This technique shows a quick way to create even complex layouts using selections and layers in Photoshop. It is simple to achieve for any one with advanced beginner skills or better in Photoshop.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can use Photoshop to make a reusable layout template. In a later video I’ll show you how you can go ahead and reuse that template.
This is the type of template that I’m going to show you how to create in this video and in the next video I’m going to show you how to populate it. Basically the template is made up here of a background layer which can be any color you like and you can also change the color if you want to. And into the template we’re going to put two black boxes and these later on are going to be filled with images. Here’s one image and here’s another. And it’s going to be done in a way that’s going to be very easy for you to limit the size of these images to match these black boxes. And then you can add copyright symbol.
Now I’ve got two in this particular template because I’m not sure whether I’m going to need a black one or a white one. And that will pretty much depend on what the images are that I’m using. So into this template I’m going to put both of them so they’re both available. So in this particular video this is the point at which we’re going to have the template created. We’ll have a backing, the two boxes and then two alternate copyright symbols that we can use. So let’s get started.
The first thing to do is to choose File, New and then make a size for your template. I’m using one that could be used for a blog so it’s a mere 650 by 300 pixels in size, 72 pixels per inch because this is going to the web, RGB color mode, and because I want a white background I’m just going to select Background Contents White. But we could color that later on if we wanted to, and I’ll just click Ok. And here is my new document. It has just a background layer.
The next thing to do is to add a guide that I’m going to use to make it just a little bit easier to make those black boxes. I’m going to choose View and then New Guide and I want this one to be at 40 percent vertical. So that’s a little bit more than one-third of the way across this document. Now I’m going to add a new layer by clicking the Add New Layer icon here at the foot of the layer pallete. I’m going to target the Rectangular Marquee tool. And making sure that I’m pointed to this new layer I’m going to drag over to create a rectangle. Now I’m going to do that again so that you can see that I start my rectangle here outside the edge of the image to make sure that I get all the image up to this line. And because View is set to Snap I’m snapping to this guide so I’m making sure that I’m filling this exact area.
I have black selected here as my foreground color so I’m going to press Alt Backspace or Option Delete on the Mac to fill my rectangle with that black color. Now I’m going to add another new layer and this time I’m going to choose Select, Inverse because what that does is to select everything that I didn’t have selected before. Now I’m going to fill this with black again, Alt Backspace, Option Delete.
Now right now I’ve got two black boxes. And if I turn off these guides, I’m just going to clear the guides, you’ll see that these two boxes in fact butt onto each other so they’re creating an entire document. That’s not what I want. I want a marker between the two of them.
So I’m going to click on the topmost layer, click the Move tool and then just tap with the right arrow key and I’m just visually deciding how much space I want between these two boxes. And I think that’s a pretty good amount. So having done that I’m just going to select a different tool and that will turn this off. So here I’ve got my two layers and my background layer.
And all I need to do now is to add the copyrights so I’m just going to choose File, Open Recent because I recently opened my black and my white copyrights. So here they are. I’m going to just pull these images out of the way so that I can see my main image. And this is the white copyright here that is selected so this is its layer. So I’m just going to drag and drop it into my image. It’s way too big but we’ll worry about that in a minute. I’ll close it down. And now this is my black copyright image and I’m going to drag and drop its background layer into my image. And again, it’s way too big too. I’m now going to select the black copyright layer here and I’m going to press Ctrl and T and then Ctrl and zero. And what that does is it lets me see my sizing handles because this image this copyright image is really, really huge.
So I’m just going to size it down so it’s going to fit better in this area here. I’m going to make sure that I click this link here so that it’s sized in proportion. And now I’m going to just drag it back to approximately where I want it to be and click the checkmark. I can hide that now. And now let’s focus on the white layer exactly the same, click the layer thumbnail to select it, Ctrl and T and then Ctrl and zero. Now I’m going to drag in on the sizing handles to make my copyright small enough to position it in place on my image. I’m just going to click this link again just to make sure that this is scaled in proportion and click the checkmark.
So this is my template. It’s all done and now I can save it. So I can choose File and then Save as and I would give it a name such as 40, 60 something, like that to indicate to me that this is a template that I can now use to create other documents in future. In the next video I’ll show you exactly how to do that.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please click Like. Think about subscribing to my YouTube channel and look at my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, iPad and a whole lot more.
Learn to make realistic rivets in Photoshop. This tutorial makes use of the new photo filters in Photoshop CS6, but doesn’t require their use, so, you can make the rivets in any version of Photoshop. You will see how to add dimension with Bevel and Emboss and Contours, as well as with gradients and light. The tutorial is easy to follow and the process of making a rivet quite simple.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create rivets quickly and easily in Photoshop. Before we get started making the rivets let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re creating. And this is the type of rivet that we’re going to create. This one’s a copper rivet, but we can make them in any colors that we like.
To start off I’m going to choose File and then New and I’m going to create a new image. This one’s going to be 500 by 500 pixels because I like my rivets to be able to be shrunk down so that they can look realistic in place. So I’m just going to click Ok. And the first thing I’m going to do is to fill this layer here with a gradient.
Now in Photoshop CS6 there are some new photo gradients that you can use. And I really like these for rivets, but in earlier versions of Photoshop you can go and do the same thing and you can create your own look in gradients. So you don’t have to have these gradients available, but you will find that they are kind of handy for creating rivets as well as of course coloring photos. So I’m just going to click Ok and I’m going to apply this as a linear gradient. So I’m going to make sure I have Linear Gradient selected here and I’m going to drag it across the image here. I’m holding Shift to constrain it to a straight line. Now I’m not totally convinced about this particular gradient so let’s go and get something.
I know this copper one is going to work. So I just want something that is a little less harsh. This one’s got a distinct dark area and I want something that transforms from light to dark a little bit more smoothly. So this is a pretty good gradient. Now if this is a bit dark you can add a new layer to your image. So I’m going to add a new layer and I’m going to fill it with the foreground color by pressing Alt and Backspace because my foreground color is white. That’s Option Delete on the Mac. I’m going to set this to Screen Blend mode and just adjust the opacity down so that I can use most of the color underneath. But I could make it lighter if I wanted to. And I’ll just merge those layers with Ctrl and E to merge the layers. But if your gradient isn’t too dark then you don’t need to do that step.
I’m then going to choose the Elliptical Marquee tool and I’m going to drag a circle onto my gradient. And if I hold the Shift key with it that will be a pure circle. And if I use the Spacebar I can move the circle right into the center of the image. So I’ve still got the Shift key selected, I’m going to let go of the left mouse button and then let go the Shift key so I’ve got a circle here.
Now I’m going to invert that with Select Inverse so I have selected everything but the circle and I’ll press Delete. So this is the first part here of my rivet and it’s actually this outside part here. I’m going to duplicate this layer by dragging and dropping it on the New Layer icon. Now I got a bit enthusiastic there and ended up with more layers than I needed. So I now have two identical layers. I’m going to deselect the current selection by pressing Ctrl D or I could choose Select, Deselect. Now this is going to be in my inner shape so I’m going to Ctrl click on it, choose the Move tool, and then I want to size it in smaller. Now the way I do that is to hold both the Shift and the Alt keys as I do this. The Shift key constrains my movement to a full circle so I’m always going to have a circle here and the Alt key sizes it from the middle so that it’s not being repositioned. This second circle is going to be right in the middle of the first circle. So when I get it in place, let go of the left mouse button and then and only then let go of the Alt and the Shift keys, I’m going to click the checkmark here.
Now I want to transform this. And I want to transform it through 180 degrees so I’ll press Ctrl and T to get my transform details up here and I’ll type 180. And that’s flipped it around. In fact I think it could be rotated a little bit more attractively, probably to about here. Now at this point you’re going to get a relatively flat looking rivet. And I actually prefer to at this stage actually go and reapply the gradient. So I’m going to select my gradient again, with this layer I’m going to lock the pixels on it so that I can drag my gradient in and it’s only going to affect the area marked out by the circle. I’m also going to select a radial gradient because what I want to do is for this part of the gradient here to be light and the outer edge to be dark, and I’m just going to find a good position for it. And I think this is a pretty good gradient. So you can just continue to drag until you get it into the right place. Let’s just unlock that now. We’re ready now to add a Bevel and Emboss.
So I’m going to click the bottom layer here, choose the Add Layer Style icon and I’ll choose Bevel and Emboss. Now in contour I want one of these contours, this one, this one or this one. They’re all going to work pretty well. And I’m going to just adjust the range so that I push it to the very edge of the shape. Let’s go back into Bevel and Emboss and now I’m going to reduce the depth quite a bit, reduce the size, just get it to what I want it to look like. Now we have a problem with the light now. At the moment from Photoshop’s point of view and for this Bevel and Emboss effect, Photoshop has the light coming from this direction. But you can see that the light is actually coming from this direction on the rivet itself. So we need to adjust the light here to match our rivet.
So I’m going to bring in a global light here that is hitting from this direction. And then I’m going to adjust my Screen and my Multiply so that I get the effect that I want. I don’t want a really, really harsh set of settings here. I just want the very smallest amount. And then I’m going to add a Drop Shadow so I’ll click Drop Shadow, select the Drop Shadow itself.
Now I think that these are badly named in Photoshop. Size in actual fact it’s more like a feather. So size will give you a softer or a harsher shadow and the actual physical size of the shadow is really controlled by the spread and the distance. So I’m going to bring my distance and my spread in quite small and adjust the size of it which gives me that sort of feathering effect and click Ok. And let’s just zoom out here and there we have our rivet. And this one’s a copper rivet but you’ll find that there’s plenty of things to choose from in this set of photo gradients. And you can create your own gradients to create your own look for your rivets.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more video tutorials on this YouTube channel, subscribe to the channel, click Like if you liked this video and visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom and a whole lot more.
Learn how to create uneven lines that look hand drawn to use for cartography and other uses in Photoshop. Make use of Hue/Saturation adjustment to add vintage color, use brushes to create a pattern for the lines. Also, show how to render lines in black and white without any shades of grey and, lastly, how to distort them slightly. This video also shows how to add shadow around land mass and multiple lines of edging for a land mass.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you some line drawing techniques for creating maps in Photoshop. In this video I’m going to show you how you can create the effect that we have here around the edge of this chart. We’re going to draw the edge. We’re going to add this shading and also create these lines so that we can see how this could be created. The pattern in the middle is just a very simple pattern fill. We won’t be covering that, but we’ll be covering everything else in this video tutorial.
So to get started I’m going to start with a new image. And I’m going to choose File and then New. And I’m going to create a very tall image. So it’s going to be 2,000 pixels tall, RGB color. Background contents of white is just fine, so I’ll just click Ok to create that image.
And what I want to do first of all is to create these lines. And we’re going to do that using a paintbrush. So I’m going to click on the paintbrush and let’s select a brush to use. And what I want is something relatively small so I’m going to start with something like this 4 pixel brush. And then I’m going to choose Window and then Brush to open this brushes panel here. And what I want to do is to set up the brush so it’s going to paint the lines for me. So first of all I’m going to adjust the spacing so that there’s increased spacing between the brush tips. And I’m going to leave the size at about 4 pixels. Then I’m going to shape dynamics because I want the size of the brush to vary.
So I’m going to increase this quite a bit so we start seeing that there’s some variety in the brush here. Minimum diameter I don’t want to change at all. And that’s pretty much all I need to do with the brush right now. And then I’m going to test it. So I’m going to make sure that I have black set as my background or foreground color, which it is here. And then I’m going to click with my brush here and I’m going to Shift click at the bottom because that will create a straight line of brush strokes. And let’s just have a look in here a bit closer at this.
You can see that we now have this sort of dotted line which is different varieties of line. Now if that’s not quite what I want I can just zoom out and we can start again. So I’m just going to undo the brush and perhaps we’ll go back and make the brush just a little bit bigger than it was. So let’s go to brush tip shape, increase the size just a little bit, and perhaps bring down the size jitter or up the minimum diameter so that we haven’t got quite so much variety in our brushes. I’m going to click here and then Shift click to finish my brush stroke.
Now what I want is a sampling of this. So I’m going to use this tool here which is the single column marquee tool, one of the few times you will ever find a need for this particular tool. I’m going to zoom in here so that I can see exactly what I’m selecting and I’m just going to click to select a single line through this image. Now that’s not the world’s best. So let’s just try again. My brush stroke is not completely vertical so that’s causing me some problems here. Let’s start this again. I’m going to click here, and again let’s Shift click to create a straight line. And let’s see if that’s a bit straighter. That will be when we click just to one side of it. So that’s going all the way through the dot.
So I’m just going to choose Edit and then Define Pattern because this is going to be a pattern. And it will be just this dashed line as our pattern so I’ll click Ok. I can now close this image because I don’t need it any longer. And let’s see how our pattern will work.
I’m going to create a new document, this time 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in size. And this time I’m going to fill it. So I’m going to choose Edit and then Fill. And I’m going to fill it with a pattern. So I’m going to select Pattern. And the very last pattern in this container here will be the pattern we’ve just created so I’ll click Ok. And there are our lines. And that’s a starter for our map.
Now with our lines we can make these bigger. So I’ve got a background layer here but I can click to make it into a regular layer. And we can just enlarge this. So if we want larger lines all we need to do is to just drag up and down on this to just make the lines a whole lot wider than they are. And because they’re lines we can just size everything like this.
If you want to make sure that that there are no gray areas to the lines, as you can see they’ve got slightly fuzzy sides here, just use Image and then Adjustments and then Threshold. And that just makes the lines black and white. They’re pure black and white now. And if you want a bit of variety, Edit, Transform and then Warp. And you can just adjust the lines with a little bit more of a curve or something through them so that they look a little less like they’re straight lines and perhaps a little bit more hand-drawn feel about them, Ok. Now let’s add our map part.
So I’m just going to grab the Lasso tool and for this exercise just draw a very wiggly sort of coastline that we’re going to use for our map. And white is my foreground color so I’m going to Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac, to fill this with white. Now I want an edge around here so I’m going to choose Edit and then Stroke. And I’m going to stroke the edge with black. I’m just going to get all my tools over on this screen. So I’m going to select Black. And I’m going to make this a 6 pixel to begin with. And it’s going to be on the inside of this shape so I’ll just click Ok. And there’s our 6 pixel stroke.
Now I’m going to bring in this size. So I’m going to choose Select, Modify, Contract and I’m going to contract this by 10 pixels because I think that will be enough and then add another stroke. So again, Edit, Stroke. And this time I’m going to just use a 3 pixel stroke, but again on the inside. And then we’ll repeat that again, Select, Modify, Contract by 10 pixels and then repeat the stroke, Edit, Stroke and just click Ok. And then when I press Ctrl D you’ll see that we have the edges around here. But I’m actually just going to undo that Deselect right now because I have another piece to go in here.
What I want to do is to fill this shape with the grass so I have that as a pattern. So I’m going to choose Edit and then Fill, and again still pattern but here is my grass pattern here that I created earlier. And I’m just going to fill it with the grass pattern. Now we’re going to see how to create the shading around the edge. So I’m going to deselect the selection. I’m going to make sure I’m selected on the land, which is where the shading is to go, and I’m going to choose the Add Layer Style button here. And we’re going to choose an outer glow.
Now outer glow sounds like it should add some lightness around the edge but we can use it to add darkness. All we’re going to do is to select a dark color. Well we’ll stick with black right now. Now we can’t use screen as our blend mode. We’ll have to use something that will darken. So we’re going to choose multiply. And we’re going to set this if we want it to be full strength at 100 percent opacity. And we can adjust the size which is really the feathering around here. And the spread is how big it is. It would sound better to me if spread were really the feathering and size was the actual size. But that’s what you’re going to use.
So I’ll just click Ok. And now if we want to add this sort of sepia tone to the image, I’m going to make sure I have the image selected, and we’re going to do that with the hue/saturation adjustment layer, Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue/Saturation, click Ok. We’re going to select Colorized because we want to colorize this. And then we’re going to go and pick up our sort of brown color, increase the saturation and adjust the lightness. And you’re just looking for that sort of effect that is going to say vintage map to you. So I’m probably just going to select that for now.
And then I would finish off by cropping my image. We probably don’t need quite as much sea visible. In my image I have a one to one crop set here. That’s why it’s behaving a bit strangely. And there is our final result.
We’ve created lines using a brush in Photoshop. They’re all different size lines and we’ve created this sort of effect of an old-fashioned map. And actually if I just drag this adjustment layer up over the top of the fill we’ll really get that look of a vintage map.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my Photoshop tutorials on this YouTube channel. Subscribe to the channel. If you enjoyed it please comment and like this video. You’ll find more videos, tips, tricks and tutorials at my website at projectwoman.com.
Learn three must know blend modes for Photoshop and in particular for editing photos in Photoshop. Covers how to use Screen, Multiply and Overlay blend modes.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’ll introduce you to the three must know blend modes in Photoshop. I’ll explain how they work and how you might put them to use.
There are three blend modes that it’s really handy to know how to use in Photoshop, and we’re going to look at those three blend modes in this video tutorial.
In this particular image I have a picture of a building in Darwin and over the top of it I have a second layer. And on the right hand side is the exact duplicate of the layer below. And on the left hand side is just the color pink because we’re going to have a look and see how these blend modes work not only with images where you’ve got two layers that are identical but also what happens when you have for example a layer that is different. And the three blend modes that are really handy to use are got to by clicking this blend mode dropdown list in the layers panel in Photoshop.
If you can’t see your layers panel choose Window and then Layers and that will show you your layers panel. When you’re using blend modes you’ll always use the blend mode on the topmost layer or the layer that you want to affect. And it will affect how this particular layer blends in with the layer or layers below.
The first blend mode we’re going to look at it is this one here. It’s Screen. Now you’ll see that the blend modes here are grouped together. The blend modes in this particular group are the lightening blend modes. They are lighten, screen color, dodge, linear dodge and lighter color. And we’re going to look at screen in this particular group. And screen always lightens an image. So you can see here that the image is lighter than it was in the original. Here it’s colored this sort of pink tone. And here we’ve just got the original image over again, but it’s a lighter version. This is a blend mode that you can use to salvage an underexposed image. If you’ve got an image that doesn’t have enough light in it, you could use the image on each of the layers and then blend the top one into the bottom using the screen blend mode. And that will lighten the image and bring detail out of it.
The next blend mode we’re going to look at is similar but works in the opposite way. This is a darkening blend mode. And it’s accessible from this darken group of blend modes: darken, multiply color burn, linear burn and darker color. And in this case the one we’re going to use is multiply. And multiply darkens the image. You can see that we’ve got a darker version of the image with this sort of pink overlay. But here where we had the image on the two layers, the exact same image on each of the two layers, you can see that we’ve got a darkening of the image. This would be useful if we had an overexposed image. If we put the overexposed image on two layers and then blend them together with the multiply blend mode, we’ll bring back some of the detail in the overexposed image.
The other of the blend modes that you’ll typically use in Photoshop is overlay. It’s in this group of blend modes, and it’s one of the contrasty blend modes. What this does is it lightens everything that is lighter than a mid-gray and it darkens everything that is darker than mid gray. So it’s a nice contrasty blend mode. Let’s have a look here at what it’s doing to the image on the right. You can see that this is a flatter sort of image. And when I turn on this layer we’re getting a lot more contrasty image. And that’s what’s happening on the left too is we’re getting a contrasty, a colored version, of the original image. Anytime you want to boost the contrast in an image you can use the overlay blend mode.
So the three blend modes that I suggest that you look at using with your photos in particular are multiply to darken, screen to lighten, and overlay to add some contrast and punch. Now if you find that a certain blend mode is too much let’s just get rid of this particular layer and let’s duplicate the image itself. And let’s go and use the overlay blend mode. And if this is too much of a contrast enhancement to the image all you need do is to back off the opacity of this layer. This will give you some of the layer below and some of this additionally contrasty layer so that your image gets more contrast but perhaps not as much as it would have if you’d had this layer at 100 percent opacity.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel. Comment on the video and like it if you like it. And look out for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more at my website projectwoman.com.
If you have thousands of images to add a copyright watermark to, you can use Lightroom to do this very quickly. This video shows the workflow to use to import thousands of images into Lightroom and how to export them and create your own watermark to add to them. This is a minimalist workflow designed to process a lot of images very quickly.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can copyright in bulk the images as you export them from Lightroom. One of my blog readers recently contacted me and asked me how easy it would be to add watermarks to a series of images that they had. And so this video is for them and for anybody else who’s considering applying a watermark to a lot of images all at once. And my suggestion is, and she had something like two and a half to three and a half thousand images, is that Lightroom is the tool to use.
So I’m going to get started and I actually have a folder of images that I am going to import into Lightroom to show you exactly how it will work. So I’m going to click on Import and then I’m going to select the folder that contains the images that I want to import in. So this would be the folders that contain the two and a half thousand or so images that this particular reader has. So I’m just looking for my particular set of images. And I know they’re here. So all I’m going to do to start off with is just to select the folder of images. And it’s these Cornwall images that I’m going to import. Now I’m going to add them to Lightroom. And in this case because I want to do this very quickly because all I want to do is to add watermarks to them, I’m going to select Minimal as my previews because that’s going to render everything very, very quickly. And because I want lots of images I’m going to deselect Don’t import selected duplicates. So all I’m going to do at this stage is now to click Import and bring those all into Lightroom.
Now the images are coming into Lightroom and I can start getting ready as soon as they’re in to export them with their watermarks. Now some of these are portrait orientation and some of them a landscape. That may or may not be an issue. I’m going to select the first image and Shift click on the last so that we can export them. I’m going to Right click and choose Export and then Export again. And this takes me to the Export dialogue. So the first thing I need to do is to determine where I want to export them to. So I’m just going to put them into a folder in my My Documents folder. And I’m just going to create a brand new folder for them. But I’m going to select My Documents as the location, and I’m going to put in a subfolder called watermark. And then I will check if I want to rename my files. I don’t want to rename them. The idea of this is to get in and out as quickly as possible.
I can convert them if they were not JPGs and I could select the quality for them. Again 85 percent quality might be sufficient. If you’re that particular reader 100 percent quality might be your preferred quality. I can resize them or not. So if I want to leave them at the exact same size I just deselect everything.
What we’re most concerned about here is this Watermark option. So I’ve got it selected, and I’m going to click it, and I can choose Edit Watermarks. So this means that I can now create my own watermark. So I’m just going to delete what’s here. I’m going to press and hold the Alt key as I type out 0169 on the keyboard because that gives me the copyright symbol, and I’m going to type my copyright text. And I’m going to do two lines. And it’s Helen Bradley, projectwoman.com. And you can see it up here and it’s up there because that’s where I’ve got it positioned right
now. Here’s the anchor. If I wanted it down the bottom corner I could place it there. And then there’s an inset which is inset off that option.
So I could push it further down into the corner if I wanted to or not. It looks like it’s also centered right now. And no it isn’t. It’s right justified. So we could left justify it or center it if we wanted to. And we can also resize it either by dragging on its sides or we can drag it just to make it bigger if we wanted to. So I’m going to inset this a little bit horizontally and a little bit vertically. But you could see that we have a lot of power in where we place it.
Its opacity is 100 percent. And I always suggest that you do apply a shadow to your text because the shadow will help its readability if it’s over a lighter background. So I would normally put a very, very small shadow. And you can change the angle so that you can make the shadow come from whatever angle that you want it to come from. I prefer mine to come from about 30 to 45, something like that, so it’s coming in from this angle here. And if you’re happy with that that’s all you need to do. So you click Save. And we’re going to save this. And we’ll call it test watermark, you can call it whatever you want your watermark to be called, and I’ll click Create. And it’s now being selected as the watermark for my images.
I’m going to select to after export to show in Explorer. But literally at this point we could have two and a half or three and a half thousand images selected and they would all be ready for export. And all I do is click Export and now they’re going out. They’re exported out of Lightroom. And when they appear in that folder in My Documents, which we’re going to see in a minute, here it is now, they’re all going to have the watermark on them. So if I double click on this image we’re going to see that the watermark is in place.
So that’s how easy it would be to apply a watermark. If that were all you wanted to do and you had thousands of images to do it with, that’s all you need do to watermark your images. Bring them into Lightroom, don’t even bother rendering big previews, just use the minimal, select to export them, click and create your watermark and then just click Go and Lightroom will just go and do it all for you.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Please if you have any questions feel free to pose them to me. I’m quite happy to make videos to answer questions. Look out for more of my videos on this YouTube channel. And follow me at projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tips, tricks and tutorials for Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator and a whole lot more.
Learn how to combine two images to make a collage. Includes use of Blend modes in Photoshop, color range color selection, clipping mask, layer mask, hue saturation adjustment layer, drop shadow layer style.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create some simple collage effects using blend modes in Photoshop. This is the effect that we’re going to create in this video tutorial. I’m going to show you how you can put the pieces of this together in just a few minutes using a couple of images and some blend modes.
We’re going to start off with this image and another one that I shot at the neon boneyard in Las Vegas, and that’s giving us the texture. And we’re going to combine these two images with a blend mode. And then we’re going to extract the color from this original image, this sort of orange color. And we’re going to recolor it using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. But if we wanted to leave it at this point we could leave it just with that additional color. And we’ll also going to add a drop shadow with a different color behind it.
So let’s see how we would create this effect. And I’m going to start with my two images, and I’m going to put one image into the other. So I’m going to grab this neon boneyard image and I’m just going to drag and drop its background layer in on top of this original image. I’m just going to size it so that it’s right over the top. And the first thing I would do with a collage like this is look and see what sort of opportunities I had with blend modes.
So I’ll generally select the first blend mode in the list, Dissolve, which generally gives me nothing at all. And now I can just arrow down and see what happens when I click on each of these blend modes. And all I’m looking for is something interesting. And you’ll generally get a better effect with this if you use images that are a little bit more textural and a little less like something where you don’t really particularly want to bring out of the image exactly what was in it. But you want to discover how these two images can interact with each other and what you can do with them as they interact. So that’s all the way down through the blend modes. And so I’m going to go back up and I’m going to settle on something that I want to use. And generally the most interesting bits are going to be in the overlay or the contrasty area. So in this area and sometimes even with lighten and darken.
So let’s just go up through these and find something that we like. And I’m thinking actually I might like something like this perhaps with the Opacity dragged down a little bit. Now what I want to do is to bring out the orange color in the original flower so that I can lighten them a little bit in this layer here. And what I’m going to do is create a duplicate of the background layer. And I’m going to drag it above the image. So right now all we’re seeing is this original background. And what I want to is to select the leaves in it.
Now the leaves are really bright colored here. So I’m going to choose Select. And in this case I’m going to use Color Range because it’s going to be the easiest way to select these leaves. Now either I can select on the sampled color and add to it this way by just clicking on these leaves or I could use just the reds and just grab the reds. But I think Sampled Colors is actually going to give me a slightly better effect here.
So let’s just go back to this and let’s choose Sampled Colors here and just click Ok. Now that has isolated the leaves here and what I want to do is to keep these leaves but drop the rest of the image out. And I’ll do that with a mask. And because my leaves are selected, all I need to do is to click on the Add Layer Mask icon. And what happens is that the leaves are then masked and left behind and the rest of the image is just dropped away. So this is the before and this is the after. And you can see we have brought in the color from these leaves.
Now if we wanted to we could even lighten this color. We’ve got some of the orange color in. But we may want to brighten it up even more. So I’ll make sure that my image layer is selected and choose Image, Adjustments. And then I could use levels or curves. I’m going to use levels, and I’ll just lighten this is a little bit and click Ok. Now in the earlier image that you saw we had actually colored these blue and it’s very easy to color them blue.
To do that we’ll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer and we’ll choose a hue/saturation adjustment layer and just click Ok. Now I want this adjustment layer to only affect the red leaves so I’m going to clip this. So with this adjustment layer selected I’m going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. And so anything that I do to this adjustment layer here is only going to affect the layer below, just these red flowers. So now let’s double click on the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and now we can go and make some changes to it. And I’m looking for a blue color which will either be at this end or this end of the hue slider. So I can get to either this sort of greeny blue if I wanted or I can get to a sort of purplely blue. I’m thinking the greeny blue will be pretty good here. And now I can adjust its saturation and its lightness from here. So when I have what I like I’m just going to close that dialogue. So that has recolored those leaves to a bluey color.
And finally let’s add a drop shadow behind the leaves. So I’m going to select the leaf layer, and I’m going to choose a drop shadow effect. Now drop shadows might start out being dark but they don’t have to end up being dark. So what I’m going to do is go and find a really cool color for this drop shadow. And I’m thinking a really, really bright pink will do me. So let’s choose that. And I want to up the opacity of this. I could set it to normal so it’s going to be a very, very pink shadow. And then I’m going to adjust the settings for this. Spread is going to be the size of the shadow and softness or size is going to give me some softness. But there’s a very small sweet spot here on this that I can very, very easily exceed. So I’m just going to add my shadow in. And I think I’m going to multiply blend mode my shadow, not apply it with the normal blend mode. Although I could use normal for example with a much lower opacity if I wanted to give it this sort of pinky color. I might leave it at that.
So there’s a way of creating some interesting collage effects. And all we’ve done is grabbed a couple of images and put them on top of each other and blended them with something that counts as being an interesting blend mode. And then I isolated the orange flowers in the image and brightened them up. I also added a drop shadow in a very contrasty color. And I added to a hue/saturation adjustment layer that only effects these orange flowers to use the brightness of them but to color them a different color. And you can do all sorts of things by just combining images. And that gives you lots of practice at making color selections, using clipping masks, using masks, using blend modes and just having a little bit of playtime and a little bit of fun creating interesting effects in Photoshop.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel and please like and comment on the tutorials if you would. Also visit my website at projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tips, tricks and tutorials on Illustrator, Lightroom, Photoshop and a whole lot more.
Create a cancelled postal stamp watermark to use in Photoshop and Lightroom. See how to use the path tools to create the watermark and then save it as a png image with a transparent background so it can be used over your images.
This is the video explanation of the blog post on the same topic which you can find here:
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a postage style copyright stamp that you can use on your images. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a copyright symbol like this which is a couple of concentric circles and some wavy lines and text. And it’s got an overall texture to it.
This is a tutorial that I created for digital-photography-school.com when one of my readers there was having a bit of difficulty following along. So that’s why I’ve created this as a video tutorial. And because of this I’m going to be doing it step-by-step as I did it for that particular tutorial on the Digital Photography School site. And you’ll see in the comments here just below the tutorial I’ve given you a link to that site if you want to follow along.
So the first thing that I did in that tutorial was to create a brand new image. So I’m going to do that now. I’m going to choose File and then New. And I’m going to do a letter size image, landscape. So it’s 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches tall, and it’s 300 pixels resolution, RGB color and the background contents are white. So I’m just going to click Ok. And here’s our starting image.
Now we’re going to add a new layer so I’m going to have my layers palette visible. So if you don’t have it visible choose Window and then Layers so that you can see it. And we’re going to add a new layer and we do that by clicking this little icon here. It’s the Add New Layer icon. It looks like I clicked it twice. So I only want one new layer here. And we’re going to draw our circles using the Ellipsis tool. And it’s here in the toolbar so let’s just have a look and see what we’re looking for.
We’re looking for this tool here. It’s the Ellipsis tool. And when you choose it you want to choose Paths from the tools option palette. Now the options are a little bit different in earlier versions of Photoshop. There are three icons here and you want to make sure that you click the icon that says Path when you mouse over it. They’re the exact same options. They just deliver differently. And this is Photoshop CS6’s version so I have Path selected.
I’m going to drag to draw an ellipsis, but you can see that this is going to be a sort of oval. I want it to be a circle so I’m going to hold Shift as I draw it. And if it’s not in the correct position before I let everything go I’m going to hold the Spacebar and move it into position, let go the Spacebar and just make sure that I have the outermost of my circles created. And when it’s dead right, I’ve still got the Shift key held, I’m going to let go of my Left Mouse button.
So now I have a circle the shape of this outer circle that we’re going to use. Now this is now going to be colored in and we want to stroke this circle. And we do this by going here to the Paths palette. Now the Paths palette you get to by choosing Window and then Paths. And the topmost path is going to be called your work path and that’s the one that you’re working with. This is this circle here. We want to stroke the circle with a brush so we’re going to go and select a brush to use.
So I’m going to click on my Brush tool and then I’m going to select the kind of brush that I want to use. And I’m going to use a hard sort of brush here. So I’m going to select that brush. It’s a hard brush. And let’s just check and see from the original tutorial just how big it needs to be. And apparently it needs to be 40 pixels. So let’s just take it up to around 40 pixels. That’s 39, but that’ll be fine.
I’m going to set black as my foreground color. So I’ve set my brush and my foreground color and what I want to do now is with this path selected I’m going to choose the option that says Stroke Path with Brush. So that’s this icon here. So I’ll click it to stroke the path with a brush. Now I’ve got a funny sort of stroke here and the reason is that my stroke is set to something I don’t want it to be set to. So let’s just wind that back with Edit, Undo.
Then I’m going to right click on this Path option here and choose Stroke Path. And I want to disable this option here, Simulate Pressure. I just want to stroke it with the brush so I’m going to click Ok. Now it’s working the way I want it to. So now I have my path stroked, well at least the outside stroked. Now I need to use the outside to make the inside because it’s going to be really easy to make a concentric circle. To do that I’m going to click on this tool here. It’s the Path Selection tool.
This is the one I want and it shares a position with the Direct Selection tool. But it’s the black one, the Path Selection tool that I want, and I’m going to click on my path so it is selected. Now I want to transform this. And the transformation handles have not appeared so I’m going to press Ctrl T to make them appear. I want to drag in on this handle. But I want to make sure that I don’t lose the circle and I want to make sure that I don’t lose the fact that it needs to be concentric. So I’m going to just hold down both Shift and Alt as I drag in on this handle. So let’s Shift Alt and drag inwards. And you can see that what I’m doing is making a concentric circle. It has the exact same middle as the original circle. I’m going to let go of my Left Mouse button and then let go of the shift and the Alt keys. Now my work path here is a much smaller path so I’m just going to click the checkmark here.
Now I’m going to do exactly the same thing. I’m going to select my brush and I’m going to stroke it, make sure black is my foreground color, and I’m going to stroke this path with the brush. And I get the exact same effect. Now what I need to do is to make a path for my type. And it needs to be a little bit bigger than this inside circle. So again, I’m going to click this Path Selection tool. I’m going to press Ctrl and T to show my handles, I’m going to hold down Alt and Shift, that’s Option and Shift on the Mac, and this time drag out just a little bit so that I get a path for my type, let go of the Left Mouse button, let go the rest of the keys and click the checkmark. Now I’m going to add my text. And to do that I’m going to select my Text tool and then select my type. And I want to use Myriad Pro.
So I’m going to go down here until I find Myriad Pro. And I think the type that I suggested in the article that we used was about 24 points so I’m going to click that. I have black as my type color. So everything looks pretty good. I’m going to hold my mouse over the line, over this path that is still selected, and when I do you’ll notice that the I-beam pointer changes from this I-beam to an I-beam with a short of squiggly line. That means I’m typing on the path. So I’m going to click to do that.
Now the first thing I need to do is to add my copyright symbol. So I’m going to hold down the Alt or Option key and type out 0169 on the keyboard because that gives me copyright, and now 2013, and I’m going to type my copyright details. And I think I’ll do this all in capitals. And I’m using Helen Bradley, projectwomam.com. And I think actually I just want to put a www in there so I’ll just arrow back and make that change.
Now so far my type hasn’t quite stretched all the way around my words. So the next thing we need to do is to stretch it just a little bit more. And I’m going to do that using the Character Spacing tool. So first of all, I’m going to make sure that all my text is selected and then I’m going to choose this dialogue here which will get me to the Character Spacing dialogue. Now this is two dialogues.
There’s a paragraph and a character, and we want the character. And what we want is this tool here, this VA tool. And it’s a scrubby slider so all I need to do is to adjust it a little bit. And can you see that the text is getting bigger every time I drag on it? And I think I’m going to wind that back just a little bit because I could probably add a trailing dash to this. And that’s now all the way around that shape. And let’s just up that to bold because I don’t think it’s really quite dark enough for me. And if I’m using bold I’ll going to have to wind back up on my character spacing a little bit. And so now I’ve created my text on a circle.
Now the only thing that I’m a little bit concerned about is I think that this circle could be a little bit smaller. So I’m going to reselect my text layer here, and again with Alt and Shift selected, I’m going to drag inwards just a little bit to resize that circle path that the text is on because I just think it was a little bit on the big side. So I’m a little bit happier with my text now.
So we’re ready now to go ahead and to create the wavy lines. And we’re going to do that by clicking on the Custom Shape tool here that shares that toolbar position with the Ellipse tool that we used earlier. But this time we want Custom Shape. And from the Shape dropdown list here what we’re looking for is this wiggly line wave shape. Now this is shipped with Photoshop so you will have the wave shape. If you don’t have it in your collection you can click this little fly out arrow and choose All to add all the shapes or append all the shapes to your shapes collection. But this is the one we’re using.
I’m going to drag the shape onto my image and then use the Path Selection tool to just move it into position. Now at the moment it’s a series of closed paths and I want to open these paths. And I’m going to do that by clicking here on the Add Anchor Point tool. Unfortunately you can’t just delete points in Photoshop to open up these curves.
We first of all have to add a point in here that we can then go and delete to open it up. It doesn’t work otherwise. It’s a bit of a nuisance. But this is how we’re going to do it. So I’m going to click once with this Add Anchor Point tool on the ends up all of the shapes. And now I’m going back to the Direct selection tool. And I’m going to make sure that I’m selected on this point that I just added, so it’s black and everything else around it is not, and I’m going to press the Delete key. And that will just break that path in two. And I’m going to repeat that for each of these points.
So select it and press Delete, select it, press Delete, select it, and press Delete. Now if Photoshop is running out of memory if you’ve been using it quite a bit, you might find as I just did earlier that that was not working. Every time I pressed Delete the entire path was going. So I just closed down Photoshop and reopened it and went back to where I was working and it’s working perfectly. So now I have my lines. And you’re probably beginning to see a pattern here because this is just another path. And we can stroke it because we have our tool that we can stroke it with.
So I’m just going to go back and make sure my brush is selected. The same brush is selected, black paint, click on the work path so that I have it selected and now I’m going to stroke it. And that is giving us our lines. And so if you wanted to leave it at this point you could because everything is in place. But I’m going to go ahead and add a Grunge effect to it.
Now we’re ready to create our Grunge effect. And to create that, first of all what we need to do is to flatten the image. But in flattening it I need to remove the white layer from the flattened version. That is because later on when I will put this copyright image over my photograph I want the background to be transparent. So I want to keep this white layer out of the action right now. So I have two visible layers. I’m going to click on the topmost layer and press Ctrl Alt Shift and E to create a new flattened version of this layer. So this is the version that I’m going to use. And now I’m going to bring in a texture layer.
So I have a texture image open here, and I think it’s a really nice texture to use. So I’ve got the texture open. And to add the texture to this particular layer I’m going to select the layer and click the Add Layer Mask icon because that adds a layer mask to the image. And now this texture has to be made the exact same size as this image so I’m going to choose Image and then Image Size. And I want to resize it to the exact same size as this one.
So I can do that by just clicking Window and just pointing to the image whose size I want to borrow. And that’s apparently the size of this image here so I’m just going to click Ok. And because it’s a texture image it doesn’t matter that I’m skewing it a bit out of proportion because nobody really knows what a scratch is supposed to look like. Having done this, and it’s critical that you resize the texture to the exact same size as this image or you can’t use this next technique, which is to apply the texture as a mask.
So I’m going to click on the mask, and I’m going to choose Image, Apply Image. And if you don’t have the texture file the exact same size it will not appear here. So it does obviously appear here so that’s exactly what I want. I want to apply the texture to the image. And at the moment it’s set to Multiply blend mode. But I can test other blend modes and I can even test inverting the layer. So I’m just going to look for the best effect that I can get here.
In fact in the tutorial I suggested that we use Hard Light. So that looks like the one that we’re going to use, Hard Light. So I’m just going to click it and click Ok. And that gives us the sort of texturize look to our shape. And again, I was going to create this as a new layer so I’ll click on this layer and again press Ctrl Alt Shift and E to gives me a newly stamped layer. Well it’s not appearing to work right now. So let’s just add a new layer and press Ctrl Alt Shift E because that will work. And then we’re going to save this as a PNG image. But before I do it I think it’s going to be cropped because I think it’s a bit too big at this stage.
So I’m just going to crop down to get rid of the bits of the image that I don’t want and click the checkmark. And now I’m going to save this but making sure that I have this background turned off because I want it to be a transparent image. So I’m going to save it as a PNG image. So I’ll choose File, Save as, and I’m going to call this HB copyright, black, and PNG. And I’m going to make sure that I select PNG from this list here. And here’s PNG. So I’m going to select it and just click Save and click Ok. And that’s now saved as a PNG image.
Having done that I then want to make it white. So I’m going to choose Image and then Adjustments and then I’m going to invert it so what was black becomes white. And now if I just test this with a black filled layer behind it, you’ll see that it’s now a white image. So we could use that to go over the top of for example a very dark image.
So having created that I’m going to turn off my background because I want this to be a transparent image, and I’m going to resave it this time as a PNG. But this time I’m going to call it white. So again, this is going to be HB copyright, and it’s going to be white, PNG. I’m going to save it as a PNG image, and Ok. And so this is now the copyright image that I can use on my images in future.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. And look out for more of my tutorials both on digitalphotographyschool.com and also on my own website at projectwoman.com.
Learn how to crop and resize in bulk in Lightroom. If you have a lot of images you need to, for example, crop to 5 x 7 and then save at a particular pixel size and resolution, you can learn how to do this quickly and effectively in Lightroom. This makes use of the tools in the Quick Develop panel in the Library module.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can bulk crop and resize images and export them from Lightroom.
A reader recently posed a question to me and that was what do I do if I need to crop all my images to 5 by 7 in size and get them out as 500 by 700 pixel images. In Lightroom that’s not that difficult to do. What I suggest you do is you do it from the Library in Quick Develop mode. So I’m going to select the images here and then I’m going to select Crop Ratio and I’m going to choose 5 by 7. And that will crop all of these images to 5 by 7 images. But look what it’s done with the verticals. It’s cropped them to 5 by 7 but it’s kept that same vertical alignment.
So now let’s go to the Develop module and just see what we’re seeing here. This is the crop marquee. And you can see that this image, each one of these images in fact has been cropped to 5 by 7. And let’s go and find a vertical crop and see how it’s been cropped. Again, it’s been cropped to 5 by 7 but in a vertical direction. So this means that all of these images have automatically been cropped.
All we would do is have a quick look and make sure that important parts of the image have not been cropped off. If these were people we’d have a quick check to make sure that somebody’s head hasn’t been chopped off for example. And having done that now knowing that everything is cropped to 5 by 7, to export these images at 500 by 700 pixels in size or 700 by 500 we would select all of them by clicking on the first and Shift click on the last. I’m going to right click and choose Export and then Export again and we would just set up the Export option. So here I’m going to put this in a folder called 5 by 7.
I don’t want to rename these files. All we want to do is to resize them. But what I do want to do is I want to select Resize to Fit. And the longest edge since I know that these are all 5 by 7s is going to be 700 pixels and the resolution I can set to 100 pixels per inch. So these are then going to be 5 by 7 images at 100 pixels per inch resolution. And all I need to do is to click Export and Lightroom is going ahead and it is cropping and resizing all of those images so that they are all going to be the exact right size that we chose. And here they are including the ones that were verticals. You can see that these are 500 by 700 pixels in size. This one is 700 by 500 because it’s a landscape image.
So in Lightroom you could batch resize and export these images in just a matter of a few seconds by just choosing the right option. And that is here in the Quick Develop module setting a crop ratio for those images. This is not something you can do easily in the Develop module, but it’s something that you can do very, very simply here in the Quick Develop area of the Library in Lightroom.
My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Lightroom video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please comment, press the Like button, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. You’ll also find more of my tutorials, tips and tricks on my website at projectwoman.com.
Learn to create a monochrome stamp effect from a photo in Photoshop. Includes using filters such as Posterize, black and white, threshold and the Photocopy and Stamp filter to adjust the image to get the effect. Also see how Dodge and Burn can help you fine tune the effect.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can convert an image so that it looks like a stamped monochromatic image.
Before we get started on this tutorial this is the effect that we’re looking for. I have an original bird image here and what we’re going to do is to firstly get rid of the background around the bird. And then we’re going to convert it to black and white. We’ll posterize it and then we’ll apply a filter to it. And finally we’re going to apply the Threshold Adjustment. And we’re going to end up with this sort of stamped monochromatic effect from an original photograph. So let’s just hide that and let’s get started on the image that we’re working with. And I have a duplicate image sitting here.
Now I’ve already gone ahead and made the mask for this image so that we’re not wasting a lot of time cutting out the bird. But essentially what I would use is the Quick Select tool to just select over the bird. And then I made a duplicate of the background layer by just dragging it onto the New Layer icon and then just clicked this Layer Mask icon and that adds a layer mask to the image. So there’s the bit that we had selected. Then obviously I would make a much better selection and this would give me my isolated bird here.
So the next thing that we’re going to do is to convert this to black and white. So I’m going to click on the topmost layer and we’re going to do this using an adjustment layer. The reason for this is that it can then be redone later on if we don’t like the effect. So I’m going Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Black and White and click Ok, and here is the black and white adjustment.
Now what I’m looking for here is that we’re going to make this into a pure black and white only image later on so I want plenty of detail here. So I’m just going to walk these sliders in either direction to see where they go. And I want some edge detail because that’s going to define the birds so I probably want to bring the blue channels and the purple channels over towards the black. And let’s just see where the red gets us. I want to definitely see the bird’s eye so I want that to be different to the colors surrounding the bird. So I’m just looking for a reasonably good black and white conversion at this point, and I’ll just close that down.
Next we’re going to use Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Posterize. And what the posterize adjustment does is it flattens the image to a certain number of colors. They’re called levels but here we’ve got four levels of lightness and darkness. So if we had a color image we’d have four colors. And we can wind this up to a sort of surrealistic amount or we can take it back to a less realistic, more stylized amount. And that’s exactly what we want here.
But you’ll see that every time you change this it has different affects around the edge. So the difference between 5 and 7 and perhaps 6 and 5 is really quite significant. So I’m looking for a number of levels that gives me a good result. I’m worried about the eye disappearing here. Three is not enough. Four is a whole lot better. I really quite like that four so I’m just going to let that be what we’re using here. At this point if we were not getting the exact result that we like we could go back and dodge and burn on this layer. So we could grab the Dodge or Burn tools here to darken and lighten the image by clicking on these, taking the highlights, just make the brush a little bit smaller and perhaps brush around the edges here to darken it up which will ensure that later on we’re going to get some dark edges around the edge of our bird. So if that’s of concern to you selecting a tool such as Dodge or Burn will allow you to lighten and darken the areas around this bird that you want to have lighter or darker.
So for example if we really wanted to see this eye we could lighten the areas around the eye. So you can craft that to an extent using the Dodge and Burn tools here. So I’m just going to burn in a little bit around the top of the leg and the sides of the leg here, and perhaps just under the belly. So once we’ve done that I’m going to come up to the topmost layer and I’m going to make a flattened version of the image so far. And I do that by holding Ctrl and Alt and Shift and E, that’s Command, Option, Shift E on the Mac. And this gives us a flattened version of this that we can now apply a filter to.
I could use smart filters but the filter is just going to be fine for this. So I’m going to choose Filter and then Filter Gallery but before I do this I’m making sure I’ve got black and white as my foreground and background colors because the filter set that we’re using relies on black and white for the color. So if you don’t have black and white selected as the color it’s not going to be a black and white effect that you’re going to end up with. So I’m just going to drag this back in. And I used the Photocopy earlier, and I found that that was a really good result for me.
But you could also try the Stamp and see if in the light and dark balance you can get what you want with the Stamp. We’re going to get pretty much the Stamp effect by just using the Photocopy. But I’ve got a way of getting rid of these sort of almost blurry sort of gradient detail in the bird’s back. So I’m going to ignore that for now and just go for a good sort of stamped effect. I’m looking at the blacks and the whites in this image because that’s essentially what I’m going to get at the end of this. So I’m going to say that that’s good and click Ok.
And the final tool that we need to make these areas disappear is a Threshold Adjustment. And again, I’ll do this using an adjustment layer with Layer, New Adjustment layer and then Threshold. Now Threshold is an unusual sort of filter. What it does is it turns everything either pure black or pure white. There is no in between. And this selector here tells Photoshop at which point we want the colors to go to white or to black. So if we wind this back down a little bit we’re going to get rid of some of these areas in here and they’re become darker or lighter according to how we have this selected.
So I’m just going to go around about that midpoint because we do have this as an adjustment layer which means that if we make changes to this layer they will affect the adjustment layer. So I’m just going back to the Dodge tool here and just see if I can get rid of the very obvious sort of circling effect here, so I’ll just make that a little less obvious that that was something that got left behind with the Photocopy filter. Let’s just bring the exposure right up. And there’s our finished bird there. And we can do whatever we like with it.
You may want to save it out so that you could use it perhaps with a background color or something like that. But there’s this sort of stamped monochromatic effect created in Photoshop. And it’s done very easily by first just isolating the object and then converting it to black and white in a way that gives you the contrast that you want, posterize it to flatten it to some levels of color or levels of tonal range, create a brand new layer from that and apply a Photocopy or Stamp filter to it and then finally finish off with the Threshold Adjustment.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please Like it and comment on it and share it with your friends. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, GIMP, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.
Learn to create a vector sunburst in Illustrator – This works with all versions of Illustrator including the new CS6. The process is simple and uses a stroke to make the sunburst – it is quick and doesn’t require a lot of fiddling to create.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a sunburst vector shape in Illustrator.
Before we get started creating our sunburst effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for. Here I have a sunburst and it’s just offset in this rectangle, but you could have a circular one if you like.
We’re going to start with circular and then we’re going to crop it to a rectangle. So if you’re ready let’s have a look and see how we create this effect in Illustrator. And we’re going to start by creating a brand new document so I’ll just choose File, New. It doesn’t matter too much what my document looks like.
I’m going to start with the Ellipse tool. So, I’m going to select the Ellipse tool and drag a shape on my image. And I need this to be a perfect circle so I’m going to hold the Shift key as I draw it and then just let go. I want this to be black stroke and no fill so I’m just going to click on the fill here and turn the fill off.
Now let’s go to the Appearance panel for this selected path and I’m going to click the Stroke option. And I’m going to set the stroke to about 200 points. And when I do you’ll see that we get this sort of circle all the way around our shape which is pretty near exactly what we want when we click the Dash Line option. Now with the Dash Line option I can set the dashes to whatever I want and this is going to affect how many of these sunbeam things there are around the shape.
So let’s just go to 20 and try that. This is what I’m a little concerned about. You can see that there’s an uneven spacing here, but you’ll see that you can adjust that by clicking this option here. So just work out how many points you need to get the number of sunrays that you want for your particular shape. I’m going to do a few more in this one rather than less so I’m going to 10 points. And when I’ve got what I want I’m just going to click away from this. And this is the basic shape. Now before we can do anything with this shape we’re going to first have to expand its appearance.
So with the shape selected I’m going to choose Object and then Expand Appearance and then Object, Expand because I want this dialogue here. And I’m going to expand both fill and stroke So I’ll select both of those and click Ok. And now each of these sunbursts is a separate shape and I need now to close up the middle. And I can do that by grabbing the Lasso tool. It’s the easiest tool to use. And all I’m going to do is just drag around because I want to select all the nodes and pointers’ handles in the middle.
Now I’m going to choose Object and then Path, and I’m going to choose Average. And with Average I’m going to select both Horizontal and Vertical and click Ok. And what that does is it just closes up the middle nicely for me. So I’m going to click outside my shape and here is my sunburst shape. So with it selected I can then go to what is now my fill color and I can choose a different fill color for it. And we could fill it with a gradient.
We could do anything we liked at this point. So let’s see now how we’re going to crop it. So I’m going to select the Rectangle tool. I’m going to start by drawing a rectangle and I’m just going to hold the spacebar as I bring it in position over the top of my sunburst because I want to work out exactly where the sunburst is going and where the rectangle is going relative to it. So I think that’s a pretty good position for me. So I’m going to let go of the spacebar and let go of the left mouse button and now select all my objects. I’m selecting other everything, and in the Pathfinder I’m going to select Crop. And that crops the shape to the size of that rectangle. And we lost our fill here so let’s just click on the fill and put the fill back on.
So here is a shape that we could save to our Symbol library. And those sunbursts are very, very easy to create in Illustrator as vector shapes. And of course if you add it to your Symbol library then you’ll have it available anytime you want to use it. And it’s very easy to create ones with different numbers of rays in them.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my videos on this YouTube channel and please like and comment on the videos. Look out too for my website at projectwoman.com. There you’ll find more tutorials and tips and tricks for Illustrator, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, GIMP and a whole lot more.
