Learn a handy keyboard shortcut to merge two layers in Photoshop
One simple trick but one that comes in handy constantly for me is merging two layers into one in Photoshop. This trick can save your life with so many Photoshop projects that require two images to be merged to a single layer.
Make sure the layers you wish to merge are on top of each other in the Layers palette. Click on the thumbnail of the top most layer of the two you want to merge.
Press Control/Command + E.
Now your layers are merged.
Something to keep in mind is the new layer when it does merge will take the name of the layer on the top.
Recently I made a post giving thanks to the wonderful font creators who distribute their work for free. Today I’d like to thank the image and texture artists who are doing the same and making my life in Photoshop so much easier. If you are looking for texture resources then I cannot give any higher recommendations than these. The links provided will take you to specific textures, but each author’s entire portfolio is worth exploring.
Skeletal Mess – A brilliant independent image and texture author.
FreeImages.com – A massive archive of free images and textures.
by Helen Bradley
Why have boring old column and bar charts when you can have picture charts instead?
Learn how to replace bars and columns in Excel charts with small images stacked up to show the values being compared.
Image charts like this are one of Excel’s secrets so let me show you how to make them.
In the video you will learn how to replace columns and bars in Excel charts with images. You will see how to find images to use and how to stack and resize the images to fit the chart’s columns and bars.
Learn how to download photos from your iPad or iPhone to your Mac
I’ve been using iCloud on the PC for a while now to sync photos from my iPad to my PC and it works well. On my new Mac, however, I had a problem, you see the feature is built in so you don’t have to install it – but you do have to find it! Here’s how:
1. Assuming you already have an iPad or iPhone and you have been taking photos with it, then you want to get them to your Mac. Start on your iPad and make sure it is set to sync. Do this in Settings – scroll to find Photos & Camera and make sure that My Photo Stream is turned on. This means that when you are on a wifi connection your photo stream will be synced with iCloud.
Note:
The photo stream has some limits. One is that iCloud itself only stores images for 30 days so after that they disappear. However provided you are connected via wifi on a regular basis these will be synced frequently so that won’t be a big issue.
On a device like the iPad and iPhone the photo stream will only contain those most recent 1,000 images – older ones are removed. This is because you have less space on your iPad and iPhone than on a Mac or PC. Remember too that the photo stream contains images from the iPad/iPhone and from your Mac or PC so this 1,000 image limitation is for images from all devices in total, so it’s not as big as it might seem.
On the PC that is less of a problem because you have a special Photo stream folder that you put images into to sync them, so you know how many you are putting there. It is more of an issue on the Mac because the process is more automated so you have to be mindful of what is happening. On your Mac or PC all the images from your Photo stream are stored – because there is more storage available on them.
2. To set up the Mac. You need to click iPhoto to launch it and then click Web: Photo Stream and turn this on.
3. Now, if you are connected via wifi you can wait as your photo stream downloads automatically for you otherwise this will happen automatically next time you are connected.
Once images are downloaded to iPhoto they will be added to the Photos folder so even if you turn off Photo Stream at some time the images that are already downloaded will have be stored there permanently.
If you’re having trouble positioning images in a document, Google provides an easy solution.
By default, all inserted images are placed inline with the text, which means it is treated just like another character and will move with the text around it. To change this, simply click on your image and select Fixed position. This places the image “above” the text so that the text moves to accommodate it; the image remains in any location you move it to while text wraps around it. This also permits images to overlap.
Google Docs has a handy research tool built right into the page that utilizes Google’s massive information database. It can provide a useful catalogue of information on almost any topic.
To open the Research module, go to Tools > Research. Alternatively, you can highlight some text from your document, right click, and select Research ‘[your text]’ from the context window. This will automatically research the highlighted text.
If your topic has any specially indexed information, it will be shown in a summary at the top of your results. It may also show relevant images and published papers on the topic. When Google has exhausted all the information it can find itself, it will simply display a list of search results. Yet these results also contain a useful set of tools unique to the Research module: Preview, Insert Link, and Cite.
Preview provides a quick look at the web page to help you determine if it will actually be useful to you. Insert Link automatically creates a link to the web page in your document. If you used highlighted text to open the Research module, it will turn that text into your link. Cite creates a neat citation for that web page, which is in MLA format by default.
If we take a look at the main page of the Research module again, we’ll find search filters for different needs.
Everything provides the results we initially saw, with as much information as Google could provide. Images narrows your search to just that, a sidebar of topical images which can be easily dragged and dropped into your document. Scholar provides a list of published research papers for your topic, although it does not provide direct links to those papers. These can be easily cited the same way web links can.
Quotes provides a list of relevant quotes which can also be inserted into your paper. Google also highlights the most famous quotes for you. Dictionary provides a fast and light way to check words’ definitions. Finally, Personal simply shows any files you already have on your Google account that fit the query.
You can also make two important changes in the Settings dropdown menu. The citation format can be swapped between MLA, APA, and Chicago, depending on your need. If you’re using your document for commercial purposes, or if you simply hate unlicensed imagery, you can filter your image search results to show only those which grant a commercial licence.
Overall, the Research module is an excellent tool to help you quickly collect information and content for your document and is worth checking out.
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?
If you’ve used any earlier version of Lightroom and if you now use Lightroom 4 you need to know a bit about Process versions.
In this post I’ll give you the basics of what you need to know which will explain why you see exclamation points by some of your images in the Develop module and why the new Lightroom 4 sliders sometimes disappear unexpectedly.
Process versions
In Lightroom 3 and again in Lightroom 4 the Lightroom Process version was updated. These process versions affect how your raw images are processed by Lightroom so it’s important to understand what they are and how they work.
Initially there was only one process version used in Lightroom 1 and Lightroom 2 so upgrading from one version of Lightroom to the next didn’t create any issues. The process version used in these versions was called Process 2003.
When Lightroom 3 was released it had a new process version called Process 2010. This process version had better rendering of the raw image and that meant better detail rendering, better noise reduction and better sharpening.
Because this new Process 2010 was so significantly improved, Adobe didn’t apply it by default to images in Lightroom 3 which had been processed using the older Process 2003. To have done so might have produced unwanted changes to images which had been already processed so it was left to each user’s discretion to apply the changes or not. Images newly imported into Lightroom 3 were processed using Process 2010.
Fast forward to Lightroom 4 and the situation is repeated. There is a new process version called Process 2012 in Lightroom 4. Images newly imported into Lightroom are processed with Process 2012, and those which were processed in an earlier version of Lightroom remain unchanged.
So What is the Exclamation Point
If you see an exclamation mark icon in the Develop module to the right of an image this indicates that it has applied to it a process version that isn’t the current version for the version of Lightroom you are using.
If you want to update an image, click the icon and select to update the image or select to update all the filmstrip photos. You can preview the changes before they are applied if desired.
It’s also possible to update images from the Develop module’s Camera Calibration panel. Here you simply select the desired process version from the Process list. The options are Process 2003, Process 2010 and Process 2012 (Current). In most cases, most users will choose to update the process version to the most current one.
Where did my Sliders go?
When Lightroom 4 was released the Develop module’s Basic panel was altered significantly. The sliders in that panel are now called by different names, they have different starting settings and they do different things to those in the earlier Lightroom versions. In short, the Basic panel adjustments in Lightroom 4 so significantly differ to those in Lightroom 3 that they aren’t interchangeable. Therein lies the explanation as to why your brand new sliders sometimes disappear and the older Lightroom 3 ones reappear – quite simply they do so when you are working on an image processed with an older process version.
So, if you have an image that has Process 2003 or Process 2010 applied to it, the Basic panel sliders will be those you are used to seeing in Lightroom 3 and earlier. If you’re working on a Process 2012 image the sliders are Lightroom 4 sliders. Updating the process version to the most current version will display the new sliders.
What this means to you
If you want the best processing for your images and if you want to see only one set of sliders in the Basic panel then go ahead and update all your images to Process 2012.
If you can see differences between the process versions and if you don’t want those changes applied to some or all of your images then you don’t have to update your images. It’s up to you to make the choice and you can do so for one or more of your images as and when you want to.
However, if you still have some Process 2003 or Process 2010 images in your Lightroom collection just be aware that Lightroom 4 sliders might disappear and be replaced by those from Lightroom 3 from time to time because of this.
Now it is over to you. Have you upgraded your older Process 2003 and Process 2010 images to Process 2012? If you didn’t what made you stay with the older version?
Learn to fix images that have iPhone filters applied to them using Photoshop Elements. Remove unwanted color casts from the images using two different methods.
Transcript:
I was sent this image by a gentleman who wanted me to fix the color in the image because this was shot with an iPhone and the young lady had applied a filter to it. I sent him a few copies back each one of them altered a little differently. And this is the one that he came back and said this is the truest to what her hair color looks like. So now I’m going to show you how you go ahead and fix an image like this.
Now I’ll always work on a copy of the original image, so I’ve made a copy. I’m just going to size this down so we can see both images side by side. Now there are a couple of tools that I would typically use. One of them is Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Color for Skin Tones. In this case what we do is we just click on some skin tone in the image and try and fix it that way.
Now it’s not giving me great results here so I want to show you another tool that we could use. And that is just the colorcast tool, Enhance, Adjust Color and then Remove Colorcast. And here we would click on somewhere in the image that was supposed to be a sort of neutral gray, black sort of white area. So we could sample some of her clothes here to see if we get a good fix. We could sample around her teeth as well. And I think that this is a pretty good result as a match for this image over here, so I’m just going to click Ok.
Let’s just zoom out here and see. So these two images have pretty much the same look in them. The hair color is pretty much the same. If anything I might just reduce the saturation a little bit on this image which I could do by choosing Enhance and then Adjust Color. And we could do hue/saturation and then we could just decrease the saturation a little bit across the entire image. And that would get rid of some of the yellow. In fact I think I’ve actually got a better fix on this image probably than I had on the original.
So there’s one way of fixing a colorcast in an image. I have another pair of images of the same young girl. Let’s have a look at them here. And I have one here that was said to be a reasonably good fix for that image. Now I’m going to show you some means of getting this result from this sort of an image. The first thing I’m going to do with this image is because it’s got a sort of reddy orange colorcast on it I think that if I apply a filter to this image we might be able to kill some of that color. So I’m going to choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Photo Filter. And here’s my photo filter dialog, click Ok. And what I want is a cooling filter. That’s a blue filter. So I’m going to go for one of these cooling filter effects. I’m going to wind it up quite high. So let’s see which is the better of them. And I think the 82 is a better cooling filter. You can see that now we’ve got some sort of reasonably good skin tones here. So I’m thinking about 65 is pretty good there. So let’s call that done.
Now one of the things that I would like to do with this image is to get rid of the sort of grain that there is on her skin. So I’m going to take this cooling filter and click on it and just press Ctrl Alt Shift E which will give me a duplicate of that image as it was. So I haven’t got rid of these two layers, but what I’ve got is a layer that contains everything that was in those two layers. And I’m going to duplicate this as well. So I’m going to drag it onto the New Layer icon so we have two versions of her face. This one I’m going to blur. So I’m going to use a blur. I’m going to choose Filter, Blur and then we’ll use a surface blur. Now surface blur is a blur that will blur the surface but not around the edges. It tends to keep edges very crisp. We don’t actually want crisp edges but we do want the edges around her face not to be blurred. So I’m going to reduce the threshold and the radius to small values. What I want to see on this image is a lessening of this grain so it’s sort of blurring out. I don’t want it too blurred, but I do want it blurred. And since I’m only going to use the lightened values here, I’m not really too concerned about the fact that it looks a little unreal at this point, I’m just going to click Ok.
And now I’m going to blend this back in using lighten. So with the lightening we’re actually lightening the pixels underneath so that’s a pretty good result there. But let’s have a look at what we’re sort of targeting. I don’t think this is great, but I don’t think this is quite there either. So let’s have a look and see what we could do.
Well we could apply another photo filter. So let’s go to Layer, New Adjustment Layer. Let’s go and get another photo filter and again, a cooling filter. So I’m thinking one of these others might be appropriate. Let’s just wind the value down and let’s check those again. This one’s pretty good. It’s a little bit red but it’s not a bad sort of cooling filter for this image if we could get the density of it correct. Let’s have a look at this other one. Again, that’s having quite a nice effect on her skin tone. So I might choose one or other of these cooling filters to apply to the image.
So now if I was continuing to work on the image I might want to for example apply a curves adjustment to it. So let’s just go and get our layers. We’re working on an adjustment layer right now so I’ll need to give us a full image layer to work on. So I’ve pressed Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E so we’ve got a new layer to work on. And now we could use a curves adjustment, Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Color Curves. And here what I’d be looking for is to sort of just generally lighten the image. So, I think the backlight will give us a reasonably good start here. And I’m just going to adjust this curve so that everything is just a little bit lighter. So I’m just looking at pulling all of these curve marks up a little bit. Here’s our before and after. And you can see that we’ve got a little bit better skin tones here so I’ll click Ok.
And I think in actual fact this time round I’ve probably got a better fix than I had the first time. Perhaps if I have a look at that smart blur again I might to do something else or what I could do is just blur a duplicate of the image using for example a Gaussian blur and then just bring back these areas into the image. Let’s see what we would do there.
I’m just going to duplicate this layer. I’m going to apply a blur for example, a Gaussian blur to this layer looking to get the smoothest skin tones. That’s really all I’m interested in here is the slight smoothening of the skin so that we get rid of the grain that we got in from the iPhone, click Ok.
I’m going to add a layer mask to this layer. And what I’m going to do now is to just paint out the areas where we’ve got some softening of the image. The softening areas are going to be around the eye and perhaps over the lips. So I’m going to bring these areas of detail back a little bit in these areas. So there’s how I would fix these images to remove the impact of using an iPhone to take the images in the first place. Let’s just go back to the Undo history on this image and let’s see how far we’ve come. This is the original image and this is what we’ve got now, a much more pleasing result for the family of this young woman.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. I encourage you to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you’ll be advised when new videos are released. And look out at projectwoman.com for more Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Illustrator tutorials.
