooh look! - a set of my celtic brushes are there too!
Free Photoshop Book From Sitepoint
Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 18, 2008
Sitepoint are currently offering their book “The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques” for free download as a PDF. I bought the book myself about a year ago and it’s a good read and full of good tutorials on using Photoshop for web design. The book includes instruction and tips on how to;
- Design attractive web graphics
- Touch up photographs for web use
- Create web site mockups using Photoshop
- Improve your digital workflow
- Master menus, buttons and background tiles
- Use nondestructive editing techniques
The Photoshop book is available for free until the 13th of June, and you can download it here.
Photoshop Tutorial : Stroking a selection and blurring to bring focus
Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 15, 2008
A quick and easy way to focus attention to part of an image using Photoshop is to make a selection, stroke that selection, then blur outside the selection.
The stroke command can be applied to a whole image or if you use one of the selection tools, you can actually stroke the selection. And you can make multiple selections and stroke each one to get some cool results. Here’s a simple example;
1. Open an image
Use one of the selection tools to and draw out a selection around the area that you want to bring focus to. Here I’ve just used a rectangular marquee.
Choose Edit > Stroke. The stroke dialog box opens.
I want a fairly thin stroke – 4 pixels thick, coloured white and set to stroke the inside of the selection.
Click Ok and the stroke is added and importantly the selection is still there too.
5. Now inverse the selection by hitting Ctrl + Shift + I (windows) or Cmd + Shift + I (mac).
6. Choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and change the radius slider until you have a strong blur on the outside.
Finally deselect everything – Ctrl + D or Cmd + D and that’s it. I just added a little bit of text to finish up with a small drop shadow to lift it slightly off the page.
100 Photoshop Tutorials From 3D Total
Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 12, 2008
3D Total have posted 100 great photoshop tutorials on their site. The tutorials are based around the idea of creating beautiful art and some of the work is truly lovely.
There are tutorials on everything from making clouds to scary faces to cute monsters. Each tutorial seems to be fairly indepth with lots of nice screengrabs. I had seen some of these before, I think they may have been in 2D artist magazine but there’s something of interest for everyone here and well worth a look.
Image Copyright www.waheednasir.com
-
About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
