Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Photo editing with Photoshop Express on the iPad

download: Photo Express on the iPad – free

When it comes to apps sometimes you get great value in free apps and other times you get rubbish. Photoshop Express falls somewhere between the two extremes – it isn’t rubbish but it’s far from great.

Photoshop Express has a very strange interface which left me tapping furiously on the screen trying to get it to do something – anything!  The problem is you have to swipe the screen to adjust the intensity of the edit? So, to increase saturation you choose the Saturation option then swipe across to the right to increase it or to the left to decrease – Ok – where exactly did that interface metaphor come from? I feel like I missed class that day and there is nothing  on the screen that makes this behaviour easy to discover.

Interface complaints aside this app lets you crop and fix your images and apply some effects to it.

Here is the crop/straighten/rotate/flip options:

Here is the image with contrast and saturation improved:

The noise reduction tool requires you to buy an add-in – OMG Adobe just gets some things sadly wrong and this is one of them! Either give the program away or don’t but why do they make one fix a pay for feature? It makes no sense – and they could just have easily left out noise reduction altogether. If you want this feature, expect to pay a hefty $4.99 for it.

In the border area there are a handful of free borders and others you can buy but which you can preview on your image first – this is useful so you get to see how they look before you commit to buying them. They come as an all in pack of 22 borders for $1.99.

There is also a small range of effects you can apply by selecting the effect to add to the image.

A lot of folks will download this app because it is from Adobe. Lots of these same folks will be wondering why they bothered to do so. This app is competent but it is hard to look past the silly in-app purchases and the screwball interface – Adobe is better than this – this app damages the company’s reputation – why not do something like they have at photoshop.com?

You don’t have to reinvent interfaces for the iPad and you don’t have to make up new interface gestures for adjusting images when a slider will do just fine – if you use sliders folks can see the slider and work out quickly how to use it – instead here with the swiping you really have to guess how to make the thing work and you shouldn’t have to do that.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am0 Comments - links to this post

Monday, April 9th, 2012

Grunge an image with Pixlr-o-matic on the iPad

Download: Pixlr-o-matic on the iPad free

I love this app but wish it worked in landscape and didn’t force me to work in portrait. It is from Autodesk who are the unsung heroes of the iPad photo editing app world. They do great stuff – way better in general than Adobe when it comes to iPad stuff.

Not only that but this app is also available online so you can use it on your desktop in a browser or download a standalone version – all cool and all free! You can buy extras if you like so you can buy extra frames and effects and you get lots for your money.

Start by capturing an image or import one from your gallery. Then click the first of the options across the foot of the screen – these are filters. Here you can browse the gallery of options – you can instantly view the filter on the image or keep scrolling to try something out if you don’t like the result of your first choice. I chose Lucas for this image:

Then select the Lightbulb icon and apply a lighting effect to the image. I added Bubble to this image.

Then click the frame option and add a frame – I chose Flowery.

I would like a tool for cropping the image as I really prefer to use square images for these types of effects and you cannot do it in Pixlr-o-matic so you  have to do it before you come to this program.

The icon in the top right of the screen lets you apply a random mix of settings to your image – it’s a sort of “I feel lucky solution” – worth trying if you just want to see what the program can do.

Your save options are to the Photo Gallery or iTunes – it would be nice to see some integration with, say, Facebook or Twitter too?

I love Pixlr-o-matic on the desktop and the iPad. I have bought all the extras because you can never have too many cool features and I am willing to overlook some minor frustrations like no crop and portrait mode for the sake of art!

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am1 Comment - links to this post

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Cool hand drawn frames for Photoshop

Here at Projectwoman we’ve been busy with our sketchbooks creating some great looking hand drawn frames for Photoshop. These frames are available for Photoshop, Gimp and Photoshop Elements and we’ve included instructions for all the applications.

The frame sets sell for ninety-nine ¢ which is way less than your morning coffee — in fact you could buy three sets and have change left over.

We’ve created two sets of square frames because we think you just can’t get enough of square frames. We have a luscious floral set and a great set of speech bubble frames from our newest illustrator all ready for your photos.

There are circles, rectangles, simple frames and complex frames. Every one of them is hollowed out in the middle so that you can easily place your image in it and they are created as PNG files with opacity built into them. All you do is open your image, drag it in and it all works! And just in case you need a little more help, the step by step illustrated instructions will get you going instantly.

All the frames are lusciously sized at somewhere around 2,500 pixels in length or height so they’re a perfect size for framing all your images. Digital SLR images will pop straight into the frames and if you’re shooting with an iPhone or your brand new iPad 3, just size them down a little bit and you’re ready to go. Here are the framesets that we’ve got linked to the shopping cart page. Click a set and you’re ready to go.

Floral Frame Set

floral frame set

Simple Frame Set

simple frame set

Square Frame Set

square frame set

Circle Frame Set

circle frame set

Heavy Line Frame Set

heavy line frame set

Speech Bubble Frame Set

speech bubble frame set

Rectangles Frame Set

rectangle frame set

Square #2 Frame Set

square two frame set

Helen Bradley

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am0 Comments - links to this post

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Photo fixing and painting with PhotoPad

Download: PhotoPad by Zagg for the iPad free

This app is interesting and would be useful if it were more functional. It has a few problems and most annoying is the inability to preview changes on the image before you select them. So you have to apply the effect and then undo it if you don’t like it. It just seems a whole lot more cumbersome to use than many other apps of this genre.

The rotate tool has no grid so lining up a rotation is total hit or miss. And worse still the program adds a colored matt background around the rotated image – wtf? Most photographers won’t want an image on an angle with a colored background showing up just what you did to the image. In reality what we need and want is the option to rotate the image and, at the same time to crop or resize the image to get rid of this skewed background.

There are a range of paint tools which let you sample colors from the image or select your own color and paint onto the image. This paint goes on a layer above the image so you can erase it if desired. There are 4 brush types – soft, hard, square and line but they’re not really different enough or a wide enough range to do much – you’d go to another program if you were serious about doing real painting of an image. Here I just did some fun brush lines.

The fixing tools are limited to color levels, saturation and hue, contrast and brightness and things like redeye.

There are a few filters but the thumbnails don’t indicate well enough what they do so you have to apply them to the image to test them. Basically they’re a pretty lacklustre range of filters which just about sums up this app – lacklustre and hardly worth bothering with – there are far better apps out there which do all this does and more and way more to boot.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am0 Comments - links to this post

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

Find the best photo and graphic editing software

If you’re in the market for some new graphic software the first thing you’ll want to know is what’s the best for you. The folks at findthebest.com have done a lot of the work for you.

Visit the website and you can select to compare a range of applications. I’ve selected Photoshop, ArtRage and Lightroom – 3 very different applications, and then I ran a compare on them. You’ll get a heap of information including the Smart Ranking, what the purpose of the software is, the latest version and all sorts of details including ratings from the key sites such as PC World, PC Magazine, CNET and MacWorld. There’s plenty of information about supported file types, color spaces, help and online resources and whether or not the application runs on Windows or the Mac.

Findthebest.com is a great resource when you’re looking to compare different programs. Use the slideshow tab to view simplified information about each selected application and click the chart to see how the applications compare.

There’s plenty to like about this site when you need to get an overview of the kind of programs that you may want to use.

I think the interface looks a bit similar to those airline ticket site where you can sort by price, category and all sorts of things. Only here, you’ll get the best photo editing programs not a ticket to London!

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 2:00 pm0 Comments - links to this post

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

Photo-editing in Photogene

Download: Photogene for the iPad $2.99

I have had Photogene now for a while but just cranked it up today to see just how it performs. I have to say it has some cool features – sort of an all-round app that could be all things to some people but which hasn’t a huge amount of depth.

It doesn’t have layers but it does have a mask you can paint on to paint on features such as the dodge and burn fixes. I got a bit confused with the presets – they are great for applying effects but they seem to have been added on rather than integrated with the program itself. It’s a minor complaint but you feel like filters and frames appear  in two different places – as regular tools and as presets. Problem is that if you use the presets you get access to some frames that you can’t get to elsewhere – which is a little frustrating if you are a DIY person and like to have better control over your images.

This image was shot in NY and I shot it specially to use for iPad editing. Here I gave it the treatment in Photogene. The image wasn’t perfectly straight so I started with the rotate tool and straightened it.

I cropped it using a 1:1 crop with the Crop tool.

Then I added a vignette using the Burn brush which is a Retouching tool. The built in vignettes didn’t give me the control I wanted and being able to paint the vignette on is great.

When you are dodging and burning you can change from paint to erase by tapping twice on the screen and there is an Intensity slider you can use to dial down the effect.

You can also choose to see the mask overlay which helps you when you’re trying to work out where you painted.

I used the Dodge brush retouching tool in the middle to lighten the image and then applied an effect from the effects collection.

Then I applied a cross process effect. You can do this to the entire image or it can be painted on using the retouch tools.

To finish some adjustments were made to the image saturation, vibrance and clarity.

This was the end of the process in Photogene but I felt the image needed a little something extra. I saved it out of Photogene to the Photo Library.

Then took it to Scratch Camera to add the final touches you see here.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am0 Comments - links to this post

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

Scale a Pattern in Photoshop

I use patterns a lot in Photoshop to fill backgrounds and to apply effects to my images. Problem is that ahead of time I never really know how big the pattern needs to be. If you fill an image with a pattern using Edit > Fill then you get the pattern in the image but at the size it is in the pattern swatch so you get zero control over it.

Instead, if you prefer to add your pattern in a scalable way, apply it using a fill layer. To do this, choose Layer > New Fill Layer > Pattern, click Ok and then select your pattern to fill the layer with.

You will see a Scale slider and you can use this to scale the pattern to suit the image.

If you don’t want it to stay a fill layer, right click the pattern layer and click Rasterize Layer to rasterize it so that you can then do other things with it.

While it remains a pattern fill layer you can double click the layer and rescale the pattern if desired.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 3:45 pm11 Comments - links to this post

Friday, March 30th, 2012

Print Contact Sheets in Lightroom

By Helen Bradley

Historically a contact sheet was a page of images each printed at the same size as the film negative – they were used as a reference for the images on the film roll. They were called contact sheets because the film was placed in close contact with the paper when printing them.

These days the term contact sheet loosely means an arrangement of multiple, small, same size images on a single page usually with some identifying information such as the image filename placed under the image. The purpose is to provide reference to a larger number of images. You may print them to keep or give to a client as a catalog of the images from a shoot, for example.

You can create a contact sheet inside Lightroom and here’s how to do it:

Select a template

Start by selecting the folder or the collection that contains the images that you want to add to the contact sheet.

Launch the Print module and, from the Template Browser, select one of the contact sheet options. There are a few grid layouts including two with square image cells – a 4 x 8, and a 5 x 8. There are two with landscape orientation cells – one 5 x 9, and one 5 x 11.

I chose the 5 x  8 one.

Set up the print job

If you plan to ‘print’ the contact sheet to a jpg file, from the Print Job panel on the right of the screen, choose Print to JPG File. As contact sheets are just that – a contact sheet and not full scale images – select to use Draft Mode Printing to speed up their creation.

The page dimensions will be preset for 8.5 x 11in. You can set your own Custom File Dimensions but increasing the size of the page simply changes the page size not the size of the cells – you have to adjust them separately.

Adding images

If you have only one image selected in the Filmstrip then the contact sheet will only display one image.

You’ll need to select all the images on the filmstrip to add them to the contact sheet. To do this, either click on the first image and Shift + Click on the last or select All Filmstrip Photos from the Use: list on the toolbar. If the Toolbar is not visible, press T to display it. You can also select Flagged photos, if desired.

The Toolbar shows you how many pages you will use and you can click the arrow keys on the toolbar to navigate the pages.

Add image captions

To add information below the images, from the Page panel on the right, select the Photo Info checkbox and choose the field to display. You can use one of the preset options such as Caption, Date, or Filename or click Edit to create your own field.

In the Text Template Editor, you can access to fields such as the filename, a sequential numbering or date as well as EXIF and IPTC data. You can also type your own custom text to create detailed photo info to add to the contact sheet. Here I typed some text, added a sequential number and the filename.

Customize the Contact Sheet

The template contact sheets are a starting point but you do not need to strictly adhere to their design if you don’t want to and they can be easily customized.

For example, from the layout panel if you click the Keep Square checkbox you will find that in some layouts your images may change orientation so the page will be a mix of portrait and landscape images.

You can adjust the maximum cell size and width using the Cell Size Height and Width sliders in the Layout panel. As you adjust the cell size, notice that the Cell Spacing values will change.

You can decrease the number of rows and/or columns using the Page Grid options. By decreasing the number of rows or columns, you can increase the cell size.

Adjusting margins

If you increase the Bottom or Top margin you can give yourself room to, for example, place an Identity Plate on the page.

Here I’ve reduced the number of rows and increased the bottom margin and added an Identity Plate from the Page panel options. In the Page panel, select the Identity Plate checkbox and then select the Identity Plate to use.

The Identity Plate will appear, by default, in the middle of the page so drag it into position on the page. Adjust its scale by dragging on the Scale slider.

You can adjust its Opacity if desired and, if it is a text identity plate (rather than a graphic), you can also select Override Color to make it any color you like.

Print the result

When you’re done, you’re ready to output the result. If you selected to print to a JPG file click Print to File and type a name for the file and select a location for them. The pages will be printed to a JPG file and if there are more than one they will be sequentially numbered.

Print to PDF

If you want to print to a PDF on a Windows machine you will need to have a PDF printer driver installed such as Adobe PDF or one you have downloaded from the web.

Select Page Setup, select the pdf printer driver and configure the page size so it matches the template size – such as letter paper portrait orientation. Then set the Print to: option in the Print Job panel to printer and click Print to print to a pdf.

Save the Template

If you have customized a template and want to be able to use it again in future, save the design as a new template.

Click the plus symbol opposite the Template Browser panel header and type a name for your template. You can store it in User Templates or create a new folder for it. Click to create it.

In future you can save yourself the time setting up the template by starting with your customized version.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am0 Comments - links to this post

Sunday, March 25th, 2012

Use Lightroom Presets in Adobe Camera Raw

If you’re like me, you have some presets that you’ve created in Lightroom that you would like to use in Adobe Camera Raw. Unfortunately the format of the preset files in each program is different so you can’t just install a Lightroom preset in ACR. However you can make an ACR preset from a file that has had that same preset applied to in Lightroom. Here’s how:

Apply the Preset

To begin, open an image in the Develop module in Lightroom. Without applying any other changes to the image, apply the Preset that you want to take to ACR. Here I have applied one of the free Wonderland presets from wonderlandpresets.com.

Export the Image

Now export the image as a DNG file so that the changes will be written to the file. To do this, right click the image and choose Export > Export to DNG and export the image to folder of your choice.

Open in ACR

Launch Windows Explorer and locate the image on disk. Right click it and choose Open With > Photoshop CS5. Because it is a DNG file, it will open automatically in ACR.

Create the Preset

Click the Presets tab and click the Create New Preset option at the foot of the Presets panel. Type a name for your preset and then select the options that you want to include as part of the preset. Type a name for the preset and click Ok.

The preset will now be available from the Presets panel in ACR and will be able to be used to adjust any image.

Features not included

You should note that while most of the Lightroom adjustments that can be stored in a Lightroom Preset can also be saved as an ACR Preset, one exception is any Graduated Filter adjustment.

In Lightroom any adjustments you make using the Adjustment Brush cannot be saved in a Lightroom preset and in ACR those made using the Graduated Filter cannot be saved either. You will see the Graduated Filter adjustments that you made in Lightroom in ACR if there are any but you cannot save them in your preset as a Graduated Filter adjustment. What you can do however, is to save the settings for the Graduated Filter but not its placement as a separate setting. To do this, click the Graduated Filter icon in ACR to select the tool then click the Graduated Filter to save the settings for. Click the icon in the top right of the Graduated Filter panel and choose New Local Correction Setting and save it giving it a name.

You can apply this to an image in future using the Graduated Filter tool – just select the setting to use from this menu and drag to create the Graduated Filter for the image. The solution isn’t perfect but it can save you some work as shown here with the two Graduated Filters which are part of my Orton Preset for Lightroom. I can apply the preset then switch to the Graduated Filter and quickly apply the two Graduated Filter adjustments with their individual settings.

Advantages of taking Lightroom presets to ACR

One of the reasons you may want to take presets from Lightroom to ACR using this process is to take advantage of the free presets available for Lightroom. There are lots more of these than there are presets for ACR. If you use ACR as well as Lightroom then having your favorite presets available in both program will be useful.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am0 Comments - links to this post

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

Content aware resizing in Gimp

In a previous post, I looked at content aware resizing in Photoshop CS4 http://projectwoman.com/2009/09/smart-scaling-with-content-aware-scale.html which is the same as in CS5. I also mentioned the online application called Rsizr http://www.rsizr.com. Today I’m going to show you a plug-in for Gimp that does pretty much the same thing.

The tool is called Liquid Rescale which you can download from here: http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/. Close Gimp, install the application and then reopen Gimp and you will see the application on the Layer menu.

This plug-in is an alternative to the crop tool. You use it to reduce an image’s size but, where the crop tool removes the data from one or more sides of an image, content aware resizing removes it from the middle of the image. This gives you basically the same looking image but smaller in one dimension. You might use this, for example, to remove some empty area from the middle of an image where the more interesting parts of the image are to either side of it.

The same tool can scale an image up to make it larger in one direction – and this time it will create extra data in the image to fill the space. You might use this, for example, where you have a rectangular image that you want to make into a square image without losing any detail.

To see how this can be done, I’ll take this beach image and size it down from 3571 pixels wide to 3000.

Open the image in Gimp and choose Layer > Liquid rescale. When the dialog appears, click the Output tab and set Output Target to a New Image. Enable the Resize image canvas checkbox and click Ok.

Set the new image width – I set this to 3000 but made sure that the link icon was disabled as I don’t want the height altered. Click Interactive and wait as the image is resized.

The program resizes the image by removing unimportant details from it and keeping what it understands to be the important bits. This is the result:

If you find that some elements in the image are squeezed or damaged by the process, you can create a mask to prevent this from happening.

To do this, click the original image again and choose Layer > Liquid rescale and set up the Output tab options.

Click Feature Masks and, to create a protective mask, click the Feature Preservation Mask option and click New. The paint color will be set to green so select a brush, enlarge it to an appropriate size and paint over anything on the image that you do not want to change as the image is resized.

In my case, that is the swimmer at the front of the image and the lifeguard and boards at the back. I’ve added some other bits I don’t want skewed out of alignment like the vertical poles too. Anything else can be adjusted except these elements. When you’re done, click Ok.

Type the size for the new image and click Interactive and wait as the image is resized. Here I chose for the image to be reduced from 3571 to 2500 pixels wide, and the surfer, boards and flags have all reduced well. The protected areas have not been touched.

The plug-in also has a tool that you can use to remove elements from the photo. In my image let’s take out the large pole in the foreground. In this case you use a Feature Discard Mask – and paint in red over the area that you want removed from the image. Adjust the strength to the highest value, set the width value by clicking Auto size: Width so that the image is scaled to the appropriate width for the item you are removing and click Interactive.

In this case, the flag has gone but we’ve got a bit of a repair job to do with the rest of the image to fix it up. It would require some work with the clone tool to fix up the image but Liquid rescale has got us some part of the way towards where we are headed.

You can also use the plug-in to enlarge an image. In this case, we’ve enlarged the image to create a square image.

The rescaling process isn’t perfect but generally you’ll get a good enough result that with a small amount of cloning afterwards using the clone tool you’ll be able to produce a realistic result.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , ,

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

Monday, March 12th, 2012

Deleting catalog backup files

I’ve been talking to a few people lately about deleting catalog backup files. If you backup and optimize your catalog every time you close Lightroom then, over time, you will end up with a lot of excess catalog backups.

Each of these backups will consume disk space so the question becomes – what is in these backups? What use are they? And can they be deleted safely?

Backup your catalog

When you set Lightroom to make a backup of the catalog what it does is to make a backup of just the catalog and not your images, or your previews, or the sidecar xmp files for your raw files, or your presets. While having a catalog backup is undoubtedly a useful thing, it is incomplete so you will need to have a system backup system in place to backup what Lightroom does not.

In fact, because Lightroom’s backup is only a catalog backup, some people don’t do a backup this way and instead rely on their regular system backup to take care of backing up everything – catalog included. I prefer to at least have Lightroom do a regular catalog backup but that’s my personal preference.

Which backups to keep?

Because the catalog backup files are all stored in different folders by date they will build up over time and keeping them all is not a necessity.

You can be selective about which ones you keep – you should, at least, keep the most recent backups because if your catalog is corrupt you will want to be able to recover using these. If the most recent backup has issues then you would progress backwards until you get one which isn’t corrupt.

So, if I use Lightroom every day, I would keep the backups from this week and then one from last week and one from last month and beyond that I could feel pretty safe about deleting the others.

Delete a catalog backup

To delete a backup, locate the backup folder and identify the backup folders to delete and go ahead and delete them.

You will find your catalog backups, if you didn’t change the default location for them, in a folder called Backups inside your Lightroom catalog folder.

If you changed its location you can find the location you selected when you’re next prompted to backup Lightroom – the location is reported in the dialog prompting you to backup. Here too you can change that location if desired.

One issue with the Lightroom catalog backups is that the location, by default, is inside the folder that contains the Lightroom catalog. So, if the disk containing the catalog becomes corrupt you could lose your Catalog backups too. You may prefer to backup to a different disk to protect against this likelihood.

Every one of us will have different preferences for how we backup, where we backup to, the frequency of backup and what we backup. It’s over to you now – do you use the Lightroom Catalog backup tool? If you do, do you store your backups in the default location? Do you delete excess backups regularly?

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , ,

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

Saturday, March 10th, 2012

Pixel Bender Droste Filter video tutorial

I work for Practical Photoshop mag in the UK which is a totally cool job. One of the projects I did recently is creating a spiral image using the Droste filter for the Pixel Bender extension for Photoshop CS4 & CS5 – try saying that quickly 5 times!

The guys at the mag – Ben and James have added my video tutorial to the magazine’s YouTube channel. Here is the video in all its glory and I highly recommend you subscribe to the channel there are some terrific tutorials there (if I say so myself!):

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:28 am0 Comments - links to this post

Monday, March 5th, 2012

Templates in Photoshop

A short while ago I wrote an article on using templates to create a collage or montage of images in Gimp. Sometime after, the templates that I suggested you  could use were taken down from the original website.

To help out our Gimp readers, I created a new set of templates and as I was making them, it seemed like a good idea to include instructions for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements as well as for Gimp. Here, therefore is how to use a downloadable template to create a montage of images:

Start by visiting this site and download the template zip file: http://projectwoman.com/articles/45PhotoshopTemplates.html

Then unzip the templates, save them where you can find them when you need to use them and open one of them. I’ve used the template triptych.psd.

When you open it, you’ll find that there are a series of layers. The top layer can be disabled or deleted at this point. The next two layers are instructions for Gimp and Photoshop users. Again, you can discard these two layers.

Open up the three images that you plan to use for this triptych. Images that are in portrait orientation will look best but you can use anything that you like – just be aware that you’re going to take a portrait orientation slice of the image.

In the template, click on Layer A and then click on the first of your images and drag and drop the background layer from the first of your images into the main image.

Click on the Move tool and size and position the image so that the interesting portion of it is over the black background. Click to accept this size and positioning and then with the new layer still selected, choose Layer > Create Clipping Mask. You’ll see that your layer is clipped to the size of the underlying shape.

You can fine-tune the placement and sizing by moving the contents of the new layer.

Now click on Layer B and again drag and drop the background layer from the second image into this template. Again, position the interesting portion of the image over the underlying background, sizing the image if desired. Create the clipping mask for that layer by selecting the image and choose Layer > Create Clipping Mask.

Repeat this for Layer C using your third image.

When you’re done, you can adjust the background of the image if desired by recoloring the layer marked background recolor if desired. You can now save and print the image or upload it to the web.

This same process can be used in Photoshop Elements.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

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

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Adobe Launches Photoshop Touch for the iPad

It has been a long time coming – way too long – but Adobe finally launched Photoshop Touch for the iPad.

I have reviewed it here for PC World and I wrote a how to for creatively editing images with it for Digital-Photography-School.com.

The app costs $9.99 so it isn’t cheap by iPad app standards but I think it is worth it. Downsides are non editable text, 1600 x 1600 px file size limit, no true editable masking tools and no adjustment layers. But it does have good layer tools (unlike Adobe Ideas you don’t have to shell out 99c for each new layer!), blend modes and it is easy to use.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 10:54 am0 Comments - links to this post

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

Photoshop – Replace a Face

A reader recently emailed me a couple of photographs of her children. Unfortunately, as often happens with small children, one image had two of the three children looking at the camera and smiling and the other image had the exact opposite combination – only one child looking great. Her question was – could she take the good face from one of the images and paste it into the second image.

The answer is yes, and here’s how to do it in Photoshop without any need to cut and paste:

Step 1

Open both images in Photoshop. Drag the background layer from one image onto the other – in my case I dragged the background layer from the image with two out of the three faces correct and dropped it into the image that has only one good face.

You will have an image with two layers – the top has two good faces and the one below has the other one. Close the other image.

Step 2

Select both layers in the image that you’re working on and choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers and select Auto.

Photoshop will now align the two layers so that the faces in both layers will be aligned on top of each other. To do this you need to have two images with very little difference between them and this image lined up pretty well as a result.

Step 3

Click on the topmost layer and add a layer mask to it by clicking the Add Layer Mask icon at the foot of the Layers palette.

The mask is filled with white by default which means that the entire contents of the top layer is visible and the bottom layer not visible at all.

Step4

Select black as your foreground color and choose a soft edge brush. Target the mask by clicking on it so you’re painting on it and then paint over the child’s face in the image to reveal the face from the layer image below.

Step 5

You’ll need to make some small choices about how much of the layer below you reveal with the mask – if you take too much you can paint back on the mask with white to reveal the top layer again.

I made some small adjustments around the child’s collar to hide the fix. The red portion of the image shows the mask – I turned this on – it won’t typically be visible to you as you work.

Step 6

Finish by taking a critical look at the final image and, if necessary, adjust the mask or add a new layer and clone elements from the layers below to fine tune the image.

I had to do a small amount of cloning of the little girl’s shirt to fix a small problem and then I cropped the image and it was complete.

The entire process took all of around ten minutes.

Photoshop Elements

You can get similar results in Photoshop Elements 7 and above by opening the two images and choose File > New > Scene Cleaner and follow the instructions there.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:00 am1 Comment - links to this post

Page 21 of 39« First10192021222330Last »