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

Friday, November 16th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Photoshop Tip – Quick Guides

original photo by: Stacey Bry

When you need to add guides to an image to help line up objects or the image itself you can do so if you first display your Rulers. Then click on the ruler and drag onto the image to create a guide – drag from the left to make a vertical guide and from the top to make a horizontal one. To remove an unwanted guide, drag it off the screen back to the ruler and it will disappear. To remove all guides choose View > Clear Guides.

Helen Bradley

Wednesday, November 14th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Illustrator Tip – Groups

When working with Multiple Shapes to make one image it’s good to be able to resize or edit them together.  To Group them all together, begin by selecting everything to be grouped and press Ctrl + G on a PC or Command + G on a Mac. To ungroup them press Ctrl + Shift + G.

Helen Bradley

Friday, November 9th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Photoshop Tip – Toggle Display of Rulers

Photo by: John De Boer

To make your Rulers display along the left and top of an image Ctrl + R on a PC or Command + R on a Mac. To make the Rulers disappear, simply press the keystroke shortcut again. Bonus tip – this works in Illustrator too.

Helen Bradley

Friday, October 26th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Photoshop tip – Zoom with your scroll wheel

 photo by: Cierpki via sxc.hu

Do you want to fluidly zoom in and out of your project with the scroll wheel of your mouse? Well you’re in luck because in Photoshop this can be activated in Preferences. To go to your General Preferences, press Ctrl + K on a PC and Command + K on a Mac and check the Zoom with Scroll Wheel checkbox and press OK. Now you can zoom in and out of your images using just your mouse.

Helen Bradley

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Photoshop Heart Shape Crop

Crop an image to a heart shape or any other shape in Photoshop. Uses a filled shape and a clipping mask.

Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.

Complete transcript of this video:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to crop to a heart or any other shape in Photoshop. Before we get started on this technique let’s just have a look and see what the end product is going to be. You can see here that I have an image of my cat. And what I’m going to do is to cut her face out in a heart shape. Now in Photoshop Elements this is relatively easy to do because there’s a cookie cutter tool that you can use. In Photoshop it’s not that easy. So we’re going to go through this step by step so that you know exactly how to do it. So let’s get started. I’m going to open up a duplicate of this image. And the shape that we’re using is a heart but this could be any shape at all. So it doesn’t have to be a heart and this process is going to be the same for any shape. The first thing we’re going to do is convert the background into a regular layer. And do that your favorite way. I’m just going to double click the layer and click Ok. And now I’m going to go and get my heart shape. So I’m going to click on the custom shape tool here, and I’m going to select a shape. Now I’ve already selected the heart I want to use but let’s have a look and see. There’s a couple of hearts here. There’s one in the sort of card collection, but I don’t actually like that very much. It’s a really sort of weird shape that one. I prefer this one here so I’m just going to select it, and then let’s go and add a new layer. So I’ve just added a new layer. And let’s go and select a color. Now it can be any color at all, and I’m going to make it this sort of black. It doesn’t matter what color it is. And we’re going to use pixels so this is really important this bit, the pixels bit. In earlier versions of Photoshop there’s actually three icons here and you want to select the one that is pixels. And I’m just going to draw my heart shape. And if it’s not in the exact right position I’m just got a hold the Spacebar as I draw the shape so that I can move it around. And this is actually a nicer shape so once I’ve finished drawing and I’m just going to let go. And now I have a black heart shape right over the top of my cat. It doesn’t matter what this color is because it’s about to disappear. It does matter that the order of these two layers is the wrong way around. So I’m just going to drag the bottom layer up over the top layer. So the photos are on top and the heart is underneath it. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to cut the photo to the heart shape and we do that using a clipping group or clipping mask. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. You see here that there is a keystroke that’s Alt Ctrl G. That’s something we could use as well. But what this does is it cuts the photo into the shape of the shape below. So if this were a star than we’d have a star shape. So essentially that’s all you need to do. If you’re already to go, go now because you know how to create a heart shape from an image. If you want to finish it off nicely than hang around and we’re going to finish it off. The way we’re going to finish it off is by adding yet another new layer, and we’re to drag it to the very bottom. And what we’re going to do here is to fill this with a nice color. So I’m going to choose a color of pink because this is a sort of Valentine theme. My foreground color is pink. I have the bottom layer selected. I’m going to Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac, to fill it with pink. Now we have our heart shape image over pink we can crop it. So I’m just going to crop it to size. And we’ll come in a bit on the edge here too. And now we want that nice finishing touch that we had on the original image. Let’s go and see the original image. You can see that this one’s got dimension and ours is very flat. If you want that dimensional look what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a drop shadow. And we’re going to do it to this heart layer because we want to the drop shadow to follow the heart shape. Here is the layer effects tool, the layer style tool. I’m going to click here and choose Drop Shadow Now my drop shadow at the moment is black. I would prefer a color that is similar to this pink but perhaps a bit darker than it. So let’s just go and get a darker version of our pink. We’re on multiply blend mode which is a good blend mode. I don’t like the angle of light. I prefer my light to be cast in this direction. And you can see that I can now drag my drop shadow around to place it where I want it to be. It’s a bit harsh so I’m going to soften it. Now this is where Photoshop is a little confusing. I think they’ve labeled these really wrongly because size actually adjusts the feathering and spread really adjusts the size. So we don’t want it to have a very big size or spread, but we do want it to have a nice feathering so I’m going to adjust the size to suit there. And on the other one I added an inner glow so I want to grab inner glow here. I again changed the color, this time sampling the pink from the image and going for a lighter pink for my inner glow. And then we’ve got it screen blend mode so that’s going to work nicely. But we do need to increase the size here and probably increase the choke a bit. And we just wanted to blend that around the edge and click Ok. So this is an effect that you can create with any shape in Photoshop. You can put any shape in here. You can put your photo on top. You’re going to add a clipping mask or create a clipping mask with Layer. And this will say Create Clipping Mask. At the moment it says Release because that’s what we would be doing at this point because we already have clipping mask created and we’re just dropping a filled layer below it. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Photoshop video. If you liked this video please would you give it a thumbs up so that others know that it’s a good video. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel and look at projectwoman.com for more tutorials about Photoshop.

Helen Bradley

Helen Bradley

Friday, October 19th, 2012

Trevor’s Illustrator Tip – Controlling the Pen Tool

Photo by: Harpreet Padam

Having trouble working with the Pen tool?  When it takes off and draws yet another curved line after a curve when you want a straight segment, the fix is surprisingly easy. Hold the Alt key and click on the last anchor point. The line will be set to a point rather than a curve so you can make a straight line after your curve.The bonus? This works in Photoshop too. The double bonus? In Illustrator CS6 you don’t even have to use the Alt key – it’s smart enough to know that you want to change the line type when you click on the last point.

Helen Bradley

Thursday, October 18th, 2012

Photoshop Masks 101 – Spot Color effect

Create a spot color or isolated color effect in Photoshop. The image is black and white and only a portion of the image is in color. Learn how to do this and how to get started with masks as you do this.

Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.

Complete transcript of this video:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to begin to use masks in Photoshop and I’m assuming that you’ve never used a mask before. And so that we actually create something in this tutorial we’re going to use it for a spot color effect. Before we get started on actually introducing what a mask is let’s have a look at the effect that we’re looking at here. This is my original image and it was shot in color on a very wet night in Wales. And what I’ve done is converted the image to black and white but I’ve left this person in the middle of the image in color. And I’ve done it in such a way that we can edit it. So if I didn’t make the selection correctly to begin with I can adjust it at any time. I can also remove the effect. So you can see here I’ve removed the mask here and the image has been reverted to fully black and white. I can reinstate the mask and this converts the image into black and white but leaving this person in color. This is a black and white adjustment layer here, a very simple adjustment layer. But because I’ve got a mask here I’m able to control where the color is on the image. And with masks you can paint with black and white. Black will reveal the layer underneath or the color underneath and white hides it. So if I get a really big brush right now, let’s go and get a really big brush on this image, and just see what happens when I paint on that mask. Can you see that I’m bringing color back into the image because I’m painting was black. If I paint with white I’ll removes the color from the image. I’m painting on the mask so I have the mask targeted but my paint is being painted onto the image itself. So I’m painting here. You can see that the color is going on the mask and we’re poking a hole in this black and white layer to see the color below. If we change to paint in white we’re removing it so we’re seeing what is on this particular layer. So now that we’ve seen what we’re aiming for let’s go and see how we could achieve that result with another image. Here I have another image. This one was shot in Cambridge. And I’m just going to size it down. And to make a start on this image we’re going to convert it to black and white using an adjustment layer. I’ll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, black and White and click Ok. And now I can make my black and white adjustment. But because my phone boxes are going to be colored red later on I’m not worried about the color in the phone boxes but I am worried about how the black and white is converted in the image around the edges. So I’m just going to focus on these edges. I do want it to look a little bit dark. So I’m probably going to go to the black end of the scale on most of these. And there’s my black and white image. And now we’re ready to add the color back into it. There any number of ways that we can bring the color back into the image. I’m going to show you a couple of them. Because we created a new adjustment layer you can see that there’s already a mask in place. So we can use this mask just by painting on it. Because it’s white that’s automatically telling us that we’re seeing just the black and white elements in the image. So if we start painting with black, and I’m just going to choose a paintbrush to use, I’m going to choose a slightly softer one to start off with. Now if we paint with black on the mask we’re going to start seeing the color appear underneath. And if we go too far then we can paint over it by painting in white. And you can see that we would really need a harder edge brush to really get a good effect here. But we could get a soft effect if we wanted to with this sort of almost not really quite transparent but it almost is in the edges brush. So I could just brush that effect on. It’s not fully opaque at these edges but it’s still giving me a spot color effect. Now I’m just going to trash that mask, drag it off and I’m going to delete the mask. At any time I want to add a mask I can just click this Add Layer Mask icon and that will add it to an adjustment layer or to a regular layer. Now let’s turn off this entire adjustment layer. Let’s go to the background layer and let’s use the quick selection Tool to select over these telephone boxes because this is another way that we could mask things. And now because I have my selection in place we can go back to our adjustment layer, turn it on, make sure I have the mask selected. I have black as my foreground color, I can Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac to fill the mask with the black color that then shows the red through it. If I press Ctrl or Command D I’ll deselect the selection. And now I can zoom into areas that I think may need to be fixed a little bit, move them into position and go and get my black paintbrush. I’m going to make it a fairly hard edge paintbrush because the edges of these phone boxes are pretty hard. And I’m just going to paint over these edges and just make sure that in every place that I created my mask or my selection that everything is working correctly. I’ve actually got some color here so I’m going to switch colors by pressing X to make white my foreground color. I’m just going to tidy up a little area here where I had too much of the background color. And now I’ve gone the other way, again press X and this time bring it back in by painting with black. I’m painting on the mask. Although I’m using the image, I’m actually physically painting on the image but it’s appearing on the mask layer. And again I can just check around here to make sure that I have everything looking the way I want it to look. Let’s just zoom out again. Now there’s another way that I could have created this entire effect and that would have been to have made a duplicate of this background layer, Layer, Duplicate Layer. And I could have converted this to black and white just using Image, Adjustments, Black and White. Now for this one I’m just going to select the default adjustment. And now I’ve got a black and white layer on top of a color layer. Again I can add my mask here and I could paint on that with the paintbrush and black paint to bring my color back in or I could go to this layer and make my selection on this layer just as we did earlier. I’ll just go and quick mask this, really quick mask it. This is a very quick and dirty mask this one. Ok and then let’s go back into this layer and because I have this selection made, in fact it needs to be a little bit better made, I can just Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac to again mask this layer. And then we can go back and tidy it up with the paintbrush and just paint over any areas where we want to bring back the color from the layer underneath. So this is done with two layers, one of which is black and white and one of which is color. But you could do it with an adjustment layer. There are lots of different ways to do it. It’s this Add Mask icon that allows us to add a mask. We’ll always put the mask on a top most layer because we want to poke a hole through this layer to see the one below. We’ll paint with black or white on the mask, and we can also paint with shades of gray. So let’s go and get a shade of grey here. It’s under my paintbrush so let’s see what happens when I paint with it. What we get is part of the current layer here but not all of it. So you can see I’m getting a mix here of the layer below and this layer because I’m painting with gray. Anywhere I paint with black I’m going to get only the layer below. Anywhere I paint with white I’m only going to get this particular layer. So there’s an introduction to masks by creating a spot color effect which is fully editable. Provided we save this as a PSD file, the image is going to be editable at any time by just painting on that mask. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked this video please give it a thumbs up on YouTube. Subscribe to my channel if you’d like to know when new videos are being released. And visit Projectwoman.com for more tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

Lightroom Frame a photo

Learn how to add an image as a frame to use in Lightroom to print around your images. Uses the Identity Plate option to do this. Shows you how to create the effect using one of our frames that we sell here and also how to do this using your own hand drawn frame.

Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.

Complete transcript of this video:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can frame an image ready for printing inside Lightroom so you don’t even have to leave Lightroom to add a frame to it. Before we start on this process let’s have a look and see what our end product is going to be. I have here Lightroom open and you could do this in Lightroom 4 or 3 or 2. It’s not specific to Lightroom 4. I’m in the print module and here I have a series of images that I want to print. And what I’ve done is I’ve created this frame that now sits over this image. Now you can see that the frame pulls apart. So this image can be altered. So for example I can just change the image there, move the frame back into position, and I’m ready to print this. Now I can print it direct to the printer or I have these going to print to JPG because I want to use them on my blog. Now we sell these frames on projectwoman.com, and I’m using one of the frames that we sell. But let’s have a look and see how you can do that with your own hand-drawn frame or how you could use one of our frames to do it. And to do that we’re going to start in Photoshop if you’re using your own frame because you’ll need to create it yourself. Here I am inside Photoshop and I have a frame that I’ve already created. Now what I did was I took a piece of white drawing paper and a nice thick black felt tip pen and I drew this frame. And then I scanned it in using my scanner. But if you don’t have a scanner you could always just take a photograph of it. Now I’ve cleaned this up. And what I’ve done is I’ve cut out the middle so this is hollow in here. If I add a new layer below this, and let’s just go and get my Tools Palette, and let’s drop some color in there so that you can see that it’s actually a hollow frame. So let’s just go and get a different color to the frame color. And I’m just adding a filled layer beneath it so you can see that there is actually a hollow in the middle of the frame. And that’s really important because that’s where your picture is going to go. And here my frame I’ve added a boarder to it, so a plain blue border. But you don’t have to have a border. You could remove it. And this is just white with black. So once you’ve got your frame created what you’ll want to do is to save it, and I’ve saved mine as a PNG file. Now the reason I’ve used PNG is twofold. First of all you get a nice flattened document. But PNG will store transparency. You can’t store transparency in a JPG file. So you can’t use JPG for this because you won’t have a hole in the frame for your picture to sit in. So what I’ve done is create it as a PNG with this hollow cutout because when it comes to Lightroom that hole is still going to be there. So having saved it to disk, let’s just do that, File Save As. I just want to put this in a place that I know where it’s going to be. So I have a folder here for video images. So I’m just going to put my hand-drawn frame in there and just click Save so I know exactly where it is. I’m just taking the options here, just the standard PNG options from Photoshop. So let’s close that out, close down Photoshop for now and let’s go and get Lightroom again. Okay, so let’s go and get a different folder of images because I don’t want to start with anything that we’re sure of. And I know I’ve got some really nice Safari West animals. So let’s go with the animals. And let’s go to the Print Module. And let’s go to a brand new layout. So let’s close down this preview. And I’m just going to go and start with a brand new layout. It can be anything at all. I would set up my page. And I want to be working in landscape. I’m going to click Ok. And I want this to go to a JPG file. So I’m just going to set JPG there, and I’m working in a landscape letter size image. So everything’s looking perfect there except of course that this is not what I want my print job to look like. I have an Identity Plate turned on. So I’m going to turn that off for now. I’m going to get rid of these pieces. Okay, so now I’m going to add my first image. So let’s go and find an image that is in landscape mode because my frame is a landscape image. So let’s just go and get something. There’s some distinctly not Safari images in this folder by the looks of it. I really like this one so I’m going to add it in here. So I’m just placing it. Because we’re using a custom package I can just drag and drop the image into position. And Lightroom won’t let me skew this image so whatever I do with it it cannot be skewed out of alignment. So I’m just going to put the image there. And what I want to do is to put my frame over the top. It looks like we’ve got a few settings coming in with this image such as a photo border and an inner stroke. I’m going to take all of those off. And now let’s go and get our frame. And the way that we add the frame is from the Page Panel here. We going to add it as an Identity Plate. So I’m going to click to select Identity Plate. But I want to add my own so I’m going to click here and choose Edit. Now the type of identity plate I’m going to use is Graphical. So I’ll select that, and I’m going to locate the file that I created. Now one thing I didn’t mention that is critical is that the dimensions of this frame need to be the same dimensions as the image that you’re working on. So I’ve made mine the size of a letter size sheet of paper. Now it’s very large. That’s fine. I’m going to use it anyway. And I want to save this. So I’m just going to click Save As. And I’m going to put this blue hand-drawn frame and click Save, so now I can use it anytime and click Ok. And the frame is now added to the image. And I can size it. Now the reason why I have to make sure that it is a letter size frame is that Lightroom won’t let me scale it any larger than letter size. So I have to make sure that it’s in the correct proportions before I start. And I’ve got grids and guides turned off so we’ll be able to see everything really clearly. Now the reason why the frame is in front, and we do of course want it in front but we do need to check and make sure that it is in front, is that Render Behind Image is not turned on. So if we had it behind image than it would be behind the image. We want it on the top. Now I’m ready to print that. And once I’ve printed that I can then use it for another image. And all I’m going to do is move the frame out of the way a little bit, drag and drop a replacement image into position and then just put my frame back in. Now I’m ready to print the second image and then I could continue through to create other images ready for printing. If I want to save this, and typically having done the work of setting this up I would want to save it, I can either create a saved print which will save this print layout and the image or I can just save the user template. So I’m going to click here. I’m going to call this blue frame template. Blue frame one up will tell me that it’s going to be just one up, one image on this, and just click Create. And it’s going here into User Templates. And that means that I can select it any time in the future for any image at all, and it’s going to be preset for me. So there you have the ability to create your own framing for images inside Lightroom.

Helen Bradley

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Photoshop Create Plaids & Checks

Learn how to make plaids and checks in Photoshop very quickly. See how to save the plaids as patterns and how to  fill a shape with a pattern in all versions of Photoshop.

Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.

Complete transcript of this video:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this video I’m going to show you how to create quick and easy plaids and checks in Photoshop. And this is going to work with pretty much any version of Photoshop. Before we start creating our plaid pattern let’s have a look and see exactly what we mean by creating plaids and checks. This is a simple sort of gingham style pattern that we’re going to create, and I’ve used it to fill a shape. And you’re going to see how you can do that as well. So let’s just tuck that away for now and let’s go and create our pattern. I’m going to choose File New and I’m going to create a workspace that is a fixed size and it’s going to be square. So I’m going to make this 200 pixels by 200 pixels because that’s going to be nice and easy to see. And I’m going to for this one create background contents as white because I actually want white as the basis of my pattern. So I’m quite happy to have white there. I’m going to choose View Rulers because I want to see my ruler right now. And I want to add two guides just to make sure that this is perfect. I’m going to choose New Guide and I’m going to make this 50 percent Horizontal and then add another one at 50 percent Vertical. These guides are going to help me draw in my shape. So I’m going to select the Rectangular Marque Tool and drag over one side of this shape. I need to work on a new layer so I’m going to click the New Layer icon here. And let’s choose a different color to the one we were working on before. Let’s create a sort of purple gingham this time. So I have purple selected as my foreground color, a brand new layer. I can fill this layer automatically with the foreground color by pressing Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac. I’m going to add another layer. Still with this Marque Tool selected, this time I’m going to select the top area here, and I’m going to fill it again with the same color, Alt Backspace, Option Delete. And there’s the basics of my gingham check pattern. The only thing is is it doesn’t quite look the way it’s supposed to look yet. What I’m going to do is to make these layers both 50 percent opacity. And when I make both these layers 50 percent opacity you can see that we’re getting this sort of gingham check look. And I’m pressing Ctrl D, Command D on the Mac, to deselect my selection. To get rid of my guides I’m going to just click Clear Guides. So this is my gingham pattern. To make it a pattern I’m going to press Ctrl A or choose Select All to select everything and choose Edit and then Define Pattern. And I’m going to call this purple gingham and just click Ok. Now that pattern is created so I can just trash that document. But we might save it just for the moment because we might come back to that in a minute. Now let’s see how we could use our plaid pattern. I’m going to choose File New and create a letter size document with a white background. And here it is. Here I’m going to click the Custom Shapes Tool and I already have this rabbit shape selected. But you could select any shape. And I’m going to show you how to do this in any version of Photoshop because Photoshop CS6 is a little different. But the procedure I’m going to show you will work with any version. So with the custom shapes tool selected we’re going to make sure that we have path selected here. There are three options and they’re just different icons in earlier versions of Photoshop. But you want the Paths option. And we’re going to drag our rabbit shape. I’m holding Shift as I do so to constrain it to those proportions. Now in any version of Photoshop you can choose Layer New Fill Layer Pattern. Click to accept pattern fill and then you’ll find that it’s filled with the most recently created pattern which is the pattern we just created. If the scale of the pattern is too big, which it is really for me, I want to scale this down to 25 percent. I can just select Scale 25 percent and click Ok. And there is my rabbit filled with my pattern. Now in Photoshop CS6 you can do it a little differently. What we’re going to do is to choose a shape. And in this case we can fill our shape with a pattern. So now let’s grab our rabbit. And you can see that by default this is now created. It’s actually got a stroke on it. I don’t want any stroke. And with my pattern fill I can scale my pattern here in Photoshop CS6. So CS6 just makes it a little easier to do. But you can still do the same process in any version of Photoshop. Now let’s just go back for a minute to our original shape which is this one here. We could do some other things to make it a little bit more plaid like. For example I’m going to add a new layer, drag it to the very top, and I’m going to drag a very small stripe through here. And I’m going to fill it with a slightly darker version of this purple. So this is the foreground color, Alt Backspace, Option Delete. And then I could add another one again through here. This one I’m going to do twice. So I’m going to select the selection I have here and I’m going to Alt drag on it to create a couple of lines. Actually let’s do three. And I’m going to call that my new plaid shape. Having done that lets press Ctrl A to select everything, Edit Define Pattern. This is going to be my new pattern. It’s a little bit off in the spacing but I’m not going to worry too much about that. Let’s turn everything off here. Let’s go and grab a new shape. So for this one we’ll do a flower shape. And again, I’m just going to choose, well let’s go with Photoshop CS6. Let’s grab our pattern there and no stroke and just draw my flower shape holding Shift to constrain it to the shape. And you can see now that we have a more complex pattern fill for our object. We can again scale that down to 50 percent. But you can create plaids any way that you want to, and they’re going to fill any shape in Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. You can find more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more articles on Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator.

Helen Bradley

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