Yes! It can be done! Don’t let anyone tell you it can’t.
Ok, so if you read some of the information that’s available on the web you’ll be lead to believe that, in Photoshop CS6 the Picture Package feature has at last been permanently removed from Photoshop and only the Contact Sheet feature is available.
You’ll also read that the Picture Package is not a supported plug-in. Well, it might not be supported but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. If you are a Windows user then it does work – in fact it works just fine. And thanks to J. J. Mack’s research here, step by step is how to put the Picture Package back in Photoshop CS6 for Windows.
Once you’ve downloaded the plug-in zip file, open it up because what you want is two parts of it. You want the appropriate ContactSheetII.8LI file and the layouts.
So, once you’ve unzipped the file use Windows Explorer to locate your Adobe folder – you will need the C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6 <64 bit or 32 bit>\Presets folder. Depending on whether you are using the 32 or 64 bit version of Photoshop, you will need to locate the correct folder. On my machine, I am using the 64 bit version of Photoshop so the folder is: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64 Bit)\Presets.
Put the folder of Layouts that were in the zip file into this folder – so you will now have a Presets\Layouts folder with a set of layouts in it.
Step 3
Locate your Adobe Photoshop \Required\Plug-Ins\Automate folder – the Required folder is at the same level as your Presets folder so, on my computer it is here:
Into this folder copy the ContactSheetII.8LI file from the zip download.
Step 4
Once you’ve done this simply close and restart Photoshop.
Choose File > Automate and you’ll see the Picture Package option.
You’ll also find that you have two Contact SheetII entries – you want to use the second one of these as this is the one that is installed with Photoshop CS6.
If desired you can use the Edit Menus feature to remove the unwanted entry from the Automate menu to make things neat and tidy.
Step 5
To run the Picture Package plug-in in Photoshop CS6, choose File > Automate > Picture Package. You can now proceed as you did with earlier versions. You can edit layouts, open layouts, you can click on an image to add it, you can go and add a file to the layout and basically do anything that you used to do with the Picture Package in any earlier version of Photoshop.
So when someone tries to tell you that Picture Package is not available in Photoshop CS6 feel free to send them here to prove that it can be done.
Make your own custom glossy buttons in Photoshop – shows how to layer pieces on top of each other, and how to use Styles, a gradient and Warp to quickly and simply create a button in just a few steps.
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 make custom buttons in Photoshop. This video was really born of necessity. What I needed was for a project that I was working on I needed a stop and a go sign. And all I could find on the stock websites that I liked and that really worked for me was a stop sign. I couldn’t find a matching go sign. So instead of buying just the stop button and then going ahead and reworking it to make my go button I decided I’d make it from scratch.
So here’s my stop button, and we’re going to make it. And I’ll show you have to turn it into a go button so that you can do that as well. I’m going to start with a new document. And I’m going to start with a relatively small one but you can make yours as large as you want and if you were using this at a lot size you’d want a large size document. So I’m just going to click Ok. And it has a white background and that’s Ok for now.
So I’m going to choose Window and then Layers so we can see our layers palette. I’m going to start with the shape that I’m going to use. So I’m going to show my toolbar which has disappeared here, and I’m going to go and get a custom shape. Now there is already a shape that I can use here and what it is is the polygon shape. And all I need to do is to set the number of sides.
Now this is a sided figure so it’s already preset. Let’s just click on a new layer and we’re going to choose pixels. And I’m going to go and get a red color to use. So now that I have Pixel selected and my red color and a brand new layer I’m just going to draw my polygon. Now I’m going to hold the Shift key so it’s constrained to a regular shape. And because it’s being drawn in exactly the wrong place I’m going to hold the Spacebar down and move it into the middle of my image. And only when I’m ready am I actually going to let go the left mouse button which I’m doing now. As you can see it’s not actually rotated correctly but we can fix that with the move tool.
I’m going to go to Edit Free Transform and I’m just going to rotate it 15 degrees because that’s all it needs to be straightened up. So we’ve got our starting shape now. Now we need this white bit. So what I’m going to do is to actually just put this on a new layer. So I’m going to create New Layer via Copy which means I’m going to copy the exact shape into a brand new layer. I’m going to make white my foreground color. I’m going to fill this layer with white using Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac.
Now if I click on this icon here you can see that now I have a white shape. I want it to smaller than this bottom shape. So I’m going to click and drag on the corner but I’m going to do it with the Alt key selected because that is going to size that relative to the middle portion of the shape. So now I’m just going to size it in and let go the left mouse button and then let go the Alt key. So now I have a second shape on that layer.
So again once I’ve created this layer I’m going to choose Layer New Layer via Copy. And this time we’re going back to our red color. So I have that selected. I’m going to click here to lock these pixels, Alt Backspace Option Delete to fill it with that color. And again I’m going to size it in by dragging with the move tool and do that with the Alt key selected so that I can actually set this border here so it’s sort of even all the way around and then let go and click the checkmark here. And now we have our shapes.
Now we’ve got basically all the bits that we need except for the text. So let’s go ahead and put the text on. So I’m going to go and grab the text tool. I’m going to reset these so that I have white as my foreground color. I’m just going to go and find a font to use. I’m really not that fussed about what font we use because you can go ahead and find a really good font yourself. I think I might just use Calibri. Nowhere near big enough in actual fact, so let’s just go in here and let’s make it 200.
Not nearly big enough even still. 350 pixels is pretty good. And let’s just move that down into position. Ok, so there’s my stop sign. What it’s missing right now is this sort of look that gives it a sort of dimension. Now the dimension that we’re going to give our shape is going to be created using styles so I’m going to click here and add a style. And I’m going to choose bevel and emboss. Now we’re on the back layer so we’re on this outside edge. And what I want to do is to add quite a deep bevel. And we’re just going to size that to suit.
Now you can see that the highlight mode here is Screen but it doesn’t have to be screen. We could actually multiply it and we could use a slight color here if we wanted to darken up the edges of the highlight. And here around the shadow areas we’ve got again multiply and a darker color. In this case I may want my dark red, but I may want it a bit redder. So instead of using a sort of black color to multiply I’m multiplying with a darker version of the color I’m using. But you can play around with that.
You can also play around with the shape of the bevel. So you can make it all sorts of different shapes. And you can even click here and change it manually by dragging on the curve. But I’m just looking for a beveled edge here. And it needs to be an inner bevel, but we could make it chisel hard or we could make it chisel soft as well. They’re alternatives that we could use. Once we’ve done that I’ll just click Ok. So that’s taken care of the outside edge, and we’ve got the white mark. All we need to do is to deal with the middle.
So again I’m going to select the middle and I’m going to again add a slight bevel to it. So let’s go to bevel and emboss. This time again in a bevel I want quite a large one, but I want it to be really, really soft in shadow. I just want it there, only just barely. So I’m going to call that good for that inner bevel right now. If you have a look at this particular stop sign you can see that it’s got a line through it. And now we’re going to create that affect again here in Photoshop.
There are any number of ways that you can create that sort of custom shape. But I’m going to show you just one way that you can do it. I’m going to start with a new layer and I’m going to drag a rectangle on it. And this rectangle is going to be over the top of my stop sign. And I’m going to go and grab the same colors as I’ve used in my stop sign, this red, and I’m going to choose a slightly darker version of the red. And let’s make this a slightly lighter version of it, but again all in the same color palette.
Now that I have these colors I’m going to fill this shape with a gradient made from those colors. And the gradient I want is this foreground to background gradient. So I’m going to select it, and I’m going to drag it into here. And I want a linear gradient. And I want it the other way around because I want the lightness at the top. So I’m going to reverse it. So once I’ve got my linear gradient in place I’m going to call that good. And I’m going to then clip it because what I’ve got right now is a gradient that’s going to give me the beginnings of the effect that I want.
The problem is is that it’s much bigger than the shape underneath. But if I create a clipping mask it’s all going to work perfectly. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. And you can see that that shape is now clipped to the shape of the layer below. Now I just need to drag down the opacity a bit. Ok, now we want to make that nice shape. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Edit and then Transform and then Warp. And now I can warp this shape to the shape that I want. So I’m just going to drag down on this edge. And I’m going to look to make a smooth warp over my image.
If I want some more darkness into my image I can just pull up the darker edge of this rectangle. I don’t want to twist these if I can help it. I did in my shape and it didn’t end up quite the way I wanted it to look. But here we’ll be a bit more careful. So now that I’ve got my sort of warp look I’m just going to click the checkmark here. And that’s now in place. And if I want it a little bit differently I can just drag on this shape and just bring it down or I could re-warp it. But there’s the basics of a stop sign. And that’s all been created now inside Photoshop. So I could save this off as stop. Now to recolor this and make this the go sign all I need to do is to put in an adjustment layer.
So I’ll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue/Saturation and click Ok. And this hue/saturation adjustment layer is going to affect everything below it. And so all I need to do is to drag around until I find a green for go. And somewhere in here is a pretty good green, decrease the saturation a bit and just work out exactly where my correct green is. Ok. So now we’ve actually turned stop into go. And we’ve done that just using this layer. And all I’d need to do now is to just go ahead and type a layer that has go written on it. Let’s click the text tool. Let’s make sure we’re typing in white, click here and just type go. So my stop sign is now a go sign.
Here is the stop version. And then with the adjustment layer that changes the color and then a text layer here’s my go sign. And these two signs match exactly. And it was really fairly quick to create them inside Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked this tutorial place give it a thumbs up and like it on YouTube so that you tell others that it’s a good tutorial. You’ll find more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel. If you subscribe you’ll be advised when new videos are launched. And look out for my website at projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tutorials, Tips and tricks for these applications.
With the increasing popularity of the iPad and iPhone it’s no longer appropriate for most of us to create Flash based web galleries – they just can’t be easily viewed on these devices. If you want almost everyone to be able to see your galleries then you need to create them as HTML galleries and not Flash.
Lightroom has a range of HTML Templates you can use to create a reasonable looking gallery in a very short time.
To make your web gallery in Lightroom start by placing your images in a Collection. This makes it easier for you to work with the images and you can save the gallery so you can edit it in future if needed.
Select your Collection and switch to the Web module. From the Layout Style options, you can select Lightroom HTML gallery or, easier still, from the Template Browser panel on the left of the screen, select a gallery that is HTML based. If you look in the preview area the HTML gallery templates all have the letters HTML in their bottom left corner. Select a template to use.
From the toolbar (press T if it isn’t visible), choose All Filmstrip Photos if you have a Collection selected and this will add all the images to your gallery. What you see on the screen in the editing area is a live version of your web gallery. You can click on any image to view it as it will look on the web.
Open the Site Info panel and type a Site Title, a Collection Title and a Collection Description. If you don’t want to use all of these simply delete the placeholder text for those items you don’t want to use and the space they take up in the template will be freed for use for your images.
For the Contact Info, type your contact name if desired and then complete the Web Or Mail Link and this will be linked automatically to the contact name in the web gallery.
You can add an identity plate to the gallery, if desired, it will sit above the Site Title. You can link it back to your site if desired by completing the Web or Mail Link box.
The Color Palette options let you change the colors for the various elements in the website template.
In the Appearance panel you can set the thumbnail image grid size – it defaults to 3 x 3 and cannot be any smaller but it can be considerably larger. If you want to show cell numbers over the images you can do so – this is useful when you need to give viewers an easy way to identify images they like. Images are numbered sequentially and if you have multiple pages the images on the second page continue sequentially from the numbering from the first page.
You can control the size of the full size image on the Image Page by adjusting the Size slider. You can also add Photo Borders to the images in the Image Pages. Note that the Appearance panel is divided into Common Settings, Grid Pages and Image Pages allowing you to make change that effect the entire gallery, only the grid pages or only the image pages.
In the Image Info panel you can select to add labels to your images. These appear on the Image Page only. You can select a Title which appears above the image and a Caption which appears below the image. For each you can source the text from the image metadata and there is no reason why you can’t set the Title to be the Caption metadata and the Caption to be your Equipment metadata, for example.
In Output Settings select the quality of the larger size JPG images – 0 is low quality and 100 is high quality. If you want to include Metadata with the image select what to include – your choices are Copyright Only or All.
Also add a Watermark if desired. If you select to add a watermark, you’ll see it on the image page and the index pages so you can check to see that it’s what you want.
Select whether or not to sharpen the images – this sharpening is only applied as the images are output so you won’t see it on the screen. If you’re unsure what to use, enable Sharpening and set it to Standard.
When you’re done, click Create Saved Web Gallery – this is a new option in Lightroom 4 and it appears to the top right of the main editing area. Type a name for your web gallery and click Create. Doing this ensures that the gallery is saved and once you have done this, Lightroom will track your changes from now on.
In future you can come back to the web gallery by clicking the special collection that Lightroom creates for you.
If you want to upload your gallery to the web later on, click Export to export it to disk. Otherwise you can upload it direct to your website by selecting the Upload Settings panel and configure your FTP server. For this, you’ll need your server details, user name and password. You’ll also need the server path although you can click Browse to browse your server to find it if desired. Type a subfolder in which to place the gallery – you’ll need to do this if you plan to have multiple galleries in the server folder you are using. Each gallery needs to be placed in a different subfolder or it will overwrite the previously uploaded gallery.
When you have everything configured click Upload to render the gallery images, create the necessary html code and upload it all automatically to your server.
The HTML galleries in Lightroom aren’t the best looking galleries in town but having a gallery accessible to almost any device is definitely and incentive to use them in place of Flash galleries.
Speed up and streamline importing images into Lightroom using Import Presets. Learn how to create and edit presets for importing images into a Lightroom catalog, includes backup on import, renaming, import presets, choosing previews and folders for storing images.
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 streamline the importing process in Lightroom with import presets. An import preset helps you speed up the process of importing images into Lightroom because you don’t have to make all the settings each time that you import. I’m in the Library module. I’m just going to click here on Import. I already have a disk in the drive. I’ve got a camera card in the drive. And we’re going to have a look at an existing import preset because you can see that the default here right now is craft images. What this is is in import preset that I created to import images that I shoot of the crafts that I make. And it has certain settings already in it. There’s no file renaming because I don’t rename my files. Apparently there are no develop settings here but there is some metadata that’s being added to the images as they’re imported. And the destination is already selected. You can see here that the destination is craft images. This Into Subfolder is not actually being used because it’s not checked. So in actual fact everything is going straight into the craft images folder. So let’s go and create an import preset. And the way that we do it is just to make the settings that we usually want to use. Here’s the camera card. I only want to bring in new photos. In this case these are daily photos. So let’s just check. I do want standard previews made. I don’t want to import suspected duplicates. If I wanted to make a second copy I could automatically set that up but I’m just seeing that my backup drive is not attached at the moment. So let’s leave that blank. If I wanted to rename files I could select that and set up the renaming, but I don’t usually do that. Apply during import. Now there is a develop setting that I want to use here. And here it is in my user presets. And it’s a camera standard profile. What that does is makes my images when they appear inside Lightroom look the way they did on the back of the camera. And then I can go to metadata and I can select the metadata. I’m just going to click Edit Presets just to see what this metadata preset looks like and make sure it’s the one that I want to apply. Well no, that one looks a bit empty. So let’s go to Helen Bradley copyright. This looks like the right one. So I’ll click Done. Now I’m not going to apply any keywords to these image. The problem with keywords is that they’re going to be applied to all of these images. So you can see that there’s a whole range of images here. And there’s really not a keyword that I would apply to everyone of these images. So I usually keyword later on if I keyword at all. So let’s just close Apply during import. And now I need to select my destination. Now I already have a folder for these images on my removable disk. It’s actually this one. Toshiba hard drive green is where my images are kept. I’m going to go into photos and I want to pick up my daily walk from 2010 onwards. So this is the folder in which the images are going to be placed. And once I’ve made all these settings I can go ahead and import the images. But if I want to use these settings or most of these settings again in future I’m better off creating them as an import preset. So I’m going to choose Save current settings as a new preset. And here is my preset dialog. And I’m just going to call this daily walk, whatever it is that is going to remind me that these are these images and click Create. And now I have an import preset that’s going to be saved with Lightroom. It’s going to be available from this dialog anytime I come into Lightroom. All I need to do is to select daily walk and all these settings will be automatically applied to my import. Now if for example I do go and reconnect my backup drive then I could click here and just make a change to the settings. It’s not going to change the import preset but I can actually vary these things if I want to. But it gives me most of the settings that I need most of the time. So I’m going to go ahead and just click Import. So there’s the basics of using an import preset in Lightroom. You’ll find that if you repeatedly choose to use the same settings that an import preset will save you a lot of that setup time. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video training session. If you liked this video please click the Like button here in YouTube to tell others that you liked it. If you’d like to see more of these videos and be notified when they’re released please subscribe to my channel. You’ll find lots of other Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom tutorials in this YouTube channel. And visit my website at Projectwoman.com for more blog posts and interesting articles on these programs.
Want to share your image with the world? To save an image for the web, choose File > Save for Web & Devices… , choose the file type, set the quality level, set the image size and save it. Your image will look great and it won’t slow down your website.
Learn how to create complex designs in Photoshop from simple shapes. Learn how to quickly rotate shapes, how to find and fill them and some ideas for using them in your own work.
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 create complex designs from simple shapes in Photoshop. And this will work in practically any version of Photoshop. Before we start on this tutorial I’m going to show you exactly what you’re going to end up with so that you can get an idea as to what we’re aiming for. This is the kind of complex shape that we’re going to create in Photoshop, and we’re going to do it using Photoshop shapes. And what I’ve done is I’ve created a shape on this middle layer and then another shape on the top layer. And what I’ve done is actually blended the two together using a blend mode. But if you liked it you could actually just settle for this shape. You can take any part of this tutorial and use the pieces of it in your own art. So let’s just tuck this image away and let’s get started. And the first thing that we’re going to do is to create a brand new file. And I want to make this file a fixed size because I’m going to need to use some of these dimensions in a minute. And I’m going to make it 4,000 by 4,000 pixels because that’s going to make the math really easy. I’m going to set it to RGB color and I’ll have a white background. So that’ll be just fine. I’ll click Ok. The first thing I’m going to do is add a new layer to make sure that everything is kept separate of this background layer. And then I’m going to choose View and then New Guide and I’m going to add two guides. I’m going to add them at 50 percent horizontal and then another one at 50 percent vertical. And I’m going to choose View and make sure the Snap is turned on and that we’re snapping to guides. Now let’s go and find a shape. Now the shape tools in Photoshop CS6 that I’m using are a little different to in the earlier versions but they work pretty much the same as long as you just follow along here. Now the first thing I’m going to do is select a shape. Now this is the shape that I used earlier. So let’s just click on that to use it. I’m to set my foreground color. I’m going to make sure that I’m working in pixels. Now in earlier versions of Photoshop there’s icons here not a dropdown list. But what you want is Filled Pixels. And then I’m going to make sure my shape is selected, and I’m going to select my layer and draw my shape. And I’m going to set it away from the center line. But before I finish drawing it I’m just going to hold the spacebar and position it. Now I’m going to want it more accurately positioned but we can do that in a second, just let go and it’s filled. I’m going to click the move tool and I’m going to zoom in here because I want to make sure that this is in the exact right position. So yes it has snapped into the correct position. So I’m going to leave it there. Now I’m going to choose Layer, New Layer Via Copy. Now this is critical that you use these steps that we made a second layer and then we’re going to press Ctrl or Command T to get into Transform mode. Now we want to rotate this shape but we want to rotate it around the center point. So I’m going to grab this sort of marker here in the middle and drag it over the center point of my image. And I can check up here and this should say 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels. And if it’s not dead right I can come in here and change it. We want it to rotate around the exact midpoint. Then we need to change its angle. And I’m going to rotate this one 30 degrees. So each one of them is going to be rotated 30 degrees from the previous one. And I’ll click the checkmark. To save myself having to do that repeatedly I’m just going to press Ctrl Alt Shift T, which is Command Option Shift T on the Mac. And as you can see every time I press that key I get a rotated shape. I’ll do that until I rotate around the full 360 degrees. I’m then going to click on the first of these layers I’m going to Shift Click on the last of them so they’re all selected and then choose Layer, Merge Layers. And I could just press Ctrl or Command E. And that’s put that shape on a layer all by itself. And really that’s all we’re going to do to create this small complex shape. Let’s go and add a brand new layer, and now let’s go and find a different shape. Here’s the Custom Shape tool. Let’s go and find a different shape to use. Now earlier I used this shape. So let’s just select it. It’s sort of like a little rickrack design. I’m going to change my foreground color so it’ll be a little easier to see and I’m going to drag it on the image. Now I’m not concerned that it drags in proportion here. I think it’s more interesting perhaps if it doesn’t. I’m going to position it roughly where it goes, then zoom in with the Z or Zoom tool. I’m going to choose the Move Tool and make sure that it is directly on that line, so it’s snapped to that line. Now I’m going to make a new layer, Layer, New Layer Via Copy. With this new layer I’m going to make sure I have Move Tool selected. I’m going to move its center point so that its rotation point is right over the middle of my image. I’m going to check up here and if it’s not at 2,000 by 2,000, and X and Y at 2,000 and 2,000 I’m going to make it 2,000 and 2,000. And now I’m going to rotate it. And this one I’m going to rotate just 10 degrees and click the checkmark. And then I’m going to Ctrl Alt Shift T a number of times, in fact 35 times, for this to rotate around and finish its rotation. Then I’m going to grab this layer, click on it, scroll down to the last of these layers, Shift Click on it and then merge them with Layer, Merge Layers or press Ctrl or Command E. So let’s just zoom out here and this is our new shape. And this is the shape with the original one underneath. And now I can impact how these shapes relate with each other by for example setting an Overlay Blend Mode. You can see that we’re getting a different effect. And we can use all sorts of blend modes for these layers to control how they interact with each other to get different effects in our pattern. Now I like that one so I’m going to settle for that. And let’s just add one final layer to this. I’m going to click on the layer. I’m going to add another color. It’s going to be a dark purple. And this time I’m just going to add a circle, a filled circle. And I’m going to add it out here. Actually let’s make it an oval. Now a filled oval, I’ve just dragged the oval out. I need to fill it. The foreground color is the dark purple that I want. So I’m going to Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac. Now I could if I wanted to add some additional circles. So if I wanted to align these or not align them as I wish I can do that. So let’s just add a few different shapes in here. And we’re going to use these to decorate our piece. So having created those shapes I’m now going to select the Move Tool and Ctrl Click on this layer so that I’m going to affect the entire layer. I’m just going to move this down so it’s centered. Now we’re going to do exactly the same thing as we did before, Layer, New Layer Via Copy. We’re going to use the free transform Ctrl or Command T. We’re going to move this transformation point into the center of the circle because we want everything centered nicely. We’re going to change this to 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in case it is not already set up to be that. And then we’re going to choose an angle. I’m just choosing an angle there is a factor of 360 degrees. So I’m going to choose 36 this time and click the checkmark. And now Ctrl Alt Shift T, Command Option Shift T on the Mac, to create my rotations. The same as before, select the first layer, Shift Click on the last of these layers, Ctrl or Command E to merge them. And now let’s see what we have. I’m going to zoom out. You can see that these dots have given us a little bit more visual interest in our design. And we can just run through these blend modes to see what sort of effect we can get with the blend mode. So I’m just running through down the blend mode list to see if any of these are giving me an effect that I like on my design. Well I kind of like the green that I’m getting with this exclusion. So there you have the way of creating a complex pattern in Photoshop. And all we’re doing is creating shapes and rotating them around a known center point. When I’m through I’m going to choose View, Clear Guides and that will get rid of the guides so that we can see our finished pattern. And we could use that as a repeating pattern in Photoshop. We could make it into a shape. We could do all sorts of things with it. We could even make it into a brush if we wanted to. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Photoshop tutorial. You can find more of my tutorials on the this YouTube channel. And visit projectwoman.com for tips, tricks and articles on Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
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.
Need to fill in a selection or a layer with your current foreground color. Press Alt + Delete on a PC (Option + Delete on a Mac) to instantly fill in your selection or layer with your foreground color.
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.
Learn how to make colored stripes in Photoshop. This uses a mosaic filter to turn a regular image into blocks of color from which stripes are extracted. Once you’ve done that you can then create a madras check from this stripe image and I’ll show you how to do that too.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create quick and easy stripes in Photoshop. And this is going to work in practically any version of Photoshop. Before we start and I show you exactly how to create this effect let’s have a look and see the kind of effect that we are creating. What I have here is a series of stripes in Photoshop. It’s a document that is full of stripes. And you can see here that I’ve also been able to create this as a sort of plaid look. So we’re going to look at both options here, and we’re going to create this set of stripes from a photograph really, really easily. So let’s just get rid of that document. And let’s go to our starter document. Now you can start with any document at all. I like to choose something that’s in the sort of range of colors that I want to see in my stripes. This is what I got my stripes from. So if you want pink and blue stripes then find an image that has say pink and blue flowers in it, or you could adjust it with a Hue/ Saturation adjustment later on. But we’re going to start with a filter. I’m going to choose Filter and then Pixelate and then Mosaic. And what the Mosaic Filter does is it turns this image into a sort of mosaic look. And what I want is nice big cells because that’s going to give me the stripes that I’m going to use in a minute, and the bigger the cells the less stripes I’m going to have. So I’m going to just choose quite a big value for us for now and just click Ok. And so there are the beginnings of my stripes. And now we’re going to use a tool, probably a tool that you’ve never used before and wondered what it’s purpose was, but this is this tool here. It’s the Single Row Marque Tool. And we’re going to click at the edge of a row because we want to take just one row of this image. And these are going to be the colors that we’re going to use. So I’m looking for something here with some blues and pinks and yellows in it. So let’s just select this one here. So I’ve selected a single row. And I’m going to choose Edit Copy because that’s copied that row. And now let’s create a new document. And I’m going to make it nice and big so let’s say three-and-a-half thousand pixels by three-and-a-half thousand pixels. And it can have white as its background. That’s Ok. I’ll click Ok. I’m going to add a new layer. And I’m going to paste my copied shape into it, Edit Paste. And it’s coming in here in the middle. It’s just such a small line, it’s almost impossible to see. But I’m going to target the Move Tool just by pressing the letter V. And now I’m going to drag it to fill the image because these are my stripes. And when I click the checkmark I now have my stripes. Now I’ve lost a bit of the yellow off the edge. So maybe I can just bring it in here. And I’ve got some slightly thinner stripes. And if I don’t like this color here I could just drag that off the edge and not even use it. So now I’m going to crop my image because I want to crop it to delete the cropped pixels. So I’ll just press Enter to crop it to size. And there is our stripe. So we could create this as a pattern if we wanted to use it over and over again, or if we just want to use it for now then we have it in place. So let’s see how we would make that into a plaid. I’m just going to duplicate this layer because I want to keep my stripes just in case I want to use them again later on. And what I’m going to do is reduce the opacity of this layer to about 60 percent, and then I’m going to duplicate it again. So I’ve got two layers each of about 60 percent opacity. And all I’m going to do is target this top layer, let’s grab the Move Tool, and I’m going to rotate it around 180 degrees. So I’m just going to hold the Shift key as I do that so it’s rotated to exactly the right number of degrees and just click the checkmark here. So now I have this sort of plaid madras sort of stripe pattern. I could change the blend mode if I wanted to by targeting the top layer and change the blend mode to something like Overlay. And that will give me a contrastier look. I could also try Difference or Exclusion. And that’s making a sort of otherwise brown and green pattern turn into a blue sort of pattern. So we have all sorts of options here. Here’s our original stripes garnered from our original photograph. And then what I’ve done is created two copies of it at an angle to each other and 60 percent opacity with a blend mode to create something that’s more like a madras stripe pattern. And this could be copied as a pattern or saved as a pattern by choosing Edit Define Pattern. We could use that as a pattern at any time. Before I create it as a pattern I’m just going to make sure that I’ve got rid of those pixels at the edge. I want it to be exactly square, and that’s not exactly square. But you can see the possibilities of working with stripes and patterns in Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. You can find more of my Illustrator, Photoshop and Lightroom videos on this YouTube channel. And visit projectwoman.com for more blog posts and Photoshop tutorials.
(photo by: roxinasz via www.sxc.hu )
(photo by: Jürgen Eixelsberger)