Learn how to use the color sliders to get a great Black and White image
You can convert any image into black and white by pressing the letter V or select B&W. However, you can also craft your own black and white image to get a better result than you get with the default settings if you drag on the color sliders in the Black & White Mix panel.
Each slider controls one of the underlying colors in the image. Drag to the right to lighten a color in the black and white or to the left to darken it.
Using the sliders, you can get a crafted black and white image that looks the way you want it to look.
Sliders for which there is not corresponding color in the underlying image will have no effect or little effect when you drag on them.
Learn how to create a simple animation in PowerPoint. You will add a shape which, when clicked will trigger an image to be displayed. It is a smart animation with lots of potential uses which, once you see how it is done, will be simple to adapt to your own needs.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create an animation where you click a button to show an image. Before we get started with this tutorial let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re going to achieve.
I have an image here and a shape and when we play the presentation this is what we’re going to see. We’re going to see a slide without the picture and when I click on this shape I’ll see the image displayed. And we’re going to create this animation where we click on a shape and an image appears.
So back in PowerPoint let’s go to a new slide and I’ve already inserted my image. I just chose Insert and then Online Pictures. I searched for an elephant and I’ve just inserted it on the slide. So there’s nothing special about what I’ve done to date. Now I’m going to choose Insert and then Shapes and I’m going to choose my rounded rectangle shape.
And I’m going to add it to my slide and I’m going to add some text to it. And I’m just going to click away from the shape. Now that we have our shape and our image we’re ready to create the animation. To do this I’m going to click the Animations tab on the Ribbon. And I want to animate the elephant so I’m going to click on the elephant image and I’m going to choose an animation for it.
So I could choose an animation such as fade so it will fade in. And then I’m going to open the Animation task pane over here by clicking on Animation Pane because I want the elephant to be animated but I don’t want him to appear on a click and I don’t want him to appear after the slide is opened. I want him to appear when you click this particular shape.
And that’s a different animation. This is the elephant animation so I’m going to right click it and choose Effect Options because that allows me to control how this effect is going to play. And I’m going to click the Timing tab.
And I want this to be triggered by the clicking of this shape so I’m selecting to Start Effect on Click of and I’m going to select Rounded Rectangle and just click Ok. And now this image is going to animate when we click this shape. Let’s close down the task pane and let’s go and test it.
I’ll click the Slide Show. You have to do that because you have to test this slide as it would appear inside a working slide show. And you can see here we have our slide on the screen and just our filled rectangle. I’m gray. I have a trunk. Click to see what I am. The elephant image is not visible yet. However when I click the shape the elephant appears and we would then progress through the slide show.
So this is a simple animation effect that you can create so that you can click a shape and something happens. The animation is all added. All the effects are added to the image itself. You’re going to animate it with some sort of an entrance effect and then adjust its timing so that it is triggered by a click on this shape here.
I’m Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more PowerPoint tutorials on this YouTube channel as well as additional tutorials on other Office applications and Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator.
Visit my website at helenbradley.com for tips, tricks and tutorials on all these applications.
Lightroom has two types of collections: regular Collections and Smart Collections. Smart Collections are live and they are created as a result of filtering your photos according to rules that you write. You cannot add an image to a Smart Collection by dragging and dropping it into the collection. You can’t remove an image from a Smart Collection just because you don’t want it in there – it can only be removed if it fails to meet the criteria you set up for the collection.
Smart collections are a handy way to create collections and to manage your photos and here I’ll show you how to make use of them.
Shipped Smart Collections
There are a few Smart Collections which ship with Lightroom. To find these, click the Collections panel in Lightroom and click on the Smart Collection Set. Click the Smart collection called Without Keywords. As its name suggests, this collection shows you all the images in your Lightroom catalog that do not have keywords associated with them.
If you’re like me you’ll want to close this one pretty quickly – it can be scary to see just how many images aren’t keyworded!
You can learn more about this collection by right clicking its name and choose Edit Smart Collection. You’ll see that the Smart Collection is configured to contain all those images for which the Keywords property is empty.
There are other collections which are shipped with Lightroom including Recently Modified which is a collection of images that have been edited recently.
You can, if desired, change the Recently Modified Smart Collection to span a different number of days. Click this collection , right click and choose Edit Smart Collection. You can see that the collection criteria is set to be Edit Date > Is in the last
When you do so, Lightroom checks the images in your catalog to determine which images meet this criteria and it displays these in this Smart Collection.
Make your own Smart Collections
In addition to those shipped with Lightroom you can create your own Smart Collections. For example, if you color your images red meaning a certain thing you can create a Smart Collection that contains all the images which are colored red.
To do this, click to open the Collections panel, click the plus symbol and choose Create Smart Collection. Type a name for it such as Red Images, click Inside a Collection Set and choose to add it to the Smart Collections set. From the options below select Label color is red.
Click Create to create the collection – it will contain all images in your collection which have the red label color associated with them.
Remove an Image from a Smart Collection
The only way you can remove an image from a Smart Collection is to configure it so it no longer meets the criteria for the Smart Collection. For example an image will no longer appear in the Without Keywords collection if you add a keyword to it.
You can remove an image from the Red Images collection if you remove or change its color label. When it no longer has the red color label associated with it, it will no longer appear in the collection.
Similarly, if you apply the red color label to an image in Lightroom it will be automatically added to the Red Images Smart Collection.
One of the benefits of Smart Collections is that they’re continually updated by Lightroom. So Lightroom ensures that all the images which match the criteria you use to define the Smart Collection are in that collection.
How Smart Collections differ from Regular Collections
Smart Collections behave differently to Regular Collections in a few key ways. One difference is that you cannot arrange images in a Smart Collection into your own custom order.
The collection order can only be set to one of the Lightroom default Sort Order options; Capture Time, Edit Order, Edit Time, Edit Count, Rating, Pick, Label Text, Label Color, File Name, File Extension, File Type and Aspect Ratio. Regular collections, on the other hand, can be sorted into User Order which is useful for slideshows and web pages for example.
You also cannot set a Smart Collection as the Target Collection because you cannot add images to a Smart Collection manually. It can only be added if it matches the criteria which describes that collection.
Over to you .. Do you use Smart Collections in Lightroom and, if so, how do you use them? Do you use the shipped collections or make your own?
Quickly Converting your Image to Black and White with this shortcut key
The simplest way to convert an image to black and white is to press the letter V. This is a toggle so press it once to turn the image into black and white and again to make it a color image.
You can also convert an image to black and white by clicking the B&W option in the HSL/Color/B&W panel.
If Auto is enable click it to get a black and white conversion tailored to the needs of the image.
And, if the sliders are already all at different values you can reset them all to zero by holding Alt (Option on the Mac) and then click the ‘Reset black and white mix” option. Choose which is the best starting point for your conversion and progress from there.
If Auto is enabled, click it to get a black and white mix appropriate to the image.
I’ve been working on a project which involves adding shapes to a PowerPoint slide using VBA.
One big big problem with PowerPoint is that there is no longer any macro recorder. This means you can’t get information about methods and properties by recording the steps you perform to, for example, add a shape to a slide. In other programs you can get a lot of useful information from recorded macros – in PowerPoint – nada!
So, if you, like me are struggling to make sense of a language that uses such wonderfully nonsensical properties like TextFrame.TextRange then here is the benefit of my research.
Here, in no particular order, is a grab bag of MSDN articles and references for adding and formatting (and adding text to) shapes in PowerPoint using VBA. Enjoy! and if you have any additional useful resources, please add them to the comments to keep us all from going crazy!
Here I show you how to create works of art using your images in Photoshop. Included is how to find and select texture images to use, how to blend these into the image and, how to add a lightening effect to highlight areas of the image to draw attention. Also, included is one method of adding a vignette to an image.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make art from your photos using textures in Photoshop. Before we get started with this video tutorial let’s have a look and see what we’re aiming for. This is the image that we’re aiming for. And quite often when I’m doing these tutorials I’ll play around with a few images before I come up with something that I really want to share. But today it was just this one image, this one texture and the whole thing just blew my mind. So here it is in video form.
To start off with I’m going to show you where I got my textures because these textures are totally awesome and I love this guy’s work and I want to introduce it to you. So this is a Flickr photo stream and the guy is called Skeletal Mess. And he has a whole lot of textures that you can download. Now I downloaded this one. It’s very big but I just want to show you his set that he has on Flickr so you can see the sort of potential for what there is available. Now with this particular image I was having a look through his sets and just having a look to see what I might use. And this one really spoke to me and I’m going to show you why because we’ll go back to the image that I have and we’ll see why blue worked particularly well for this image. So let’s just wind back what I’ve done.
So I’m just going to the layers palette for this image and let’s go and create a brand new image. Okay, so here’s our duplicate image that we’re going to work with. That was what we were aiming for so now I’m going to take away the pieces that went to make up this image. Now you’ll see why I thought that that blue texture would work particularly well here because this image has no sky and if we can borrow the blue from this texture then that would give us an awesome result. We could have used this one too or this one and perhaps just rotated them. But this one really spoke to me so I downloaded that. So I’m just going to grab it now because whenever I download an image even though I can just drag and drop it into Photoshop I’ll also save it just in case I want to use it again later on.
So I’m just going to bring it in here. It’s a whole lot smaller than my image but because it’s a texture that doesn’t really matter. So now I’m going to grab the move tool and just size it to fit all the way across my image. And again because it’s a texture it doesn’t matter that it’s pulled a little bit out of square. So it’s been pulled a little bit wider than it was tall. The next thing I’ll do is just run down these blend modes and just see what it gives me because this is like totally the most exciting thing that you get to do. So I’ll just select Dissolve and then we’ll just run down these blend modes until we get what we’re looking at. And Multiply I think is probably the one I’m going to come back and use but let’s just see what there is in this list. And it was at the point at which I got to that Multiply blend mode that I thought I actually had something I really wanted to work with but you might find other things here that are speaking to you. There’s a whole lot of potential. I usually run down the list and then come back up and by then I’ve pretty much made my choice as to what is working for me. This one possibly but it’s not nearly as good as the Multiply one. So here’s the Multiply blend mode applied to this image.
Now having achieved that I thought in actual fact the middle of the image could be a bit lighter. So what I did was I added a brand new layer and from my tools palette which has gone walkabout here I just grabbed the elliptical marquee tool and just dragged out an oval on that image. I switched so that white and black would be my colors and I also added a feather to this. So I’ll choose Select and then Modify Feather. This is not a very sophisticated feather option but I’ll just add a 100 pixel feather radius to it. That just really softens this edge so now when I fill it by pressing Ctrl Backspace, Command Backspace on the Mac, it’s going to have this feathered soft edge. So now Command or Ctrl D to deselect the selection.
Now I have a big white splat right in the middle of image. That’s obviously not going to work but what I’d want to do then is to blend it in so again I’ll just select the first blend mode in the list and then just run down until I find something that works for me. And here’s Overlay blend mode. That’s lightening that image really well in the area where the lightening effect was. I’m thinking that’s probably the blend mode of choice. But let’s just go and check these others particularly in this lighter area with soft light, hard light, vivid light and pin light. You’re never really sure that they’re not going to give you something so I always run through those just in case one is better than the other. So we’re pretty much to the end and Overlay is going to be our choice. So I’m going back up to pick up Overlay. Now this is too white for me so I’m just going to drag down on the opacity of that layer just to make it a little less opaque. I’m also going to test around this area. I’m thinking that some of this lightness is coming through from this layer and it’s probably a bit more than I want.
So again I’m going to add a layer mask to this layer, go and grab a paintbrush and just paint with black with a very small opacity brush, you can see it’s only 26 percent opacity, just to knock out the bits where I think the lightening effect is too much. I really just want it on the front part of this boat. So once I’ve neatened that effect up now I’m thinking a vignette around the edge. Now there’s umpteen ways of adding vignettes. I’m just going to show you one of them. So a brand new layer, I’m going to go back to my marquee tool, this time the rectangular marquee, I’m just going to drag in around about probably an inch into the image and then I’m going to invert the selection, select Inverse so everything that was selected is now not selected.
So I’ve got this outside edge selected. Now I’m going to sample a color from the image by clicking the eyedropper. I’m thinking one of the colors around here is kind of pretty good. It’s sort of dark but not really, really dark. I’m thinking that color was pretty good. And now I’ll Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac, to create that as my fill color. Now I can deselect my selection with Ctrl or Command D. Now this is not looking like a vignette but that’s fine because we’re going to again run down our blend modes and look for something that is going to give us a darkening effect at the edge. Things you would look for are going to be in this light field. Obviously Overlay is going to do it. Multiply will do it as wells. That will always darken everything up a little bit.
So they’re the ones to look out for but also look out for any surprises as you run down. You might see something that gives you an effect that makes you go oh, wow, that is just too amazing. So I’m headed towards probably Overlay. So now it’s still not the vignette effect that I want but I’m going to blur this. So with that layer selected I’m going to go Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Gaussian Blur is an awesome blur for just blurring things to almost oblivion. So here it is at zero radius effectively and now we’re just going to wind it up to soften this edge and pretty much just blend it into the image. And at some point it just becomes a really, really nice soft vignette effect for our image. So I’m just going to click Ok.
So there we have the effect. It’s very, very simple. This is a throwaway image. It’s just the sky is gone. It’s Hong Kong. It’s smoggy. It’s an overcast day. The sky is just nonexistent and I really wouldn’t have given this image a second look except that I was looking for a challenge. Add a really nice texture from Skeleton Mess free online textures from Flickr, add a bit of a highlight in the middle and then add this vignette effect and we’ve got an image that is now a keeper.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel. Please subscribe and also visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom, iPad and a whole lot more.
How to use the Color sliders to change color and remove color casts
When an image has a colorcast or a color that you’re wanting to play down in it, select the Color option in the HSL/Color/B&W panel. Here you can select the color to minimize the impact of and reduce its impact by dragging on the Saturation slider to reduce its saturation. Drag to the right on the Luminance slider to lighten the color.
This tool also allows you to take one color and alter its hue. So, for example you can target yellow and drag it towards green or towards orange by dragging on the Yellow Hue slider. In this way, any color in the image can be adjusted to one of its adjacent colors.
Learn how to type a macro in Excel 2007/2010 & 2013. Covers displaying the Developer tab and how to create your Personal Macro Workbook so you can create and save macros. Then how to create a new macro, save and run it.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a macro in the Visual Basic Editor in Microsoft Excel. First of all you need to make sure that this Developer tab is visible and it’s not by default. So this is Excel 2007. To make it visible you’ll click the Office button here, choose Excel Options and this is the option you want to enable Show Developer Tab in the Ribbon. With that selected the Developer tab then appears in the Ribbon. Now that’s only for Excel 2007. I’m actually going to close Excel 2007 because I’m going to work in 2010, but I just wanted to show you how you could get the Developer tab in 2007.
Now in 2010 and 2013 it’s a bit different. To get the Developer tab there you’ll choose File and then Options. And what you’re going to do is go to Customize Ribbon because only in 2010 and 2013 can you actually customize the Ribbon. And there’s an option here for Developer. So this the Developer tab and again by default it’s disabled so you want to just select it so that it is enabled and click Ok. Now this entire video was prompted by a user who asked me for a macro that would delete every row in a worksheet if there was nothing in column A.
So I have a worksheet here and I have some rows in which there is nothing at all and what we want to do is to delete them. So the first thing we need to do is to make sure that the Developer tab is visible on the Ribbon and then we’re going to actually create this macro. In fact I’m just going to copy and paste it because I just want to show you the basics of creating a macro. This might be one that you’ve been sent or it might be one you find on the web or whatever.
Now before you can actually create a macro inside the place where it’s supposed to be you have to actually have this one file created. And chances are if you’ve never created a macro before you don’t have the very file that you need. The simplest way to resolve that situation is to first before you do anything else go and click Record Macro. And you’re going to store this macro in what is called the personal macro workbook.
If you don’t have it Microsoft Excel creates it for you so that’s why we’re going to the trouble of recording just anything so that we can get this personal macro workbook created. And once it’s created then in future we’ll be able to store macros in it and these macros will always be available to every single worksheet.
Whenever Excel is opened it opens this file and everything is fine and dandy so I’m just going to click Ok. And I’m just going to type a couple of letters in there, press Enter. That’s a macro. That’s all it does and click Stop Recording. I don’t actually want the macro and I don’t actually want the contents of that cell. All I want is this special file that is called personal.xls. So I’m going to click Macros now and you can see here is the macro that we just created in this workbook personal.xls.
It’s personal.xlsb whatever it is for your particular version of Excel. And this is a file that Excel takes care of opening every time you come and open Excel so these macros are always going to be available. Now I want to add a new macro. And the macro I want to add is called remove rows. That’s just what I called it. So I’m going to type the word removerows. Now macro names have to be one whole word. You can’t use spaces but you can use underscores. I’m just going to type removerows.
And now because I don’t have that macro Excel is offering me the option of creating it. But I want to create this in my personal.xlsb workbook so I want to make sure that I select that first. Macro name personal.xlsb workbook, click Create. And what that does is it automatically opens the Visual Basic Editor for me so I don’t have to do all the work. And it also places me right in the middle of this code area which is exactly where I put my macro code. So I have it in a file so I’m just going to copy and paste it. In fact I’m going to do a little bit of the wrong thing so I can show you the result.
I’ve gone and got my file and I’ve copied the macro code to the clipboard and I’m going to paste it in. And you can see that what I did was I bought in the sub and end sub statements. And you can’t have two sets of sub and end sub statements. So the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of the extra statements. And it appears here that my lines have been cut in pieces so I’m just going to make sure that these comments are back in single lines.
So here is my removerows macro. And this has also got cut in two so let’s just neaten things up a little bit. And this is a macro that removes rows in a worksheet where the cell in column is blank. It doesn’t require you to make a selection before running it. However as Undo doesn’t work after running this macro it’s a good idea to back up your worksheet first. Well, that’s good. And I’m just going to while I’m here clean up this macro that I recorded earlier that I didn’t really want to keep but I just created so that I would get this personal.xlsb workbook.
Now that I’ve finished inside the Visual Basic Editor, I’ve created my macro I’m just going to choose File, Close and return to Microsoft Excel. Now the macro is stored not in this particular file but in this special workbook. I want to test it so the first thing I’ll do is to save my file just in case everything goes haywire. The other thing I’m going to do is just for my own purposes is format these particular rows the ones that I want to get rid of with a color. What I want to do is when I get rid of these rows the very first time I run it I just want to make sure that the macro is behaving correctly.
So if it were to do something funny I’ve marked up in orange exactly what I don’t want to see at the end of this macro. So if it were to do something like this, so let’s just go and do Delete Cells, I don’t want it to delete cells. I want it to delete a whole row so if it were to end up with something like this happening I know that my macro isn’t working. So I’m just setting myself up to check to make sure that everything is working correctly when I do run my macro. And if it works perfectly on this worksheet then I’m just going to assume that it’s going to work perfectly every other time in future.
So here we have our worksheet. Now it’s time to run the macro. Now you don’t have to use the Developer tab to do it although you can. But you can use the View tab. We’re going to Macros and here are our macros and the macros are in personal.xlsb. And the one we want to run is called removerows so I’m just going to click to run it. All the orange highlighting is gone and everything that is left are just rows that have data in column A.
So that’s how you would create a macro yourself if you found it on the web or you downloaded it from somewhere or were given it in the Visual Basic Editor in Excel. Once the personal.xlsb workbook has been created the first time you don’t have to go through that record macro step. That’s only to create that file the very first time. From now on Excel is going to take care of that file. If you’re prompted to save it when you exit Excel, say yes because you do want to save all the data that you’ve created in it. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for tips, tricks and tutorials on a whole range of Office programs.
Five Must Know Features of the Photoshop Brush Tool
Brushes are used a lot in photo editing from removing blemishes and smoothing skin to dodging and burning and painting on masks. Here are five important features of the brush tool in Photoshop.
1. Adjust Size, Opacity and Hardness from the Keyboard
When a brush is selected you can adjust its size without having to open the Brushes palette by clicking the [ and ] keys on your keyboard.
Provided a brush is selected you can change its Opacity by typing a number. For example, type 5 to set Opacity to 50%, type 1 for 10% and 0 for 100%.
To adjust the hardness of the brush hold the Shift key as you tap either the [ or ] keys on the keyboard. Each tap increases or decreases the hardness by 25% in the range 0%-100%. The results of doing this are harder to see as there is no hardness indicator on the tool options bar. However, if you have the Painting Cursor set to Normal Brush Tip in preferences you will see a difference in the brush size as you do so
2. Save the Brush
When you have a brush configured with your preferred settings, save it as a Tool preset. To do this from the Brush Preset list in the top left of the screen click the Create New Tool Preset button and type a name for the preset. Click Ok.
In future you can select this saved preset from the list and just start painting with it.
3. Disappearing Brushes
One of the very annoying things that will happen to most of us at one time or another is to have the brush appear to disappear. Instead of the regular brush cursor which shows the size and style of the brush you will see a crosshair cursor.
The issue is not with the brushes themselves but is with the Caps Lock key. If you disable Caps Lock on your keyboard the more visual brush cursor will reappear.
4. Paint a Straight Line
To paint in a straight line, click at one end of the line, hold the Shift key and click at the other end of the line. This draws a continuous brushstroke between both points.
If you adjust the spacing of your brush by using the Brush panel Spacing option to make it more than 100% you can create a line of dots this way.
This can also be used to remove power lines with the Spot Healing Brush Tool. Click at one end of the power line, Shift + Click at the other end to paint a straight line over the power line and it will be removed automatically.
5. Quickly Show the Brush Panel
You can quickly show the Brush panel so you can choose a brush to use by first selecting a tool that uses a brush such as the Brush Tool, Dodge, Burn, Eraser tool and so on.
Then right click on the image and the brush panel appears automatically. To select a brush and exit the panel in one step, double click the brush to use.
And now it is over to you. What other features of Brushes do you think are valuable for photographers to know?
