Friday, March 8th, 2013

Illustrator CS6 PatternMaker

Learn to use the new Pattern Maker in Illustrator CS6 to make repeating patterns.

This video covers the tools in the dialog and how to save the pattern. Make half drop repeats, brick and hexagonal patterns in a few seconds.

Transcript

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to make a repeating pattern in Illustrator CS6.

To make a repeating pattern in Illustrator we’re first going to need a shape to work with. So, I’m going to create just a little square shape to use, and I’m going to add a fill color to it. I’ll select a pink fill and then a blue border so we can see what we’re working with. And I’ll make it about a 5 point border. So that’s my shape that I’m going to work with. And I want it to be sort of like a flower shape so I’ll choose Effect, Distort and Transform, Pucker and Bloat. And I’m going to Bloat it to 200 percent and just click Ok. So, this is my shape that I’m going to be working with.

To make a repeating pattern all you need to do is choose Object and then Pattern and then Make. And we now have a pattern piece added to the Swatches panel so I’ll just click Ok. And that is as easy as it is to create a pattern in Illustrator. But of course now that we can see our pattern we may want to make some changes to it.

So firstly we can change the number of copies to say 3 by 3 but I have a 5 by 5 grid in place so I can see things clearly. Dim Copies allows you to dim the duplicate or the repeating pattern so that you can see which is your original piece and which is the repeating pattern I have that now set at 100 percent so the copies are not dimmed. Let’s go back to dimming them.

Now these settings here can be a little bit confusing when you first encounter them. What these Width and Height are is this blue box so that’s the box in which my pattern is created. So if I lock these together and if then I decrease them say to 150 these are going to be scaled proportionately because I have it locked. So I’m just going to press Tab. Now the box is squeezed up and you can see that my pattern is now going to overlap. And I can control how it overlaps by using these icons here. So I can show various pieces of my pattern. If I want it to be on top over here and underneath here for example I can adjust that. But if I take this up to larger than my pattern piece, and I know that this is going to be larger than my pattern piece, I’ve typed in 250 and pressed Tab.

Now you can see that we’ve built in extra space around our pattern piece so there is more room here for perhaps adding other elements. Here is the type of pattern. At the moment we have grid but we could do Brick By Row and then we can offset the brick by a certain amount, one third, three quarters and so on. There’s Brick By Column and the offset is in a different direction. There’s also Hex By Column and Hex By Row. And for this pattern piece I think Hex By Column looks pretty good so I’m going to settle on that. Now if I wanted to add a bit of extra horizontal spacing I could do so but I’ll need to size my tile to the art and then add it in because you can see that right now these are grayed out. But if I size the tile to the size of my art I can then add some extra spacing. At the moment this is unlocked so that’s 10 points of horizontal spacing and now 20 points of vertical spacing. But I prefer not to size my tile to the art so I’m just going to leave that as it is.

Now one of the other things that we can do in this pattern area is we can add extra bits to it. So this is actually looking a little bit small for me so let’s just take it up a little bit larger so I’ve got some extra room in here. And I’m going to select the Ellipse Tool and I’m just going to hold the Shift key as I draw in here a circle. And you can see that the circle has now become part of the pattern. So if I select on the circle here, hold the Alt key as I drag a duplicate away, I now have two circles. And they’re part of the repeating pattern. I’m going to hold my Shift key as I select over both, now hold Alt as I drag a duplicate away and here we have a total repeating pattern. But we’ve been able to add pieces to it because we were actually working in this Pattern Make feature in Illustrator when we did it. Now these can also be adjusted so we’ll see that in a minute. But for now let’s just click Done. And that has saved our pattern to the pattern Swatches in Illustrator.

So let’s just go and get our pattern piece and we’ll tuck it away here off the art board for a minute. I’m going to select a rectangle and draw a rectangle here and let’s turn off the Stroke and let’s fill it with our new pattern. And there it is. Now you might see a missing pixel through your pattern. Don’t worry. That won’t be there when you actually come to print it. It’s just a resolution issue. Now I have this shape here and I might say well that pattern is fine but it looks a bit big for the shape. So I’m going to choose Object, Transform and then Scale and I’m going to disable Transform Object so that will then scale the pattern down to 25 percent of its original size but not the object and then just click Ok. So there is my pattern filled shape.

Now this shape is, this pattern is in the Illustrator swatches. It is only going to exist for this document. So if you want to keep it go up here, select the dropdown list here and click Save Swatch Library as AI. So this means that you can get it back later on. I’m just going to call this flower55 and click Save. And so now that swatch will be available later on that I can come and get it if I want to reuse the swatch in another Illustrator document.

Now we’ve already seen how we can add shapes to our pattern. But what happens if we look at this and decide that the shapes are ok but the color is not? So what I’m going to do here is go to the Layers panel here and go and locate the actual pieces that are part of this pattern. So I’m going to select this piece here and with this piece selected I can now go and make changes to it. So I’m going to give it a green fill color and then I’ll go here and select the next piece. And this is now targeted and I’ll go and grab a different fill color for it. And let’s go and select this one. We’ll give it the same green fill color as we used previously. And then let’s target this one here and we’ll give it a yellow fill color.

So if you come back and look at your shape and say well yes the pattern looks really good but the colors are not right it’s very easy to open up the layers panel here and to make adjustments to it. So for example if we didn’t like the pink here I can grab the pink path here and you can see that the pink path here for the inside shape has been separated from the path that is the stroke. And then I can just select to apply a different fill color to this particular piece here. And it hasn’t adjusted the stroke. The stroke needs to be separately selected. Here is the blue stroke color here and we could perhaps make it a darker blue. So once I’ve got that looking the way I want it to I can just double check by filling it back in.

And if I say yes that’s fine, that’s exactly what I want, and now this has been created as a new pattern. But if it wasn’t, if I’d already created this as a pattern in the pink color and I wanted to also save a green version what I can do is click Save a Copy and I’m going to call this flower 45 and it will then be saved as a different pattern swatch so it won’t be created over the top of the original. And when I’m done I’ll just click Done.

So now I have two pattern swatches so I’m just going to click the shape here. You can see here now that we could fill it with this green pattern swatch or we can go back to the original pink one. If we go to green again we would probably want to scale this down. So we’ll go to Object, Transform, Scale, again transforming only the pattern, not the object itself. So there you have the ability to create repeating patterns very, very easily in Illustrator CS6.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:Illustrator, photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:30 amNo Comments links to this post

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

OmniSketch Mirror Drawing Video Tutorial

In this video I demonstrate having a little fun in the iPad app OmniSketch, which lets you create tons of funky and interesting brushes.

Transcript: 

I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial on creating a mirror drawing in OmniSketch on the iPad. If you followed my previous tutorial you know how to create this sort of Seurat background. Now we’re going to create some hearts.

So the first thing I’m going to do is select here and click this box here that has lines through it. This means that we’re going to start drawing four things at once and then I’m going to select a brush to use. So I’m going to start with probably this second brush in the top row and we’ll just see how we go. I’m going to choose a sort of red pink because I think I’m going to make some red pink hearts here, okay. And now I’m going to start drawing and you can see that I’m actually drawing all four at the one time.

Now everything is a bit light here so let’s go and see. Let’s increase the width and fiddle with the adjustments. So you can see now that I can get a heavier rendition of these hearts. So I’m going to change brushes and see if we can’t find some brushes that will go down a bit more quickly. Okay, the opacity is really low on that. The width is really low. Let’s go and get some change of color. You can see how these brushes all paint very, very differently. OmniSketch would be probably one of my favorite applications simply because it’s just totally funky. You can get some really, really interesting effects with it. And it’s the kind of application that you can play with for hours.

So I’m just trying to give you a look at – ohhh. Okay, probably not the bubbles. I’m trying to give you a look at some of these different brushes. But let’s just undo that one and let’s go and get a different brush. Okay, this one is pretty good. And for all these brushes you can adjust their opacity and width. And of course you want to keep changing your colors as you work so that you get some interesting designs happening. And I want to fill this one in pretty fast so this is usually a pretty good filler tool. And let’s make it pretty wide and let’s start filling it in. Of course we can always go back to our Seurat dots which are the dots that we used to create the background. I don’t want them to be very wide but you can slowly just draw in this area. And of course I can draw in any one of these and right now I’m working in the top left corner. But I can change and draw on any one of these that I like because wherever you’re drawing you’re just repeating all the way around the image.

So I just kind of work and build up, that was not a happy brush. If you make a mistake just tap Undo and wait as it undoes. It’s probably a little bit delayed here because I’m screen recording at the same time. I’m just going to change the color and yes, let’s just dial down the width on this brush. This is a really nice little brush. And I tend to use it a bit but sparingly because it does really, really funky things so I’m going to see. Sometimes it’s really not clear what adjustment does but varying it just has an interesting effect. I think I need this to be wider and certainly adjustment is going to help me here with this brush. This is really a nice little brush. I think I’m going to darken it up and use it quite a bit for my heart here.

So I’m just looking at building up an overall heart shape. And let’s go back to this brush and I think it’s a small width. I’m just testing this one here. We’ll just undo it. This is a brush I like to use at the very end because it has this really nice little spiky effect. So sometimes I’ll use it for sort of like the star effect because if you just tap you can get this like star happening on your heart shape. So let’s call that good for now. You can obviously work on something similar yourself.

Let’s have a look at what I’ve done in the past. I’m just going to save this and we’ll go back and have a look at some of the hearts that I’ve created previously. This is one of the hearts and it has that same effect down the side. Let’s just open this up. I’m not quite sure why it’s upside down but let’s just go with it. It’s got those little edges around it.

Here’s another set of hearts. This has been drawn on a white background but again it’s had these black hairs around it. Now I’m thinking with the black hairs I might have erased in the middle here as I was working after I did the black hairs. But this mirror drawing is really interesting. You can get some really, really nice effects with it. So there’s a little bit of an introduction to the wonders of OmniSketch on the iPad. And as I’ve said it’s probably one of my favorite applications for drawing because you get these wonderful, wonderful brushes to play around with. I’m Helen Bradley.

Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more iPad tutorials as well as Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements on my YouTube channel. And visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials. And please subscribe to my YouTube channel and Like the video if you liked it. Thank you.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 1:00 pmNo Comments links to this post

Monday, January 21st, 2013

Photoshop Layers Tips and Tricks

Learn how to create and use layers in Photoshop, in all versions. Includes how to unlock the background layer and how to add and fill new layers.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to look at some tips, techniques and tricks for working with layers in Photoshop. When you’re working with an image in Photoshop CS4 and later you’ll probably be working in this tabbed interface. It’s not my personal preference but we’re going to look at working in it and then also why you might look at other ways of working in Photoshop.

The first thing we’ll look at is the Background Layer. Now any image that you open from your camera is always going to have just one layer and it’s always going to be the Background Layer and it’s always going to be locked. In addition if you add a layer, I’m just going to add a filled layer to this image, I can’t drag this layer below the Background Layer. I can’t move the Background Layer above it. The Background Layer is in a sense fixed and there’s nothing much we can do with this image until we unlock the Background Layer. There are few a few ways to do that and the easiest I think is just to grab this little icon here which is the Lock icon and just drag and drop it into the trash and then this converts the Background Layer to a regular layer. Let’s just undo that and see some other ways. We can right click and choose Layer from Background. That has the same effect except that this time we get a chance of naming our layer. We can just click Ok. Let’s undo that again. We can also go up here with the layer selected and choose Layer, New and choose Layer from Background and again click Ok. But honestly I think dragging and dropping this Lock icon is probably the easiest way to convert a Background Layer into a regular layer.

Now you saw me earlier create a new layer. There are lots of ways again that you can create a new layer in Photoshop. You can do Layer, New, Layer or if you have a selection you can choose Layer, New, Layer via Copy so the selection will be copied to a new layer or Layer via Cut where your selection will be cut from the current layer and copied to a new layer. But another way of doing that is just clicking here on the New Layer icon that just creates a brand new layer. And you can drag it into position. You can also delete it by just dropping the layer onto the Delete icon. If I hold the Ctrl key as I click this New Layer icon the layer that I add is below the current layer. So just clicking on this icon adds a layer above. If we Ctrl Click on the icon we add a layer below. So you can target exactly where the layer goes. Let’s add one below this image, Ctrl and click on this icon.

Now I want to fill this layer with this green color which is the current foreground color. A quick and easy way to do that is to hold the Alt key and press Backspace on the PC. That’s Option and Delete on the Mac. That fills this layer with the currently selected foreground color. If I do Ctrl Backspace, Command Delete on the Mac, we fill this layer with the background color. Now we could do that just as easily using this Paint Bucket tool, target the layer and click on the layer that we want to add the color to. But it’s whatever suits you. I find those Alt and Option, Ctrl and Command, Backspace and Delete keys really easy to remember and very easy to do. I’m Just going to trash this layer.

Now I have another image open here and I want to start creating a collage from these two so I want to take this particular layer and drop it onto this image here. Now previous to Photoshop CS4 that used to be easy. Now it’s a pain in the neck but we live with it. I’ve created this as a new layer so it’s not the Background Layer any longer. I’m going to target the Move tool and I’m going to with this layer content selected I’m going to drag on it. And I’m going to drag it up here to the image that I want to paste it into and then I’m going to bring my cursor down. And because I want this centered I’ll hold the Shift key to center it over the middle. And now you can see I have two images, one on one layer, one on the other layer.

Now previous to Photoshop CS4 we didn’t have this tabbed interface. What we had was documents that were just floating and that made life just I think a lot easier. So I’m just going to trash this layer now and see. If you want to unfloat your windows by dragging them off the top bar here then you can simply target this layer and just drag and drop it into another image that easily. So I find that an easier way to work. If you do like the tabbed interface then let’s go back into this tabbed interface.

What we could do is choose Arrange two up Vertical and this would allow us to drag and drop. So in this case I’m going to take this Background Layer and drop it into here. So you can do it with the tabbed interface. It’s just your preference of ways of doing it.

Now we’re back with these two images. I’m going to close down one of them. Well actually I’m going to go back and arrange these images so I’m seeing just the images on a tab and I want this particular one which has two layers on it. I’m going to add a layer mask so I’ll just click the layer I want a Layer Mask on and click the Layer Mask. I’m just going to fill this mask with a Gradient because I want to show you a trick with layers. So let’s just blend these two layers together using a mask to do so. I’ve got my mask selected, a black and white gradient and I’m using a linear gradient. I’m just going to drag a simple linear gradient into the image. So we’ve now got these two images blended together, not particularly attractive, but that’s not really a big problem right now. I’m going to add an adjustment layer so let’s just add an Adjustment Layer. We’ll convert this to black and white just so that we have something to look at here. And I’m going to just make the blues a little bit lighter. Now we have this image.

Now if I wanted to sharpen it for example more appropriate to the web or something I would need to flatten it because you can’t sharpen multiple layers at once. So I would typically go and flatten this image. But if I hold Ctrl and Alt and Shift and press the letter E, that’s Command Option Shift E on the Mac, look what happens. I get a layer which is the merged image. It’s called stamp but what I also have is the original layers still underneath so I could use those later if I for example wanted to come back here and make this layer a little bit transparent so we got some of the color removed but not all of the color. So then I could go back and recreate my merged layer with Ctrl Alt Shift E, Command Option Shift E on the Mac. And then I could sharpen this layer. So this is a sort of have your layers and eat it too so you’ve got everything on one layer but you’ve also got the existing layers in case you ever need them.

Now up until now I’ve been dragging and dropping a layer onto the trashcan to remove it. Let’s just undo that. There’s also a way to delete a layer and that is just pressing the Delete key on the keyboard. You want to be in the layer itself. Right now I seem to be stuck in the opacity area here so let’s just click in the layer, press Delete and the layer has been deleted.

So there are some layer tips and tricks for you in Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials here on this YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more tutorials, tips, tricks and techniques for Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and lots more.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 1:54 pmNo Comments links to this post

Sunday, January 6th, 2013

Photoshop Elements & Lightroom – Image Frame Effect

Use your preferred software to create an image frame effect in either Photoshop Elements or Lightroom.

Photoshop Elements:

See how to use the Custom Package in Photoshop Elements to create a neat frame effect for your photos, whether for print or for the web.

Lightroom:

See how to create a simple framed image effect in Lightroom 3 & 4. Includes an Identity Plate to display your name below the image.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to look at creating a framed photo in Photoshop Elements.

I’m here in Photoshop Elements and I have my image already open. And I’ve sized it down just a little bit so that I can actually see around the surrounds of the image here in the window. That’s pretty important right now. Now I’m going to select white as my background color because I want to add some white around the image.

So first of all I’m just going to select around the image just by selecting over it. And I’m going to add a very, very narrow black border to it so I’m going to choose Edit and then Stroke Outline Selection. I’m going to add a white pixel black border on the Inside just so it’s easy to see and then just click Ok. And that will give my image just a one pixel black edge which will stop it from sort of bleeding into the white surrounds.

With white as my background color I’m now going to choose the crop tool and I’m going to select over my image with the crop tool. I’ve selected over and let go of the mouse button. That’s pretty critical the let go bit. And now I’m going to hold the Alt or Option key as I drag out on this corner handle. And see what happens when I do. When I drag outwards I’m adding some extra area around the image and because I’m using the Alt or Option Key the exact same amount of image is being added to the left and right of the image on top on bottom.

Now I want this to be a museum style frame so I’m actually going to let go the Alt or Option key and then drag down on this bottom so that I get some extra room here. And because white is my background color when I click the checkmark we’re going to have a white border around the image. Now if this were going up on the web onto a website that perhaps had a white background, I might add an extra black edge to it. So again I’ll go and select everything and I’ll go to Edit and then Stroke Outline Selection. I’m going to add a one pixel black inside. But you don’t have to do that if you’re perhaps going to print and you just want this nice muted down border effect.

Now the next thing to do is to add our text so I’m going to click on the text tool and click here on the image where we’re actually going to apply the text. Now I’m using Myriad Pro but for this image that’s way too big a font size. I’m thinking something like 12 points will be plenty and I’m just going to type in my name Helen Bradley and photography. And it looks like we’re using a white color so that’s a little bit difficult. Let’s go and get a dark gray instead.

Now once I’ve finish typing I can click the checkmark and then I can move it into position just using the move tool. So I’ll place it in position here. And then my image is ready to save or to print whatever I want to do with it.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this very quick video tutorial. Look out for more video tutorials on my YouTube channel. Visit projectwoman.com to find more tips, tricks and tutorials. And please if you like this video click the Like button.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

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

Saturday, January 5th, 2013

Photoshop – Spot Healing & Clone Tool Tips

Photoshop tips and tricks for using the Spot Healing and Clone tool to remove problems from an image. I also demonstrate using a separate layer for the fix so it can be erased, blended or undone.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to have a look at the Spot Healing Brush tool and the Cloning tool in Photoshop and look at some tips for getting a more effective and quick result using these tools.

When it comes to practicing with the Clone Stamp tool this image is just wonderful. It’s one I use in my face to face classes and I’m going to use it here to show you some of the techniques that I would use in fixing this image. What I’m looking to do is to remove the signs of the light pole and this sign here, everything that sort of detracts from a rather quaint little English house. I’m not going to crop until I finish so I want to just start off with fixing what I see as the problem for what I want to fix with this image.

The first thing I’m going to do is to drag the background layer onto this New Layer icon because that makes a duplicate off it. I could also right click and choose Duplicate Layer or I could click Layer, Duplicate Layer. All I want is a duplicate of the image layer so that I’m working on a copy, not on the original.

Now I’m going to add a new blank layer, again just this time by clicking on Create a New Layer or I could choose Layer, New Layer and that would add a new blank layer. The reason why I like to use a new blank layer when I can is that I can put my fixes on this layer and then blend them in later on if I want to or remove them if they’re not quite right or continue to fix them if I need to.

So I’m going to start with this particular problem with the Spot Healing Brush tool because if this tool works it’s just Simply the easiest tool that you can use. Now I’ve just turned off my Caps Lock key so I can see the size of my brush and I’ve got my layer selected. And I have Sample all Layers selected up here. That means that I can sample the layers below but apply the fix to this layer so I’m going to click here and then just Shift Click here to draw a line with my Spot Healing Brush tool. And that takes out that entire piece of electric wire. And I’m going to do the same here. And I’ll continue down here. And hopefully we’ll make it around that bend in the wire, which we did. So we’ve got a reasonably good fix happening there.

Here I’m probably going to have to paint it on because the wire bends too much to use that little trick, but certainly for a straight piece of wire the Click Shift Click option is by far the quickest way of getting rid of things. And I’ll do that here too, Click and then Shift Click to try and get rid of some of this detail in here. I’m going to zoom in so I can see my problem area a bit more clearly, and again, I’m looking for a good fix around here. And I can size my brush down with the Square Bracket key if I want to.

And here I need to get rid of this entire piece here so I’m thinking that probably the Clone Stamp tool would be better for this. So I’m going to switch to the Clone Stamp tool and I’m going to add a new layer because again I don’t want to be doing this on an original. And I want to be able to turn this stuff on and off if necessary if I need to make some fixes like I have lost some pieces over there which I’ll have a look at a little bit later. The Clone tool is one where you have to take a sample. So you want to make it about the size that you want to work with so I’m thinking about this size would be good. And then you’re going to take a sample of the place that you want to start painting with so I just really want the very edge of this chimney. And so I’m going to Alt Click on this position to sample it. I’ve got Sample all Layers selected and so now I can just position my mouse where it is, I can see a little preview of what I’m painting with, and I can just paint an edge onto that chimney and paint out that bracket. And now I need to get some fresh sky so I’m going to Alt Click on some fresh sky and just paint that in over here so that we’ve got rid of that piece. And I want to go back over here to the area where I lost a piece of that chimney.

If I turn this layer off that’s what I get. If I turn it back on again you can see that I really do have some problems and I haven’t done a particularly good fix here. So I’m thinking with this layer I’m just going to erase the bits of the fix that I don’t like and do it some other way, so just double click on that brush to select it. This is an eraser so I’m just going to go into the area where I want to erase back some detail. I can just check and see.

I think I’ve pretty much got what I want to have back into the image at that point. And again, I think I need to do a little bit of cloning here. I’ll just add a new layer just in case I make a mess of it, size my brush down. And with the Clone tool we have to take a sample so I’m going to click here right on the edge and then build back in the edge of my bricks here as I go down. And then I would come back in Alt Click on this and just remove the bits that I want to remove.

Let’s go back to the main image because there are some things that we can use to make some really wholesale fixes here, again New Layers every time. I’m concerned about this light pole here and finding a good fix for it. But as you can see this is a reasonably good fix for this area. What’s happening here is pretty much what’s happening here. So we could go and get the Clone Stamp tool, pick a fairly sizable brush, we could Alt Click just where the — I’m just picking the area. I’m just going to get a pointer here so you can see. I’m just going to pick the area here between this dark and this light roof and the line so that I’m going to start painting it on over here.

So let’s just go back and get the Clone Stamp tool. So this is where I’m going to click to sample. So that’s my sample point and now I can start painting it in. I’m just going to line it up with the piece of roof here. And there we’ve got rid of the worst of that pole. Now we’ve obviously overstepped the mark a little bit, but that’s really not a worry because we could come back to this layer here and erase it. We could just use an eraser so I’m just going to enlarge my Eraser tool here and just on this layer just erase back in that little edge so I’ve got a sort of blending with the original content on that layer.

So I’m going to come back with the Clone tool here. I’m going to have a look at this bottom edge here so I’m going to sample here and start my sample point about here and then just paint this bottom edge in so that we’re getting a sort of consistent look to our roof. And then we can just come back in and Alt Click on some surrounding area here and just use it to clone out that. In actual fact that’s not a very good situation. Maybe we would find it better if we used the Spot Healing Brush tool. And if we did use the Spot Healing Brush tool then we’re going to use this new empty layer that we created a little bit early and fix on it instead. The Spot Healing Brush tool is doing a better job of getting rid of this content here than the Clone tool, but you just need to work out which tools work. In some cases the Clone tool is an ace tool to use, in other cases it may not be what you need.

With this window here there’s a slight problem because we’d need to make up some content that we didn’t already have. But you’ll see that this window is probably a pretty good fix for this one and so too is this one. So if I were to fix up this window surrounds first and just get this looking the way I want it to then I can come in with the Clone Stamp. I’m just ignoring making layers at this stage just to show you what I’m looking for. So I’m actually going to work out which bit of this image I’m going to start sampling on, probably the top corner of this windowsill, start sampling it. And then we’re going to line it up here and paint. And there we’ve got a window back and again, probably the Spot Healing Brush tool I’m thinking for the rest of this plant, at least until we get into the area where we have to start creating content that we don’t have easily available in the surrounding content. And for this I’m thinking this is going to be just fine. So again, back into the Clone Stamp tool, go and find some content we can use starting at the corner of this thing, lining it up to make sure it’s going to fit properly when I start painting it and Click and paint. Now again, we’ve got a fix that’s not perfect here because we’ve started running into wall problems and things. But we can take the Spot Healing Brush and blend it in using that or we could have just erased it. I don’t know what the Spot Healing Brush– it does a reasonable fix of that too.

So that’s how I would approach the task of fixing this image is just having a look and seeing which tool will apply best. If you can use the Spot Healing Brush tool it’s obviously the easiest tool that you can use, so use it. If you need to then perhaps look at the Clone Stamp tool. And sometimes what I’ll do is just go and grab a piece of something. So for example here I might just go and grab this piece of roof here and just say okay well that’s going to fix this area here. So I’m going to do Edit, Copy and I’ll do– I’m not getting it from here so I need to get off this layer, Copy and then Paste it. We’ve got a duplicate piece of the roof and we can just move it into position here, size it if it’s a little bit too big, adjust its rotation, and then just blend it in to make up the bit of the roof that we didn’t have.

So here it is here and now I’m just going to erase over the edges of it, perhaps not quite that much, but erase over the edges, smooth it out a little bit, maybe use some Spot Healing Brush tool because we’re sampling all the layers here to get rid of the greenery and to try and blend this piece in. If I make a mistake, well not actually make a mistake, but if the blending process is not what I want I’ll just Ctrl Alt Z to undo it and go back to where I was.

And so I just continue working on this. But you can see that it’s not going to be a huge job to clean up this house. And let’s just see where we came from. This is what it looked like and this is what we’ve managed to achieve so far.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more tutorials on my YouTube channel. Like this video if you like it and visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Lightroom.

Helen Bradley

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

Monday, December 3rd, 2012

Photoshop Quick Fix for dull foggy images

Photoshop Levels offers is a simple way to fix dull, lifeless images. Learn how to apply a Levels Adjustment layer to an image, how to read the histogram chart and how to use it to fix your image in seconds.


Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you a quick fix for a dull or muddy looking image. This is an image that lacks tonal range. It lacks contrast and we’re going to give it a punch and we’re going to do it quickly and easily. In this video tutorial I’m going to show you how you’re going to fix an image that looks a bit like this. This image is what I would call muddy. It actually lacks tonal contrast. There no blacks in this image. We’ve got some light pixels around the sky area but there are no blacks. And the result is that the image looks a bit foggy, a little muddy, a little lacking in tonal range, lacking in contrast and the color is a little bit flat as well. And this is the fix that we can apply to the image extremely quickly and Photoshop will actually tell us how to make the fix. It will tell us what’s wrong with the image and how to fix it. So let’s have a look and see how we’ll do this.

To start off with, with the image open in Photoshop I’m going to choose Window and then Layers because I want to see this layer’s palette. Now we’re going to choose an adjustment layer. It’s exactly the same as making an adjustment except this time it is editable, and we would like to get you started using adjustment layers because it gives you a little bit more power in Photoshop. So we’re going to choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer. And the one that we’re going to use is called levels. So let’s just click on Levels and see what we get. We get offered to add a new layer so I’ll click Ok to say yes. And then we get this dialogue here. Now this might look a little bit confusing but it’s actually Photoshop telling us what’s wrong with the image and giving us a chance to fix it. This is the pixels in the image. It’s a histogram. And what Photoshop has gone and done is it’s had a look at every single pixel in the image, how light or dark it is, and it’s counted up how many really dark ones it has and how many middle tone ones and how many light ones. And it’s done that for all the 255 tonal ranges in this image. So we got from 0 to 255. And it’s telling us how many pixels are in each of those ranges of tone. And this is black and this is white. So you see that we’ve got a few pixels very, very white and then a lot of pixels in that sort of light white area which is of course all around in the sky.

But see here, this is the problem in this image. There are no blacks. There’s nothing in this black area of the histogram. And so levels is not only telling us that but it’s also giving us a chance to fix it. So what we can do is we can drag on this slider here, the one under the chart. I want you to ignore these ones all the way at the bottom. It’s these under the chart that you’re interested in. And when you see the chart doesn’t make it all the way to either end of this histogram you’re just going to drag in until it does. And look what happens to the image as we do that. We’re just going to drag in to give ourselves some black pixels in the image, and then we can adjust this mid tone point as well. We’ll go to the right to darken the image or to the left to lighten the image. And you just need to choose for your image where the best point for that is. And we could come in a little bit here on the whites, perhaps. And certainly if the chart didn’t reach the edge then we would drag in on those whites. So you just need to read your chart and then just drag these little sliders into position. And when you’re done you can just close that dialog.

And there’s our fix. This is the before and this is the after. Photoshop showed us what was wrong with the image and gave us the chance of fixing it. Let’s have a look at another image that also has a similar problem.

This was captured in London on the London I through a fair bit of Perspex glass I should imagine. And also given that London tends towards being a little bit cloudy and gray I think that’s probably not helped this image either. So again, with the layer’s palette visible we’re going to add an adjustment layer, Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Levels, click Ok. Here’s our levels dialog, not unsurprising that we have no black pixels in this image. And in this image we have practically no white ones either. This one is a little bit different. So if we want to perk up the whites we can just bring in this slider here to lighten the whites and stop them being gray and make them white, things like the clock face here and some of the areas around here, this white building probably here. And now let’s drag in on the black slider to get some blacks and then we could adjust the mid tone if we wanted to darken the image or to lighten it and again, it’s to your taste. When you’re done, click the Close button. This is how the image started out and this is how it looks now. And that fix will take you 30 seconds.

Now the benefit of using adjustment layers, if I double click on this you’ll see that it opens up again. And if I think that I haven’t darkened it enough I can darken it up now and close it. So I’m not bound into this fix. I can remove it if I want to or I can double click it to adjust it and just improved it a little bit if I think I haven’t got it perfectly right.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked the video please click the Like button. Consider subscribing to my YouTube channel to be advised when new videos are released. And visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and other applications.

Helen Bradley

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

Thursday, November 29th, 2012

Photoshop’s Amazing Circles

Learn to turn 360 degree panoramas and other images into Amazing Circles, mini planets—whatever you want to call them.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to make amazing circles in Photoshop. Before we look at how you can create an amazing circle let’s have a look and see exactly what we’re talking about. This is one of the Flicker set on amazing circles and this is a really, really nice amazing circle. And we’re going to create something like this but not with a white background. And there’s these here. They’re in black and white and they’re showing you There are two sorts of amazing circles we can create, either one that has all the detail on the outside or one that has all the detail on the inside.

So now you’ve seen what we’re aiming for let’s go and see how we would create this effect ourselves. I’m just going to open Photoshop and I have an image already prepared here. This is a panoramic image. It’s actually of the Seine in Paris. Now you could use any panorama to do it. Now the problem with my panorama is that of course it doesn’t wrap around but I have begun to create a duplicate of the tree on this end of the image so it will sort of partially wrap around. I’ll need to do a bit of cloning to fix it when I’ve actually done my amazing circle but this is a strip. If you’ve got a 360 degree panorama it will be even better. Add a little bit of image to the top and bottom of your panorama. What you want is an image that’s roughly four times as wide as it is high so I’ve added a bit of white on either side. And this will be either the outside or the inside of the amazing circle when we create it.

The first step is to resize the image. So I’m going to choose Image and then Image Size. I’m going to deselect Constrain Proportions because although this image is 8,000 x 2,000 I want it to be square but without losing any of the content. So I’m going to be deselect Constrain Proportions and type 8,000 in here because that’s the largest of these two values, so now I’m going to get a square image quite a bit larger than it was, and click Ok. And let’s just zoom out a bit so that you can see that this is the image just all squeezed up.

Now what we do next is to rotate the image and that gives us one of two possible amazing circles. So before we do that I’m just going to duplicate this image so that we have two images that we can make circles from. So you can see the two alternative shapes. Let’s start with this one and we’re going to just rotate it 180 degrees. So I’m going to choose Image, Image Rotation 180 degrees just to flip it upside down. And then all the work is done by what’s called a polar coordinates filter. It’s Filter, Distort, Polar Coordinates. And let’s just squeeze this up because rectangular to polar is the option that we want. The other option is polar to rectangular and that’s not the one we want. So now that we’ve got rectangular to polar I’m just going to click Ok. And that’s our amazing circle. That’s as easy as it is. You’ll see I’ll need to clone a little bit through the seam area because I didn’t do a very good job of making a circular panorama. But there is our amazing circle.

Now because we’ve flipped it upside down this one has the sky area on the outside and the river on the middle. This one’s going to be the opposite. Let’s just run the filter on this one without turning it upside down before we start. Just size the display, we can see what it’s going to look like and click Ok. And as you can see here the sky is on the inside and the river Seine would be on the outside. You can use whichever you like for your amazing circle.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Please if you enjoyed the tutorial, like it on YouTube. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel. Subscribe if you will. You can also visit projectwoman.com where you’ll find lots more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Illustrator and lots more.

Helen Bradley

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

Monday, November 26th, 2012

Photoshop – Quick Portrait Makeover

Touch up your portraits with this quick video tutorial. I’ll show you how to remove blemishes and soften skin tones.


Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can do a quick and easy portrait makeover.

Let’s have a look and see before we begin exactly what we’re going to achieve. So this is the starter image that I started off with. And I did some spot fixing on it to make sure that I had removed the skin blemishes and then I brought out the detail from the shadows. And this is the starting point that I then had and this is the effect that we’re going to look at creating. We’re going to soften the skin and brighten the eyes in our model. So let’s have a look and see how we would start off with spot fixing this image.

I would go into this image and then I would start by selecting the spot healing brush tool here because this is a tool that you can simply just paint over problems on the skin and it will fix them. So I went over this image really, really carefully. I zoomed in and I got every single one of the blemishes on this model’s skin and it’s probably a five minute job to just neaten the image up and just to get a really good starting point for it. And then having done that I did a shadows and highlights adjustment to bring some detail out of the shadows. So I’ll choose Image, Adjustments, Shadows/Highlights. And the default setting is 35. Now I used that. It was probably a little bit high. So you could probably bring it down a little bit perhaps to around 23 or 24, but there’s a good starting point for your image. And from there you’re ready to go ahead with the softening effect.

So let’s go back to the image that I’ve spot fixed and now let’s get rid of the two layers that are the fixed layers. And we’re just going to work from the point at which we opened up some of the shadows and highlights. So the first thing that we’re going to do is to create a duplicate of this background layer, just duplicate it and then we’re going to blur it. So I’m going to choose Filter, Blur, and then Gaussian Blur. I’m going to set the blur value to sort of a lowish sort of value. What I want to do is blur the model’s skin and use that in a minute to paint over her skin. So I want something that’s sort of a little bit over what I want my final effect to be but not totally over. So I’m thinking here about 9 or 10 pixels will be a good amount for this image, so I’ll just click Ok.

And having blurred that layer a little bit I want to add a bit of noise into it and I’ll do Filter, Noise and then Add Noise. And we want to bring in monochromatic noise and we want it to be Gaussian. Gaussian noise applies more noise to the lighter areas of the image and less to the darker areas. And we want probably somewhere between 5 and 10 percent noise. And this slider is really hard to adjust at that level so I’m just going to type in 7.5 percent and that’s giving us a nice little bit of noise in her skin tones, so I’ll click Ok.

So we do not want the image to look exactly like this. We just want that to be a starting point. So let’s add a mask to this layer. I’m going to Alt or Option click on the Add Layer Mask icon. And what that does is removes the blur. it will remove the entire effect from the model. And we’re going to paint on this mask to bring back in the softening where we want it to be. So I’m going to select my brush tool and select a nice soft brush, this one’s a good brush to use, and I’m going to paint with white. I’m just going to size the brush up a little bit. Now you’ll be a bit more careful than I am being, but what I’m doing is selecting over all the areas, painting over all the areas that I want the skin to be softened. So that is basically everywhere but her nose and mouth and eyes. Although I want the skin on her nose to be softened, I don’t want to soften this detail around here. And I may want to soften this area, but I don’t want to soften her eyebrows themselves. So very carefully softening by painting on the image with white in the areas that you want it to be softened. And you can see on the mask here the areas that we’ve got and perhaps any areas that we might have missed out on at this stage. Again, I don’t want to soften that jaw line too much. that’s a nice strong line and I want to keep that there.

Now that I’ve done that I can adjust the opacity of this layer a little bit. I’m going to adjust it down to zero which is totally removing the sharpening effect. And now I’m just going to march it up using the scrubby slider until I get the amount of softening that I want. So I really want a subtle softening, not totally obvious but just subtle softening of the skin. And I think probably about 30 percent is a good value for this image.

Now I’m going to make another duplicate of this background layer and drag it to the top because what I want to do now is to fix her eyes. So all I’m going to do is focus on this top layer and I’m going to look for some stronger color and contrast in her eyes. So I’m going to choose Image, Adjustments, Curves. Curves is a good adjustment for this and again I’m going for slightly more than I need. So there is some more whites in her eye. Now I know that the blue color of her eye is in this area, so let’s add a bit more contrast through that area.

So let’s see. That’s the before and that’s the after on her eye. So I’m just going to click Ok to accept that, but of course that’s not the image effect that we what. We want more of this effect, but we’d like to borrow some of the eyes from this effect. So again I’m going to Alt or Option click on the Add Mask icon to add a layer mask. And again with my paintbrush which is already preset and my white paint I’m going to target the mask and paint over her eye. Now again this is probably going to be too much, but we can tone it down a little bit by again adjusting the opacity of the mask. So we’ll just take it up to what we want it to be. I am thinking it’s probably going to be a little too much, maybe about 50 percent.

So let’s have a look at the starting point for the image. This is post having been spot fixed and post having had shadows and highlights applied to it. Then we added the skin softening and finally we added a little bit brighter eyes in our portrait.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please click to like it on YouTube. Consider also subscribing to my YouTube channel. You’ll be advised when new videos are launched and right now that’s about twice a week. You can also visit my website projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements. Lightroom, Illustrator and more.

Helen Bradley

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

Thursday, November 22nd, 2012

Photoshop Landscape Glow Effect

Quickly learn how to create a Landscape glow effect in Photoshop to give your photos a dreamlike quality.


Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to apply a landscape glow effect.

Before we get started with creating this landscape glow effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for. This is the original image that I’m starting with. It’s from sxc.hu which is a stock image site and this is just a little house in the middle of a paddock. And this is the result of applying my landscape glow effect to it. The image has a bit more of a glow to it and a slightly more painterly look. I have another image that I’ve applied it to. Let’s just hide that one for now. Let’s have a look and see what this image looked like before. Again it’s a stock image and this is what it looks like after we’ve applied the effect.

So let’s get started creating this effect. I’m just going to remove these three layers from this image, and let’s see how we would do the effect ourselves. We’re going to start on the background layer of the image. And we’re going to choose Select and then Color Range because this allows us to pick out the darker areas of the image without having to make a selection which is really nice because they would be really hard to identify otherwise. So I’m just clicking to select shadows. And Photoshop has automatically selected all the shadow dark areas of my image so I’m just going to click Ok. And this is the selection it has made.

Now I’m going to put this on a new layer so I’m going to choose Layer, New, Layer via Copy. And that’s going to copy the blacks onto their own layer. So you can see this is what we’ve got. I’m actually going to hide that layer for now. Now I’m going to make two additional copies of the background layer. I’m going to right click it and choose Duplicate Layer and click Ok and then do that again. With the topmost of these duplicate layers I’m going to set its blend mode to Screen and that will lighten the image considerably. And then I’m going to merge this layer into the layer below by choosing Layer, Merge Down.

Now I have a lighter version of the image on top of the original. And I’m going to duplicate this so I have two light versions of the image on top of each other. And I’m going to set the blend mode for this particular top layer to Multiply and that will darken it all again. Now with this darkened layer I want to blur it so I’m going to choose Filter, Blur, and then Gaussian Blur. And I’m going to set my blur to a quite high value, something like sort of 9 or 10 but in that sort of higher value area so I’m going to get this sort of glow look to my image and click Ok.

So there’s my blurred darkened layer, my light layer underneath and my original layer below. And now that I’m ready to do so I’m going to make the top layer this dark tree visible again. And you can see that in actual fact the pixels in that layer are really quite light in comparison now to the rest of the image underneath. And I can even make it lighter by blending this particular tree back in in Screen mode and then just adjust the opacity down to suit. So that’s giving my landscape a very sort of glow look. It’s a lot richer color and a lot more of a glow look to it.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this video tutorial. Thank you for joining me for it. If you liked the tutorial please like it on YouTube and subscribe to my YouTube channel to be advised when new videos are released which is a couple of times a week. You can also visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Illustrator and others.

Helen Bradley

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

Monday, November 19th, 2012

Photoshop Smart Objects

Learn how to link Smart Objects so, when one changes, they both change and how to un-sync them so they are separate. I’ll also show you how to replace the contents of a Smart Object with another image. Useful for wedding photographers and for creating albums in Photoshop.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to work with smart objects in Photoshop. In this video I’m going to show you how you can use smart objects to assemble complex images, and you can do it in a way that harnesses the value of the smart objects. For example, I’m going to create a smart object for this background and then a smart object for this couple. This will allow me to go to this smart object and choose Replace Image. This will allow me to go to this smart object layer, right click and choose Replace Contents. And I can then replace the contents of that smart object with any of the images from that album. And so I can quickly and easily create images for an album with a background in place. But there is a catch and you’ll want to use the right tool for creating these smart objects so I’m going to show you that too.

Let’s just hide this away and let’s go and get our starter document. I’ve already got a vignette that I’m going to use, but we’re going to put in here the original background. So I’m going to choose File and then Place because that’s a way of getting an image in as a smart object. Here’s the portion of this image that I want to use as my background. I’ve already extracted it as a separate image so I’m going to click Place. And I know that this needs to be enlarged a little bit so I’m just going to enlarge it to 75 percent and then click the checkmark. So it’s now in place and it’s a smart object. It has a special little smart object icon. And I’m just going to show you that you have this vignette which is separate and it just goes over the top.

Now we want to create another smart object, but we want this smart object to be unhooked or unlinked to this one. So I’m going to right click and I’m going to choose New, Smart Object via Copy. And what that does is makes a copy of the existing smart object as a separate layer,  but it is not linked to the original layer. So now if I go into this and resize it, I’m just going to link these two together, this gives us a new smart object layer in the image which is not linked to the background layer although the two share the current image. I’m just going to add a drop shadow to it. So if we were creating a bridal album we could use this as the starting point for our album. I’m just going to get a slightly nicer drop shadow here and pull that vignette down so that it’s over the top of the background and not the image here. So having created this, this could be the first image in our album. And we can then go ahead using the same background image and just change the smart object out without having to recreate this document, right click, choose Replace Contents.

This time I’m going for an image of the bride and groom, and here they are in place. They’re a little large so I’m just going to choose the transform tool with Ctrl or Command T. I know they need to be taken down to about 10 percent so I’m going to scale them down to 10 percent and just move them into position. You can see that the drop shadow is still in place, the background is still in place, the vignette is still in place, and we’ve got another page of our album already created. If I right click and choose Replace Contents I can go and select yet another image to go in here. And again, the border and everything are already on that image. So it gives me a smart way of creating an album very quickly.

I’m just going to discard that for now and let’s have a look at what you might want to use and which would be a bad choice in this situation. And that would be to right click and choose Duplicate Layer. Now that would give us on the face of it exactly what we had before, a smart object with a second smart object layer over the top. Let’s just go ahead and select that and let’s add our drop shadow to it. Let’s position it where we want it to be above the vignette. And here’s what we had, an image over the background. And we’re ready to print that out.

But look what happens if we go to replace the contents of this image with our bride and groom. Not only do we replace the contents of the image with our bride and groom, and we can scale them back down to the 10 percent size that we were using before, but let’s just link that so that it’s going to be 10 percent in both directions. But look what’s happened to our background. These two smart objects instead of just being a duplicate of each other are in actual fact an exact copy of each other. And so anything that happens to this background smart object is also going to happen to this one and vice versa. If we change this one we’re going to change this one. So if we want the ability to create a smart object from another one but to unlink it so that they’re no longer the same image each time, we need to right click and choose New Smart Object via Copy.

But if we do want two smart objects that are linked and they’re always going to be the same image even if they’re different sizes of the same image then we would simply use Duplicate Layer. Smart objects are a really good tool to use when you’re assembling an album like this because it gives you the ability to create a background image and a smaller image on top and to easily replace that image and create an album very quickly.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this YouTube video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please like it and feel free to add comments to the video tutorial. I encourage you to subscribe to my video YouTube channel. We release videos twice a week at the very least and you’ll be alerted to the new video releases. And don’t forget to visit my website at projectwoman.com. There you’ll find more tips, tricks and techniques for Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and lots of other programs.

Helen Bradley

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