Sunday, December 9th, 2012

Create an HTML web gallery in Lightroom

With the increasing popularity of the iPad and iPhone it’s no longer appropriate for most of us to create Flash based web galleries – they just can’t be easily viewed on these devices. If you want almost everyone to be able to see your galleries then you need to create them as HTML galleries and not Flash.

Lightroom has a range of HTML Templates you can use to create a reasonable looking gallery in a very short time.

To make your web gallery in Lightroom start by placing your images in a Collection. This makes it easier for you to work with the images and you can save the gallery so you can edit it in future if needed.

Select your Collection and switch to the Web module. From the Layout Style options, you can select Lightroom HTML gallery or, easier still, from the Template Browser panel on the left of the screen, select a gallery that is HTML based. If you look in the preview area the HTML gallery templates all have the letters HTML in their bottom left corner. Select a template to use.

From the toolbar (press T if it isn’t visible), choose All Filmstrip Photos if you have a Collection selected and this will add all the images to your gallery. What you see on the screen in the editing area is a live version of your web gallery. You can click on any image to view it as it will look on the web.

Open the Site Info panel and type a Site Title, a Collection Title and a Collection Description. If you don’t want to use all of these simply delete the placeholder text for those items you don’t want to use and the space they take up in the template will be freed for use for your images.

For the Contact Info, type your contact name if desired and then complete the Web Or Mail Link and this will be linked automatically to the contact name in the web gallery.

You can add an identity plate to the gallery, if desired, it will sit above the Site Title. You can link it back to your site if desired by completing the Web or Mail Link box.

The Color Palette options let you change the colors for the various elements in the website template.

In the Appearance panel you can set the thumbnail image grid size – it defaults to 3 x 3 and cannot be any smaller but it can be considerably larger. If you want to show cell numbers over the images you can do so – this is useful when you need to give viewers an easy way to identify images they like. Images are numbered sequentially and if you have multiple pages the images on the second page continue sequentially from the numbering from the first page.

You can control the size of the full size image on the Image Page by adjusting the Size slider. You can also add Photo Borders to the images in the Image Pages. Note that the Appearance panel is divided into Common Settings, Grid Pages and Image Pages allowing you to make change that effect the entire gallery, only the grid pages or only the image pages.

In the Image Info panel you can select to add labels to your images. These appear on the Image Page only. You can select a Title which appears above the image and a Caption which appears below the image. For each you can source the text from the image metadata and there is no reason why you can’t set the Title to be the Caption metadata and the Caption to be your Equipment metadata, for example.

In Output Settings select the quality of the larger size JPG images – 0 is low quality and 100 is high quality. If you want to include Metadata with the image select what to include – your choices are Copyright Only or All.

Also add a Watermark if desired. If you select to add a watermark, you’ll see it on the image page and the index pages so you can check to see that it’s what you want.

Select whether or not to sharpen the images – this sharpening is only applied as the images are output so you won’t see it on the screen. If you’re unsure what to use, enable Sharpening and set it to Standard.

When you’re done, click Create Saved Web Gallery – this is a new option in Lightroom 4 and it appears to the top right of the main editing area. Type a name for your web gallery and click Create. Doing this ensures that the gallery is saved and once you have done this, Lightroom will track your changes from now on.

In future you can come back to the web gallery by clicking the special collection that Lightroom creates for you.

If you want to upload your gallery to the web later on, click Export to export it to disk. Otherwise you can upload it direct to your website by selecting the Upload Settings panel and configure your FTP server. For this, you’ll need your server details, user name and password. You’ll also need the server path although you can click Browse to browse your server to find it if desired. Type a subfolder in which to place the gallery – you’ll need to do this if you plan to have multiple galleries in the server folder you are using. Each gallery needs to be placed in a different subfolder or it will overwrite the previously uploaded gallery.

When you have everything configured click Upload to render the gallery images, create the necessary html code and upload it all automatically to your server.

The HTML galleries in Lightroom aren’t the best looking galleries in town but having a gallery accessible to almost any device is definitely and incentive to use them in place of Flash galleries.

Helen Bradley

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Friday, December 7th, 2012

Trevor Quick Photoshop Tip – Duplicate a Layer

Original photo by: Falk Schaaf

Need an exact copy of a layer? Select the layer – click the layer in the Layer palette – not the thumbnail and press Ctrl + J on a PC and Command + J on a Mac. The new layer will appear above the original layer and will have “copy” added to the original layer name.

Helen Bradley

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Wednesday, December 5th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Illustrator Tip – Rotate Objects

Angle of your object not right?  You can rotate it by selecting the object, hover just outside one of the bounding boxes corners. Your cursor will change to a curved double headed arrow and when it does you can rotate the object by clicking and dragging it until you get the perfect rotation..

Helen Bradley

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Monday, December 3rd, 2012

Photoshop Quick Fix for dull foggy images

Photoshop Levels offers is a simple way to fix dull, lifeless images. Learn how to apply a Levels Adjustment layer to an image, how to read the histogram chart and how to use it to fix your image in seconds.


Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you a quick fix for a dull or muddy looking image. This is an image that lacks tonal range. It lacks contrast and we’re going to give it a punch and we’re going to do it quickly and easily. In this video tutorial I’m going to show you how you’re going to fix an image that looks a bit like this. This image is what I would call muddy. It actually lacks tonal contrast. There no blacks in this image. We’ve got some light pixels around the sky area but there are no blacks. And the result is that the image looks a bit foggy, a little muddy, a little lacking in tonal range, lacking in contrast and the color is a little bit flat as well. And this is the fix that we can apply to the image extremely quickly and Photoshop will actually tell us how to make the fix. It will tell us what’s wrong with the image and how to fix it. So let’s have a look and see how we’ll do this.

To start off with, with the image open in Photoshop I’m going to choose Window and then Layers because I want to see this layer’s palette. Now we’re going to choose an adjustment layer. It’s exactly the same as making an adjustment except this time it is editable, and we would like to get you started using adjustment layers because it gives you a little bit more power in Photoshop. So we’re going to choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer. And the one that we’re going to use is called levels. So let’s just click on Levels and see what we get. We get offered to add a new layer so I’ll click Ok to say yes. And then we get this dialogue here. Now this might look a little bit confusing but it’s actually Photoshop telling us what’s wrong with the image and giving us a chance to fix it. This is the pixels in the image. It’s a histogram. And what Photoshop has gone and done is it’s had a look at every single pixel in the image, how light or dark it is, and it’s counted up how many really dark ones it has and how many middle tone ones and how many light ones. And it’s done that for all the 255 tonal ranges in this image. So we got from 0 to 255. And it’s telling us how many pixels are in each of those ranges of tone. And this is black and this is white. So you see that we’ve got a few pixels very, very white and then a lot of pixels in that sort of light white area which is of course all around in the sky.

But see here, this is the problem in this image. There are no blacks. There’s nothing in this black area of the histogram. And so levels is not only telling us that but it’s also giving us a chance to fix it. So what we can do is we can drag on this slider here, the one under the chart. I want you to ignore these ones all the way at the bottom. It’s these under the chart that you’re interested in. And when you see the chart doesn’t make it all the way to either end of this histogram you’re just going to drag in until it does. And look what happens to the image as we do that. We’re just going to drag in to give ourselves some black pixels in the image, and then we can adjust this mid tone point as well. We’ll go to the right to darken the image or to the left to lighten the image. And you just need to choose for your image where the best point for that is. And we could come in a little bit here on the whites, perhaps. And certainly if the chart didn’t reach the edge then we would drag in on those whites. So you just need to read your chart and then just drag these little sliders into position. And when you’re done you can just close that dialog.

And there’s our fix. This is the before and this is the after. Photoshop showed us what was wrong with the image and gave us the chance of fixing it. Let’s have a look at another image that also has a similar problem.

This was captured in London on the London I through a fair bit of Perspex glass I should imagine. And also given that London tends towards being a little bit cloudy and gray I think that’s probably not helped this image either. So again, with the layer’s palette visible we’re going to add an adjustment layer, Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Levels, click Ok. Here’s our levels dialog, not unsurprising that we have no black pixels in this image. And in this image we have practically no white ones either. This one is a little bit different. So if we want to perk up the whites we can just bring in this slider here to lighten the whites and stop them being gray and make them white, things like the clock face here and some of the areas around here, this white building probably here. And now let’s drag in on the black slider to get some blacks and then we could adjust the mid tone if we wanted to darken the image or to lighten it and again, it’s to your taste. When you’re done, click the Close button. This is how the image started out and this is how it looks now. And that fix will take you 30 seconds.

Now the benefit of using adjustment layers, if I double click on this you’ll see that it opens up again. And if I think that I haven’t darkened it enough I can darken it up now and close it. So I’m not bound into this fix. I can remove it if I want to or I can double click it to adjust it and just improved it a little bit if I think I haven’t got it perfectly right.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked the video please click the Like button. Consider subscribing to my YouTube channel to be advised when new videos are released. And visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and other applications.

Helen Bradley

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Monday, December 3rd, 2012

Lightroom – harness the power of your scroll wheel

In Lightroom, using the scroll wheel on your mouse has some distinct advantages over using other methods for adjusting sliders. It might take a little getting used to but when you see just what it can do you might be surprised.

Develop module and the Wheel

In the Lightroom Develop module you might have used the + and – keys to adjust sliders to fix your images. If you do this, whenever you pause to see how the change looks when applied to the image, Lightroom writes the change value in the history even if you’re not done. If you readjust the same slider a few times, each time you adjust it a new history entry is made.

By contrast, you can use the scroll wheel to adjust the slider. Begin by clicking on the pin on the slider and then rolling the scroll wheel up to drag it to the right or down to drag it to the left. Not until you let go and go to the next tool will the change be written to the History. This means that you can experiment with different values rolling your mouse wheel left and right as you please – and until you move away from that control nothing is recorded. Your history list will be a whole lot neater and you have a much easier way to adjust the sliders.

Spot removal and the wheel

When you have the Spot Removal Tool, Red Eye Tool or the Adjustment Brush Tool selected you can size the brush to the desired size using the mouse scroll wheel.

To see this at work click any of these three tools to target it and then hold your mouse over the image. Roll with the scroll wheel to adjust the brush size. If you have the Adjustment Brush targeted then hold the Shift key as you roll with the scroll wheel to adjust the feathering on the brush.

Move with the Wheel

If you’re have used the Zoom feature to zoom into the image then rolling the mouse scroll wheel will move the zoomed image up or down in the work area. To scroll to the left or right use the Shift key with the mouse wheel.

A caveat…

It seems that some Mac users have experienced difficulty with the scroll wheel on various machines so your mileage with this technique may vary. On a Windows 7 machine, with Lightroom 4 and a standard two button mouse with a scroll wheel, everything worked as explained and it’s a whole lot easier than dragging sliders around to make your changes.

Thanks to Frank Schophuizen for his gracious contribution to this post.

Helen Bradley

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Saturday, December 1st, 2012

Free Hand Drawn Christmas Tree Brushes for Photoshop

Just in time for the holiday season, I’ve updated the Photoshop brushes page with a brand new set of Christmas tree brushes. Dress up your greetings cards and gifts with 32 hand drawn trees of all varieties. Best of all, it’s completely free! Happy holidays!

Download the free Christmas Tree brush set here!

Helen Bradley

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Friday, November 30th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Photoshop Tip – Entire Layer a Selection

original photo by: Gisela Royo

To select the content on just one layer of your image to work on it or to make a mask from it, Ctrl + Click on the layer thumbnail on a PC (Command + Click on the Mac). Once the contents of that layer is selected you can work with it.

Helen Bradley

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Thursday, November 29th, 2012

Photoshop’s Amazing Circles

Learn to turn 360 degree panoramas and other images into Amazing Circles, mini planets—whatever you want to call them.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to make amazing circles in Photoshop. Before we look at how you can create an amazing circle let’s have a look and see exactly what we’re talking about. This is one of the Flicker set on amazing circles and this is a really, really nice amazing circle. And we’re going to create something like this but not with a white background. And there’s these here. They’re in black and white and they’re showing you There are two sorts of amazing circles we can create, either one that has all the detail on the outside or one that has all the detail on the inside.

So now you’ve seen what we’re aiming for let’s go and see how we would create this effect ourselves. I’m just going to open Photoshop and I have an image already prepared here. This is a panoramic image. It’s actually of the Seine in Paris. Now you could use any panorama to do it. Now the problem with my panorama is that of course it doesn’t wrap around but I have begun to create a duplicate of the tree on this end of the image so it will sort of partially wrap around. I’ll need to do a bit of cloning to fix it when I’ve actually done my amazing circle but this is a strip. If you’ve got a 360 degree panorama it will be even better. Add a little bit of image to the top and bottom of your panorama. What you want is an image that’s roughly four times as wide as it is high so I’ve added a bit of white on either side. And this will be either the outside or the inside of the amazing circle when we create it.

The first step is to resize the image. So I’m going to choose Image and then Image Size. I’m going to deselect Constrain Proportions because although this image is 8,000 x 2,000 I want it to be square but without losing any of the content. So I’m going to be deselect Constrain Proportions and type 8,000 in here because that’s the largest of these two values, so now I’m going to get a square image quite a bit larger than it was, and click Ok. And let’s just zoom out a bit so that you can see that this is the image just all squeezed up.

Now what we do next is to rotate the image and that gives us one of two possible amazing circles. So before we do that I’m just going to duplicate this image so that we have two images that we can make circles from. So you can see the two alternative shapes. Let’s start with this one and we’re going to just rotate it 180 degrees. So I’m going to choose Image, Image Rotation 180 degrees just to flip it upside down. And then all the work is done by what’s called a polar coordinates filter. It’s Filter, Distort, Polar Coordinates. And let’s just squeeze this up because rectangular to polar is the option that we want. The other option is polar to rectangular and that’s not the one we want. So now that we’ve got rectangular to polar I’m just going to click Ok. And that’s our amazing circle. That’s as easy as it is. You’ll see I’ll need to clone a little bit through the seam area because I didn’t do a very good job of making a circular panorama. But there is our amazing circle.

Now because we’ve flipped it upside down this one has the sky area on the outside and the river on the middle. This one’s going to be the opposite. Let’s just run the filter on this one without turning it upside down before we start. Just size the display, we can see what it’s going to look like and click Ok. And as you can see here the sky is on the inside and the river Seine would be on the outside. You can use whichever you like for your amazing circle.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Please if you enjoyed the tutorial, like it on YouTube. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel. Subscribe if you will. You can also visit projectwoman.com where you’ll find lots more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Illustrator and lots more.

Helen Bradley

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Wednesday, November 28th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Photoshop Tip – Resize an image

original Photo By: Gisela Royo

To resize the content on a layer or an object in Photoshop CS6 bring up the bounding box or transform controls by pressing Ctrl + T on a PC or Command + T on a Mac. When the controls appear you can drag on them to resize the object. To resize the background layer of an image you’ll first have to transform it to a regular layer by double clicking it in the layer palette and click Ok.

Helen Bradley

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Monday, November 26th, 2012

Photoshop – Quick Portrait Makeover

Touch up your portraits with this quick video tutorial. I’ll show you how to remove blemishes and soften skin tones.


Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can do a quick and easy portrait makeover.

Let’s have a look and see before we begin exactly what we’re going to achieve. So this is the starter image that I started off with. And I did some spot fixing on it to make sure that I had removed the skin blemishes and then I brought out the detail from the shadows. And this is the starting point that I then had and this is the effect that we’re going to look at creating. We’re going to soften the skin and brighten the eyes in our model. So let’s have a look and see how we would start off with spot fixing this image.

I would go into this image and then I would start by selecting the spot healing brush tool here because this is a tool that you can simply just paint over problems on the skin and it will fix them. So I went over this image really, really carefully. I zoomed in and I got every single one of the blemishes on this model’s skin and it’s probably a five minute job to just neaten the image up and just to get a really good starting point for it. And then having done that I did a shadows and highlights adjustment to bring some detail out of the shadows. So I’ll choose Image, Adjustments, Shadows/Highlights. And the default setting is 35. Now I used that. It was probably a little bit high. So you could probably bring it down a little bit perhaps to around 23 or 24, but there’s a good starting point for your image. And from there you’re ready to go ahead with the softening effect.

So let’s go back to the image that I’ve spot fixed and now let’s get rid of the two layers that are the fixed layers. And we’re just going to work from the point at which we opened up some of the shadows and highlights. So the first thing that we’re going to do is to create a duplicate of this background layer, just duplicate it and then we’re going to blur it. So I’m going to choose Filter, Blur, and then Gaussian Blur. I’m going to set the blur value to sort of a lowish sort of value. What I want to do is blur the model’s skin and use that in a minute to paint over her skin. So I want something that’s sort of a little bit over what I want my final effect to be but not totally over. So I’m thinking here about 9 or 10 pixels will be a good amount for this image, so I’ll just click Ok.

And having blurred that layer a little bit I want to add a bit of noise into it and I’ll do Filter, Noise and then Add Noise. And we want to bring in monochromatic noise and we want it to be Gaussian. Gaussian noise applies more noise to the lighter areas of the image and less to the darker areas. And we want probably somewhere between 5 and 10 percent noise. And this slider is really hard to adjust at that level so I’m just going to type in 7.5 percent and that’s giving us a nice little bit of noise in her skin tones, so I’ll click Ok.

So we do not want the image to look exactly like this. We just want that to be a starting point. So let’s add a mask to this layer. I’m going to Alt or Option click on the Add Layer Mask icon. And what that does is removes the blur. it will remove the entire effect from the model. And we’re going to paint on this mask to bring back in the softening where we want it to be. So I’m going to select my brush tool and select a nice soft brush, this one’s a good brush to use, and I’m going to paint with white. I’m just going to size the brush up a little bit. Now you’ll be a bit more careful than I am being, but what I’m doing is selecting over all the areas, painting over all the areas that I want the skin to be softened. So that is basically everywhere but her nose and mouth and eyes. Although I want the skin on her nose to be softened, I don’t want to soften this detail around here. And I may want to soften this area, but I don’t want to soften her eyebrows themselves. So very carefully softening by painting on the image with white in the areas that you want it to be softened. And you can see on the mask here the areas that we’ve got and perhaps any areas that we might have missed out on at this stage. Again, I don’t want to soften that jaw line too much. that’s a nice strong line and I want to keep that there.

Now that I’ve done that I can adjust the opacity of this layer a little bit. I’m going to adjust it down to zero which is totally removing the sharpening effect. And now I’m just going to march it up using the scrubby slider until I get the amount of softening that I want. So I really want a subtle softening, not totally obvious but just subtle softening of the skin. And I think probably about 30 percent is a good value for this image.

Now I’m going to make another duplicate of this background layer and drag it to the top because what I want to do now is to fix her eyes. So all I’m going to do is focus on this top layer and I’m going to look for some stronger color and contrast in her eyes. So I’m going to choose Image, Adjustments, Curves. Curves is a good adjustment for this and again I’m going for slightly more than I need. So there is some more whites in her eye. Now I know that the blue color of her eye is in this area, so let’s add a bit more contrast through that area.

So let’s see. That’s the before and that’s the after on her eye. So I’m just going to click Ok to accept that, but of course that’s not the image effect that we what. We want more of this effect, but we’d like to borrow some of the eyes from this effect. So again I’m going to Alt or Option click on the Add Mask icon to add a layer mask. And again with my paintbrush which is already preset and my white paint I’m going to target the mask and paint over her eye. Now again this is probably going to be too much, but we can tone it down a little bit by again adjusting the opacity of the mask. So we’ll just take it up to what we want it to be. I am thinking it’s probably going to be a little too much, maybe about 50 percent.

So let’s have a look at the starting point for the image. This is post having been spot fixed and post having had shadows and highlights applied to it. Then we added the skin softening and finally we added a little bit brighter eyes in our portrait.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please click to like it on YouTube. Consider also subscribing to my YouTube channel. You’ll be advised when new videos are launched and right now that’s about twice a week. You can also visit my website projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements. Lightroom, Illustrator and more.

Helen Bradley

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Sunday, November 25th, 2012

Help! Lightroom Lost My Files

If there’s one thing that confuses new Lightroom users it is that quite often files that should be in Lightroom appear to have gone missing. Here are some things to look out for when this happens to you.

Is a Filter Hiding Things?

If you think a folder should be displaying more images than it does, check that there is not a Custom Filter in place. In the Library module, make sure the Filmstrip is visible and if there is a filter listed in the Filter box then that’s affecting what you’re seeing. To return to showing all your images in the currently selected folder, select Filters Off from the Filters list.

Are you looking in the right place?

While Lightroom’s folders mimic the folder structure on your computer and external drives sometimes you really want to look through all the files in Lightroom. To do this, open the Catalog panel in the Library and select All Photographs. This selects all the photographs in the Lightroom catalog as the basis of your search.

Images in Subfolders

If you click on a folder that has subfolders but you see nothing or none of the images in the subfolder that is typically caused by a Lightroom setting. This setting lets you control whether or not you see photos in subfolders when you click that folder in the Library module. To view the current setting choose the Library menu > Show Photos in Subfolder. The setting can be enabled or disabled depending on your preferences but it’s often the cause of photos in subfolders not showing when you think they should be there.

Look in Folders and not Collections (or vice versa)

Lightroom has folders and collections and they can have the same name. You’ll find Collections in the Collections panel and folders in the Folders panel. A collection can include files from a number of folders but a folder can only contain images which are stored in that folder on your disk, so make sure you’re looking for the right folder or collection.

Contents of Smart collections Change

Regular collections are fixed so that the images, once placed in the collection, remain in that collection until you remove them. Smart Collections are dynamic so the images in them change depending on the criteria you have set for them. For example, the 5 Star Smart Collection shows all images that are 5 Star images. If you make an image a 5 star image it automatically gets added to that collection. If you change a 5 star image to a 4 star one then it no longer appears in that Smart Collection and that might be the cause of images going ‘missing’.

Search for Lost Images

If you’ve lost photos and you know roughly when they were captured or which camera you captured them with it is possible to search your Lightroom collection for them. Start in the Library and click the Catalog panel and click All Photographs. Then choose View > Show Filter Bar. Click Metadata and you can then locate images by their metadata. For example if you know the approximate capture date was January 2012 then make sure that the first filter is set to Date and click 2012 and then January. This will show only those images that you shot during that time.

It’s also possible to filter by camera, lens and other metadata. You’ll just need to make sure that the primary field that you are filtering on is the one on the left of the Filter Bar. Images are filtered from left to right so, if the leftmost panel is Date and the one to its right is Camera type – you’ll see the camera types for only those photos shot on the specified date. If Camera type is the leftmost column and Date the rightmost one, then you’ll filter out all the images captured with a certain camera and see only those dates you actually captured images with it.

Lightroom Can’t Find the Image

Sometimes Lightroom will display an image with a question mark in its corner indicating that the photo is missing. This means that the image was imported into Lightroom but Lightroom can’t find it any longer. To return it to Lightroom, click its question mark icon and you’ll be prompted to locate the image on disk. Click Locate, find the image on disk, select it and it will appear again and it will be editable inside Lightroom.

Lightroom Lost the Entire Folder

If you move or rename a folder on your disk outside Lightroom then Lightroom won’t know what you’ve done. If there are photos in the Lightroom catalog in that folder it will report the entire folder as missing when you launch it next. Missing folders will have a question mark beside their name. If you know where you moved the folder or that you renamed it, you need to tell Lightroom where it is. To do this, right click the folder in Lightroom and choose Find Missing Folder then locate the folder on disk and Lightroom will update accordingly.

A Folder is Missing Some Files

If you have a folder which you think should have more images in it than are currently showing in Lightroom this could well be the case. The Lightroom folder structure mimics the disk folder structure but only those images you import into Lightroom will actually be in Lightroom. It is also possible to remove images from Lightroom but in such a way as they remain on disk.

To check to see if there are additional images in a folder that aren’t showing in Lightroom, right click the folder in Lightroom and choose Synchronize Folder. Make sure that the Show Import Dialog before Importing option is enabled and select Synchronize. This shows the import dialog and those images that are in the folder but not in Lightroom so you can synchronize the contents of the folder with Lightroom.

Now it’s over to you. Have you ever experienced missing files in Lightroom and, if you did, what was the cause and how did you resolve the issue?

Helen Bradley

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Friday, November 23rd, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Illustrator Tip – Edit in a Group

When you want to edit a specific part of a group of shapes without ungrouping everything to do so double click the grouped shape to enter isolation mode. Now select the object that you want to edit and make your changes. When you’re done double click outside the grouped shapes to exit isolation mode. This works for groups contained within groups as well.

Helen Bradley

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Thursday, November 22nd, 2012

Photoshop Landscape Glow Effect

Quickly learn how to create a Landscape glow effect in Photoshop to give your photos a dreamlike quality.


Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to apply a landscape glow effect.

Before we get started with creating this landscape glow effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for. This is the original image that I’m starting with. It’s from sxc.hu which is a stock image site and this is just a little house in the middle of a paddock. And this is the result of applying my landscape glow effect to it. The image has a bit more of a glow to it and a slightly more painterly look. I have another image that I’ve applied it to. Let’s just hide that one for now. Let’s have a look and see what this image looked like before. Again it’s a stock image and this is what it looks like after we’ve applied the effect.

So let’s get started creating this effect. I’m just going to remove these three layers from this image, and let’s see how we would do the effect ourselves. We’re going to start on the background layer of the image. And we’re going to choose Select and then Color Range because this allows us to pick out the darker areas of the image without having to make a selection which is really nice because they would be really hard to identify otherwise. So I’m just clicking to select shadows. And Photoshop has automatically selected all the shadow dark areas of my image so I’m just going to click Ok. And this is the selection it has made.

Now I’m going to put this on a new layer so I’m going to choose Layer, New, Layer via Copy. And that’s going to copy the blacks onto their own layer. So you can see this is what we’ve got. I’m actually going to hide that layer for now. Now I’m going to make two additional copies of the background layer. I’m going to right click it and choose Duplicate Layer and click Ok and then do that again. With the topmost of these duplicate layers I’m going to set its blend mode to Screen and that will lighten the image considerably. And then I’m going to merge this layer into the layer below by choosing Layer, Merge Down.

Now I have a lighter version of the image on top of the original. And I’m going to duplicate this so I have two light versions of the image on top of each other. And I’m going to set the blend mode for this particular top layer to Multiply and that will darken it all again. Now with this darkened layer I want to blur it so I’m going to choose Filter, Blur, and then Gaussian Blur. And I’m going to set my blur to a quite high value, something like sort of 9 or 10 but in that sort of higher value area so I’m going to get this sort of glow look to my image and click Ok.

So there’s my blurred darkened layer, my light layer underneath and my original layer below. And now that I’m ready to do so I’m going to make the top layer this dark tree visible again. And you can see that in actual fact the pixels in that layer are really quite light in comparison now to the rest of the image underneath. And I can even make it lighter by blending this particular tree back in in Screen mode and then just adjust the opacity down to suit. So that’s giving my landscape a very sort of glow look. It’s a lot richer color and a lot more of a glow look to it.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this video tutorial. Thank you for joining me for it. If you liked the tutorial please like it on YouTube and subscribe to my YouTube channel to be advised when new videos are released which is a couple of times a week. You can also visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Illustrator and others.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:00 am0 Comments - links to this post

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

Free Hand Drawn Bird Brushes for Photoshop

Some of you may already know that I’m a bit of a brush junkie, and hopefully you’ve checked out Project Woman’s brush collections before. If not, now is the perfect time! I’ve recently updated the page to include a new collection of adorable hand-drawn bird brushes. The set is entirely free and all pertinent licence information is included.

I update the collections regularly, so make sure to keep an eye out for any new brushes!

Download the bird brush set here!

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 3:00 pm0 Comments - links to this post

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Photoshop Tip – Change your Units of measure

original photo by: John De Boer

Need to change the units of measure on your rulers from pixels to inches or vice versa? To do this, right click on either of the rulers and select the measurement you’d like to use. Options include Pixels, Inches, Centimeters, Millimeters, Points, Picas and Percent. Bonus tip – this works in Illustrator too.

 

 

Helen Bradley

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posted by Trevor Payne @ 8:00 am0 Comments - links to this post

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