Give a grunge look to a portrait using the Photoshop High Pass filter and Smart Objects – it is a quick, easy, and fully editable.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to apply a grunge portrait effect to a portrait in Photoshop. Before we start on creating the grunge effect let’s have a look and see what we’re looking for. This is the original image that I have open here in Photoshop. All I’ve done really is cropped it. And this is the final appearance that we’re going to give this image. It’s a lot more grungy. It’s a lot darker. It’s a lot more interesting image. And the way we’re going to do it is by harnessing the power of the high pass filter which allows us to get edges out of the image. And we going to do it in a way that we could adjust it if we needed to as we go along.
So now that we’ve seen what we’re aiming for let’s get started on our new image. And here’s the image here, and I’m just going to hide away the existing one. And we’re going to start by creating a duplicate of the background layer. I’ll right click and choose Duplicate Layer and click Ok. This is the layer that we’re going to apply the high pass filter to. And if we want it to be editable we need to first convert it for smart filters. All we’re doing effectively is making it a smart object. So we could right click and choose Convert to Smart Object, and it’s exactly the same process to choose Filter, Convert for Smart Filters. This is now a smart object so when I apply the high pass filter to it, it’s going to be done in a way that could be edited later on.
I’m choosing Filter, Other, High Pass. And with this high pass filter what I want is to begin to see the edges in the image but not a lot of color. Now depending on the sharpness of your image and exactly what the image is all about, this might be a larger or smaller value. Usually I suggest around 5 but this image is really quite soft and 5 is just not going to cut it. So I actually have this wound up to 9.6 and click Ok. But because this is a smart filler it doesn’t really matter because if it’s too much or too little we can come back later and fix it. We’re now going to set this layer blend mode to overlay so that we’re picking up these edges in the underlying image. So let’s see how far we’ve come. This is the original image and this is a slightly grittier, grainier version. But it’s going to get better.
We’re going to make another duplicate of the background layer, right click and choose Duplicate Layer. And we’re going to drag this above everything else. And we’re going to make it black and white and then blend it back into the image. It’ll be easier to do if first of all we set the blend mode to something like hard light so we see the effect that we’re going to have. And I would like to do this adjustment using an adjustment layer so that we can also change that later on if we like. Let’s start with Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Black and White. I’m going to click Ok and then I’m going back into this layer stack here. And I’m going to clip this layer because right now this adjustment layer affects everything so we have a black and white image. I just want it to affect this layer. So I click on this top layer and then either position my cursor between the two layers and press the Ctrl and Alt keys, Command and Option on the Mac, to clip that or I could choose Layer and then Create Clipping Mask. It’s exactly the same thing. And what that does is it clips the effect of this black and white layer to adjust this layer underneath.
Now we can have a look at our black and white layer and see how we can grunge up this portrait a little bit better because we’re actually seeing the final results. Now we can drag on these sliders our self to make our own setting or we could select a preset. And I’m going to choose the red filter because I kind of like that effect. And I’m probably just going to lighten these red and magenta channels and perhaps even the yellow channel a little bit before I continue. So I’m just going to close that down now.
Now we’ve got the image that we want we can fine tune it by adding another adjustment to it. And for this I would use a curves adjustment. So I’m going to again choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Curves. And this is going to affect the entire image this curves adjustment layer. And I just really want to lighten it and add a bit more contrast into the skin tones. If I click on this slider here you can see where the skin tones are in the image. They’re in this area down here so I can drag around this area to increase the contrast in the skin tones, perhaps lighten them up a little bit as we go. And that’s really personal preference at that point.
So let’s have a look and see where we started and how far we’ve come. This is the original image. It looked a little perhaps grungy when we started but we’ve actually been able to make it even look a lot more grungy with the application of this high pass filter, blending it back in with some black and white and then adjusting the curves. Now all of these changes are adjustable so for example we can come back to this high pass filter, double click here and adjust the high pass filter effect. So we can get more or less grunge effect by just adjusting that filter. We can also come back here and adjust this black and white filter, double click here and adjust this. And the final adjustment layer was a curves adjustment layer and it’s editable too. So there’s how to create a quick and easy grunge portrait effect. It’s all editable so that you can change it and fine tune it if you like.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this YouTube video. Look out for more of my YouTube videos on this YouTube channel. I encourage you to subscribe to my channel so you’ll be advised when new videos are released. And remember to visit projectwoman.com. You’ll find more tips, tricks and techniques for working with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Lightroom and other applications there.
Improve your photography by undertaking self assignments. In this video I’ll describe how to undertake a self assignment, some topics for it, and how to assess your progress.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to talk about photographic self-assignments. What is a self-assignment. Self-assignments are short self-assigned photo projects that you shoot just for the sake of shooting. And typically they shouldn’t require you to go out and buy anything special or to go anywhere special to do them. They are the sort of thing you could go and do immediately after you’ve finished watching this video — grab your camera and you’re ready to start.
It’s a good idea to do self-assignments regularly and when you are not under pressure to capture anything at all worthwhile so you’d never undertake one when you are the main photographer at a wedding for example. Self-assignments are generally quite short so you can spend as little as a few minutes at a time on them — but of course they can consume a lot more time if you have it available.
Self-assignments technically have a topic — you’re not just out to shoot, you’re out to shoot a something or to practice something — you’re not aiming to shoot ‘keepers’ so much as you are aiming to learn something. Self-assignment should take you out of your comfort zone and help you see things or experiment with techniques and your kit.
Preparing for a self-assignment
When you’re preparing for a self- assignment, firstly you need to allocate the time to work on your self-assignment. Often you can find it by repurposing time you already spend doing something such as walking to the bus station — make this the time that you work on your self-assignment. Or you could park a few blocks from your office and walk there, walk at lunchtime or walk when you get home at night and, as you walk, you can photograph for your self-assignment. If you don’t get out a lot then photograph inside your house or your backyard or spend the time waiting at an airport or train station catching shots for your current self-assignment.
You will also need to take a camera with you — everywhere. It doesn’t have to be your good camera but it’s good if it is. It might seem strange to carry your camera with you all the time but the more you do so, the less uncomfortable you will feel and you’ll really notice it when you don’t have your camera handy.
Topics and subject matter
Plan your self-assignment — You’ll need a topic or a focus for your shooting. It should be something that challenges you and forces you to learn something new or to look at the world a little differently. Some topics which you might want to pursue are: saturated colors, circles, paint marks, streetlights, the color blue, doors, shadows, repetition, food, street art, reflections, or alphabet which is a great one for the airport. Don’t expect to always nail the project on day 1 — so if you’re shooting something like circles — it’s worth going over the same territory a couple of days in a row — notice how many more circles you see on day 2 than you did on day 1. Your assignment might also be related to a piece of your kit — perhaps you have an unused or little used lens in your case — unused because you really don’t know how to use it — and because you can’t trust yourself to use it for important situations the cycle becomes self-repeating so you never use it.
Set yourself a self-assignment to shoot with the lens for a couple of weeks. By the end of the two weeks you’ll know a lot more about the lens and how to use it. If you’re someone who always uses the Auto mode on your camera now is a good time to start using Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority mode and start learning what creative possibilities they might offer. Determine the topic or focus of your self-assignment and a timeframe to work in. Once you’re done with the first assignment you’ll ready to start on the next but don’t be surprised if you continue to shoot these self-assignment themes in other situations.
Assess the results
When you are working on a self- assignment, download the images as often as you can and view the results. Assess how you’ve gone in your project. How easy was it for you to ‘see’ things that matched your topic. Assess the technical aspect of your shots — are they in focus, is the depth of field used appropriate for the subject matter — how would you improve the shot next time and what will you do differently tomorrow? If you’re working on a self-assignment to learn how to use a piece of kit, ask yourself what have you learned about it. What worked and what did not work. Analyse the results in front of you to determine what you’ll try that will be different tomorrow or the next day. What you’ll gain Self-assignments are creative learning projects so approach them with a sense of wonder and enthusiasm for your topic — reward yourself when you see something you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t been doing your self-assignment.
Self-assignments can help you see the world different and they’re guaranteed to make you a better photographer. If you are a creative person who wishes they could photograph more but have to juggle photography with other commitments then self-assignments provide a creative outlet that can be fit into even a few minutes of your spare time.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. I encourage you to subscribe to my YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more photography tips and tricks.
Learn how to make paisley shapes in Illustrator using Graphic Styles. I demonstrate graphic styles such as scallop edges stroke style, dotted stroke and a stroke that shows dots that vary in size from big to small.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today we’re going to be using Adobe Illustrator and we’re going to be making paisleys with graphic styles. Before we go ahead and actually create our paisley shape let’s have a look and see what we’re aiming for.
This is a paisley that I’ve created using graphic styles and we’re going to create these graphic styles so that we can create it ourselves in future. You can see that there’s a scalloped border around the edge and you’re going to learn how to make this scallop border. You’ll also see how to make these blue dots which are another graphic style and then how to make these pink dots so that they change in size. So each of these is a graphic style and it’s just applied to the shape really, really easily. So it’s a very simple process to create this once you create the graphic styles. And they themselves are pretty simple too.
So let’s just close this down for now and we’re going to work on this document here. For ease we’re going to start with a rectangle because it’s just a whole lot easier than drawing paisleys right now. So let’s do a rectangle. And the first graphic style we’re going to create is that scalloped edge. So we’re going to start by selecting a stroke color to use. And I want my scalloped edge to be a sort of pale blue so I’m going to select that as my stroke color. And I want the fill color for this to be a sort of darker blue so I’m going for a darker blue here. Now the stroke is going to need to be fairly wide so I can see my dots so let’s make that 20.
And here we have the beginnings of our scallop edge but it’s just not looking a lot like a scallop border right now. What we need to do is to go into the appearance panel. So you would select Window and Appearance to get to it. Now we’re going to change the stroke so that we actually have dots. So I’m going to click Stroke here. And what I want to do is I want to make sure that the Cap is round and I want to use a dash line and I want this option here that aligns dashes to corners and paths. And I want to make my dash zero and then my gap something less than the weight of the lines. So here 16 is a pretty good fit here and that’s going to give me my scallop border.
Well it’s giving me a two side scallop right now, but that’s easily fixed. You see this appearance panel works very much like a layers panel and so the appearance that’s at the very top is the one that way we’re seeing over the top of everything. And right now that’s the stroke. If we put the fill over the top of everything then the fill would fill up to the edges of this rectangular shape and we’d be left with a scallop border not on the inside of the shape. So all I need to do is to target the fill here and just drag it up above the stroke. And you can see when I drag it above what I’m seeing is this scallop border. So now that we’ve created the first of our graphic styles we’re just going to save it. And I’m just going to click here for new graphic style and it’s now saved.
Now we can go ahead and create the second one which was those blue dots. We can continue to work on the shape here. That’s just fine. Because we’ve already saved the graphic style we won’t be losing if we make changes here. The first change I want to do is I want to remove the fill entirely. So this will be an empty rectangle with just a border. I’m going to select a different color for the stroke and this time I’m going for an even darker blue than we’ve been working on. So let’s go for this dark blue here. And let’s go for stroke and we want to change the values here. I want the weight to be 16. So this is going to be a slightly thinner set of blue dots which would be appropriate if we’re trying to make a shape that’s going to be reducing in size every time we add a graphic style to it. But I want the gap to be bigger because I want things to be circles and I want them to be dots separated from each other not overriding each other. And I do that by changing the gap value. So I’m going to make that 25. And you can see that that’s giving me my circles. So there’s our second graphic style. Let’s just save that.
And let’s go ahead and make the third one. The fill again is nothing, but this time I’m going to choose pink as my shape and we want to make pink dots that vary in size. And that’s just a little bit different to what we’ve been doing previously. Now the weight needs to be a bit smaller because it’s going to be further into the center of this paisley shape. So I’m going to reduce the weight down to 12 points. Because the weight is 12 points I’m going to decrease the gap. So I’m going to make that 16 so the dots are a little closer together. And now we have to make sure that our dots are going to reduce in size. So I’m going to make sure that I have my shape selected. Again, let’s go to stroke and let’s have a look at how we make them reduce in size. At the moment the profile is uniform so all these dots are the same uniform shape. If I change it to width profile one what I get is small to large and that’s what’s giving us these different shape dots. So there’s our third graphic style and we’re just going to save that.
Now if I was to trash this document I’m going to lose those graphic styles so let’s go ahead and let’s make our paisley in this document. So I’m just going to delete the rectangle shape. And we’ll go ahead and make a paisley but use the pen tool to do that. So I’m going to click and drag to start my shape. I’m just going to make it using 3 points so click and drag at the top of the circle. And you can see that we’re still using that last graphic style so it’s happening in place as we draw. It’s not the one we want but we’ll put up with it for now. What I do want is this original style so I’m just going to click on it to apply it to that shape. And here is our paisley shape with the first style on it.
Now all we need to do is to make the same shape but a little bit smaller. So I’m going to select the move tool here and I’m going to choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place. And that should give me a second version of the shape. Let’s just make this a bit bigger here so we can see where we’re working. I’m just going to size this down. And right now I’m going to size it down in proportion so I’m holding the Shift key as I resize it. I’m just going to drop it into place here. And this time instead of this scallop border I want to use the blue dots. So I’m just going to tap on the blue dot graphic style and you can see that we’ve got the scallop with its second layer. And again, I’m going to select that layer, choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place, Paste in Back, placed anywhere, really it doesn’t matter. I’m going to just move it out of the way here. I’m going to Shift and resize it so it’s a smaller size, apply my pink dots to it and just move it back into place. Actually I think I want it a bit smaller still because I have an idea for an intermediary step.
Okay let’s just go and get the blue one. We’re here. I’ve got it selected. I’m going to Edit, Copy and Edit, Paste it. And this time I’m going to add just a very plain stroke. So I’m going to get a green and I’m going to make it a weight of about 10 points. And let’s just go to the stroke options here and let’s just turn off this dash line because I want it to be a plain line. Now I’m thinking that’s a bit wide for this purpose. So let’s just make it that and let’s put that into place. It’s not small enough yet. I think I can resize this in place a little bit. So there’s our paisley shape. And we can do this over and over again using graphic styles. We will have to save these graphic styles though if we want to use them in other documents. So from this right click menu we can choose Save Graphic Style Library and we could save that as a set of graphic styles that we could use again in future.
But you’ve seen here how to create a scallop border, how to create a graphic style that is just dots and how to create a graphic style that is a series of different size dots and then how to apply them to increasingly smaller size shapes so you can create a paisley that looks like this very quickly and very easily. And of course these graphic styles can be applied to any shape so you could do it to circles or stars or whatever it is that you want to draw.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel and please subscribe to the channel if you’d like to hear about new videos because we do distribute them twice a week. You can find more of my tutorials and links to other work on projectwoman.com and please like this video by clicking the like button if you liked it. And I always look forward to hearing your comments.
Learn to fix images that have iPhone filters applied to them using Photoshop Elements. Remove unwanted color casts from the images using two different methods.
Transcript:
I was sent this image by a gentleman who wanted me to fix the color in the image because this was shot with an iPhone and the young lady had applied a filter to it. I sent him a few copies back each one of them altered a little differently. And this is the one that he came back and said this is the truest to what her hair color looks like. So now I’m going to show you how you go ahead and fix an image like this.
Now I’ll always work on a copy of the original image, so I’ve made a copy. I’m just going to size this down so we can see both images side by side. Now there are a couple of tools that I would typically use. One of them is Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Color for Skin Tones. In this case what we do is we just click on some skin tone in the image and try and fix it that way.
Now it’s not giving me great results here so I want to show you another tool that we could use. And that is just the colorcast tool, Enhance, Adjust Color and then Remove Colorcast. And here we would click on somewhere in the image that was supposed to be a sort of neutral gray, black sort of white area. So we could sample some of her clothes here to see if we get a good fix. We could sample around her teeth as well. And I think that this is a pretty good result as a match for this image over here, so I’m just going to click Ok.
Let’s just zoom out here and see. So these two images have pretty much the same look in them. The hair color is pretty much the same. If anything I might just reduce the saturation a little bit on this image which I could do by choosing Enhance and then Adjust Color. And we could do hue/saturation and then we could just decrease the saturation a little bit across the entire image. And that would get rid of some of the yellow. In fact I think I’ve actually got a better fix on this image probably than I had on the original.
So there’s one way of fixing a colorcast in an image. I have another pair of images of the same young girl. Let’s have a look at them here. And I have one here that was said to be a reasonably good fix for that image. Now I’m going to show you some means of getting this result from this sort of an image. The first thing I’m going to do with this image is because it’s got a sort of reddy orange colorcast on it I think that if I apply a filter to this image we might be able to kill some of that color. So I’m going to choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Photo Filter. And here’s my photo filter dialog, click Ok. And what I want is a cooling filter. That’s a blue filter. So I’m going to go for one of these cooling filter effects. I’m going to wind it up quite high. So let’s see which is the better of them. And I think the 82 is a better cooling filter. You can see that now we’ve got some sort of reasonably good skin tones here. So I’m thinking about 65 is pretty good there. So let’s call that done.
Now one of the things that I would like to do with this image is to get rid of the sort of grain that there is on her skin. So I’m going to take this cooling filter and click on it and just press Ctrl Alt Shift E which will give me a duplicate of that image as it was. So I haven’t got rid of these two layers, but what I’ve got is a layer that contains everything that was in those two layers. And I’m going to duplicate this as well. So I’m going to drag it onto the New Layer icon so we have two versions of her face. This one I’m going to blur. So I’m going to use a blur. I’m going to choose Filter, Blur and then we’ll use a surface blur. Now surface blur is a blur that will blur the surface but not around the edges. It tends to keep edges very crisp. We don’t actually want crisp edges but we do want the edges around her face not to be blurred. So I’m going to reduce the threshold and the radius to small values. What I want to see on this image is a lessening of this grain so it’s sort of blurring out. I don’t want it too blurred, but I do want it blurred. And since I’m only going to use the lightened values here, I’m not really too concerned about the fact that it looks a little unreal at this point, I’m just going to click Ok.
And now I’m going to blend this back in using lighten. So with the lightening we’re actually lightening the pixels underneath so that’s a pretty good result there. But let’s have a look at what we’re sort of targeting. I don’t think this is great, but I don’t think this is quite there either. So let’s have a look and see what we could do.
Well we could apply another photo filter. So let’s go to Layer, New Adjustment Layer. Let’s go and get another photo filter and again, a cooling filter. So I’m thinking one of these others might be appropriate. Let’s just wind the value down and let’s check those again. This one’s pretty good. It’s a little bit red but it’s not a bad sort of cooling filter for this image if we could get the density of it correct. Let’s have a look at this other one. Again, that’s having quite a nice effect on her skin tone. So I might choose one or other of these cooling filters to apply to the image.
So now if I was continuing to work on the image I might want to for example apply a curves adjustment to it. So let’s just go and get our layers. We’re working on an adjustment layer right now so I’ll need to give us a full image layer to work on. So I’ve pressed Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E so we’ve got a new layer to work on. And now we could use a curves adjustment, Enhance, Adjust Color, Adjust Color Curves. And here what I’d be looking for is to sort of just generally lighten the image. So, I think the backlight will give us a reasonably good start here. And I’m just going to adjust this curve so that everything is just a little bit lighter. So I’m just looking at pulling all of these curve marks up a little bit. Here’s our before and after. And you can see that we’ve got a little bit better skin tones here so I’ll click Ok.
And I think in actual fact this time round I’ve probably got a better fix than I had the first time. Perhaps if I have a look at that smart blur again I might to do something else or what I could do is just blur a duplicate of the image using for example a Gaussian blur and then just bring back these areas into the image. Let’s see what we would do there.
I’m just going to duplicate this layer. I’m going to apply a blur for example, a Gaussian blur to this layer looking to get the smoothest skin tones. That’s really all I’m interested in here is the slight smoothening of the skin so that we get rid of the grain that we got in from the iPhone, click Ok.
I’m going to add a layer mask to this layer. And what I’m going to do now is to just paint out the areas where we’ve got some softening of the image. The softening areas are going to be around the eye and perhaps over the lips. So I’m going to bring these areas of detail back a little bit in these areas. So there’s how I would fix these images to remove the impact of using an iPhone to take the images in the first place. Let’s just go back to the Undo history on this image and let’s see how far we’ve come. This is the original image and this is what we’ve got now, a much more pleasing result for the family of this young woman.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. I encourage you to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you’ll be advised when new videos are released. And look out at projectwoman.com for more Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Illustrator tutorials.
Learn how to take an image from Lightroom to Photoshop and back again. This will ensure that the image appears back in Lightroom, automatically added to the catalog, with the original version backed up. I also demonstrate the different possible settings so that you may customize this process.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can take an image from Lightroom to Photoshop and back successfully. I’m here in the Develop module in Lightroom and I’ve already done some work on this particular image. And I’m pretty happy with it. The problem is in this animal’s eye though you can see that there’s a little shape here that I want to get rid of.
Now I could get rid of this in Lightroom but it’s going to be a whole lot easier to take this image into Photoshop. So we’re going to do that now. To take an image from Lightroom into Photoshop I’m going to let Lightroom control the process. I’ll right click and choose Edit in. Because Photoshop has already been installed and Lightroom is aware of that I’m going to click Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS6. If I was using a different version of Photoshop I would select that from the list. I’ll click here. And now what’s happening is that Lightroom is asking me what I want to edit, either a copy of this image with the Lightroom adjustments, just a copy of the original or the original itself. In this particular case I want to edit this image with the Lightroom adjustments. So I’m going to edit a copy with Lightroom adjustments and click Edit.
If Photoshop is not already open Photoshop will be opened now. But here’s our image inside Photoshop and I’m just going to size it so that we can see the area in question. And now I’m going to bring in the tools. I have here the spot healing brush tool which is going to be the tool that’s going to help me fix this problem. I think I need to zoom in a little bit closer still so let’s get right into this problem area. And now with the spot healing brush tool I can size it down to suit the problem area and just start working over it. I could also use the clone tool if I wanted to. Any of these tools are going to help me fix this issue. And working with this tool in Photoshop is going to be a whole lot easier than working with the similar tools in Lightroom because I can just be a whole lot more accurate in Photoshop. If I want to undo it I just press Ctrl Alt Z to undo the change.
So when I’m happy with the resulting eye I’m just going to zoom out, make sure it all looks fine, which it does for this particular eye. I’ll probably fix this one while I’m here, but let’s call this good for now. And because I’m ready to go back to Lightroom now I’ve fixed the problem, I’m just going to close this image. So I’m just going to click the X button to close it. I’ll get a message which will say do you want to save changes to the document and I’ll say yes. The important thing at this point is not to choose File, Save as because you want to send the image back to Lightroom in the format that Lightroom sent it to Photoshop.
Now we’re back in Lightroom. The image that we’re looking at is the one that has been the fixed eye. And you can see here it’s called lionanimaleyes edit.tif. What Photoshop has done in conjunction with Lightroom is it’s taken the image, applied the edits to it and then sent it back as a TIF file with -edit after it. This is the original file. We haven’t lost the original. We’ve just got a copy back with the edits applied to it. Now the settings that Lightroom uses when exporting to Photoshop and receiving the image back are in the preferences setting.
I’ll choose Edit and then Preferences. And we’ll go to External Editing. You can see here that edit in Photoshop CS6 is set up as a TIF file. If we wanted to we could bring it back as a PSD file but TIF was selected here. It’s being sent out as proPhoto RGB with a 16 bit depth, a resolution of 240. And here’s the file naming. It’s coming back with the same file name with -edit on it. You can see that we’re using custom settings. Here’s the edit and here are our custom settings, the original file name with –edit applied, and then either PSD or TIF depending on what it is that we have set here for the file format. So all of this is customizable and this is where it’s being controlled as to what it goes out to Photoshop as and what it comes back into Lightroom as. And provided you use that process of just choosing File, Close or File, Save from Photoshop and not Save As so you don’t give it a name, you let Photoshop and Lightroom deal with it, then you’re going to be able to work seamlessly between Lightroom and Photoshop and back again.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you enjoyed this tutorial place click Like. You can subscribe to my channel and hear more about videos that are launched regularly every week in future.
Learn what is new in Word 2013 and how you can put it to work in your day. Features include new Design tab, start screen, Layout Options, PDF editing, Table border painting, styles and sampler, Read Mode options, Present Online, Save to skydrive, insert images and video from the web.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today we’re going to look at what’s new in the new Word 2013. This is the new start screen that you’ll see when you start Word 2013. And it’s similar to that in Excel and PowerPoint and Publisher. You’ll see the recent documents that you’ve had open down the side of the screen here, and you’ll be given the option to open other documents for example from SkyDrive or your local computer. There are templates here and these are current so at the moment it’s sort of October so we’re seeing Thanksgiving and Halloween templates. They will change with the seasons. If there is a template that you like you can click on it and you can pin it to your start screen. You can also click to have a look at it in more detail. If there are multiple images you can look through it here. If you want to use it click Create, otherwise just close it down, and you can go and have a look at another template. You can search online for templates and there are some suggested searches here. If you have your own templates you can click Personal and view the templates that you’ve created for yourself. Up here in the top corner are details of the account that you’re currently logged into. So this tells me I’m logged in to this particular SkyDrive account. Let’s open a document and we’ll start working inside the new 2013.
Here I have a document open inside the new Word 2013. You’ll see that the screen is very clean. It’s got that sort of metro style interface that is typical of the new Office 2013 suite. Everything is very flat and your documents sort of take center stage. So let’s have a look at a couple of the new features. The first one is the new read mode. I’m going to View and then Read mode because a lot of people actually use Word as a reader. So I’m just going to set this back to the layout that you will see by default. This is this sort of two column layout which allows you to work through the document and read it and particularly appropriate for using on a tablet. You can change this to the regular page layout if you want to by choosing Paper Layout. There are paper colors that you can choose. We’re obviously using sepia at the moment. And you can set it to the default which is two columns, narrow or wide as you choose.
There are some other features here. If you right click a word you can click Define and it will be defined on the screen for you. I don’t have a word that’s actually going to be definable to show you that, but it works just fine. The other thing in this read mode is that you can look at things more closely. For example we might look at this chart and double click it. And it will now open over the top of the document so that we can look at it in more detail. And that happens as well with smart art. Now this read mode is not looking at the document the way it would be presented so things may overlap if they’re complex. The important thing about this read mode is that it’s for reading the document and not sort of previewing it the way it’s actually going to appear when it’s printed.
I’m just going to escape out of here to go back to the regular Word. Now one of the other changes to Word is in the review area so I’m going to open a different document. I have one here that has track changes in it. The track changes feature has been overhauled a little bit. Let’s go into review and I’m just going to show the new mode which is simple markup. In simple markup we’re going to see the document as it would be if all the changes were incorporated. So that’s text that is inserted is inserted and text that has been marked for deletion is deleted. And we can switch between these two modes either by choosing simple markup or all markup here on the tab, or we can click these lines. These are lines indicating that there are changes here, but we’re seeing it in simple mode at the moment. So we’re not seeing the changes. We’re just being warned that there are changes. Click again and now we can see what the changes are.
There are some changes too to comment. So for example if somebody adds a comment to a document, if you want to reply to that comment you can click this Reply button that allows you to now reply to that comment. The changes here are quite significant because in the past if you wanted to reply to a comment all you could do was add another comment. So conversations could become quite long and complex as they sort of scrolled down the page. Here now all the comments or all the conversation about a particular point can be isolated inside a single comment. And I’m just going to delete that comment. Let’s just get rid of it in its entirety and let’s go back to viewing this document in the new simple markup.
Now I’m going to get rid of all the changes in this document. I’m going to accept everything because I want to show you some of the new design features in the new Design tab. The new Design tab has put together some of the features that were really difficult to find in earlier versions of Word, in particular the sort of document formatting styles. Now you can see what the document formatting styles are. And if you like one you can click on it to apply it to your document. And there are lots of different styles here to choose from. This is the one that we were using previously, but they’re easy to find and to use. If you see one that you like, for example we might like this sort of gray look, we could change the color scheme that’s applied to it. So we could make it blue for example. There’s also the ability to choose different font combinations for our document if we like the look of it but prefer a different combination of fonts for example.
Now if we create a look that we like and we want to use it every time we open Word then we can set this as default. This is a new option on the Design tab. If we click this, this is now going to be the default look for all our documents in future. So this new Design tab has lots of features on it that make things more accessible than they were. Of course if we want to format individual elements on this page we’d back to the Home tab and selecting styles. But these styles are linked to the design or the document format that we’re using here from the Design tab.
Still in this document I’m just going to change its rotation back to normal and we’re going to have a look at the new layout options that we have for this. One of them is this layout options icon here which makes it more accessible to find the text wrapping options. In the past these were really quite difficult for people to find. And now they’ve been attached to the image itself. You can also opt to move the image with the text or fix its position on the page. If you click See More you’ll get the more traditional layout dialog. There are also alignment guides so watch as I move this image around the page. It becomes aligned or we can see when it is aligned to various objects on the page because we get this green alignment guide appearing. So we can see when it’s aligned with paragraphs, with margins of the page, perhaps the edge of the page itself. So this allows you to align things up more easily than you’ve been able to do in the past. Now still in this document we’re going to have a look at the new navigation pane. I’m choosing View and then Navigation Pane. This document has been set up using styles. So because it’s been set up using styles I can navigate the document by selecting the headings in this navigation pane. It just makes it easier to move around and particularly a long document. In addition, there are these new collapse icons. Again, because this document has been formatted using heading styles these collapse and expand icons appear and I can click on them to collapse the document down to just the heading. So imagine this in a really long document. If you had really large headings that had lots of text underneath then you could collapse your document so that you only work on the headings that you’re interested in working on at the time and then you can expand the other headings as you go through it. Now this is a feature that used to be available in outline mode but it’s been brought into print layout. So it’s accessible to any document that you create using heading styles, not only the ability to collapse and expand paragraphs but also this slightly smarter and more useful navigation pane.
Now as well as collapsing parts of the document you can now collapse the ribbon. So you can click here to collapse the Ribbon and it collapses to just the headings. And then you can click to open it. You can pin it or unpin it depending on what you want it to appear like. I’m going to pin it because I like to see the ribbon particularly on large screens.
Before we start looking at tables let’s just go to headers and footers. I’m going to choose Insert and then I’m going to just insert a plain old header into this document. One of the changes here to the header option is that there is access to document info. You can get access to the author, file name, pathname and document title from the Header tab and that’s new in this version of Word. So let’s just close out of there and let’s switch to a document that has a table in it. Here we have a document that has a table in it, and with the table selected we now have options for formatting that table. From the Design tab you’ll see that there are additional table styles here. And these are theme aware so they’re going to look like the theme itself. So I’ve just applied one of them here. Now I can go ahead and format this table a little bit better if I want to. I’m thinking that the text would be better white. So let’s just go and get some white text, and let’s make it a bit bolder.
Now there is a new feature with the design of this table in the border. So we’re going to the table, let’s just grab the table. I’m going to the Design tab and here are our new border styles. This allows us to bypass the old border option that was available inside Word and to paint borders on. Now I can click here for border styles, and I’ll get borders that are theme aware. So these are borders that look like the theme. So I’ll just select one, but I might make a slight change to it. I think I’ll add a slightly wider border. So I’m choosing the color I want from the styles, but I’m making it a bit wider. Now I’m going to click on the border painter and I’m going to start Painting this border onto my table. And wherever I click and paint it’s going to be painted on. So this allows me to paint borders on where I want them to appear and to remove them where I don’t want them. For example, I could just set a border to none and they would be removed. Now let’s say that I make a mistake down here and I paint this border on by mistake. I want to go back to the regular border. Then all I need to do is from the border styles option here is choose my border sampler. I can sample a border. It’s now attached to the border painter. So having sampled it, I can now paint it back onto the table. So this gives me a lot more flexibility in working with tables than I’ve ever had particularly with borders and tables because that’s really been a nightmare issue for a lot of users.
Now the other thing that I can do in tables that I haven’t been able to do easily in the past is to add a row or a column. All I need do is to position my cursor just where I want the row or column to be inserted and I get this new indicator. And I can click to insert a row. I’m just going to undo that. But let’s go and see that the same thing appears between columns so we could add an extra column to the document. Let’s just undo that. We could also add one at this edge if we want to. So there are some new features inside Word not only new table styles but the ability to paint on borders, to sample borders and to access border styles.
The new features in Word 2013 extend to images and video. If you click the Insert tab you get access to online pictures. So you can view images that are in the office.com clipart collection. You can search Bing or you can go and search your own SkyDrive account. So let’s just type cupcake here. You can see that our cupcake image came from there, but you can add additional images by just clicking on them to insert them into your document. The same thing happens with video content. You can click Online Video and access online video. The benefit of these insert video and online picture options is that you can insert content direct from the web without needing to download it and save it to your computer first.
Let’s have a look at some of the screens that are available here. The open screen gives you access to recent documents, and if you click Computer you’ll see access to your recently open folders. And you can pin folders here as well as pin documents here. You can also get access to your SkyDrive account. One of the new features is in this share Option because you can now present online. If you click this you can go into a present online feature that is presented through the Office presentation service which is a new service. And this is similar to presenting a PowerPoint presentation online. Your presentation or your Word document is uploaded and you’re given a link that you can then share with others and they can watch as you present the document to them. You also have the ability to publish blog posts and invite people also to share your document. This would be done via a SkyDrive location. Here are the account options. Here you can see what account you’re currently logged into. You can also add services. For example we could add a LinkedIn or Twitter service here. We’re already connected to Facebook and SkyDrive, and you can see your update options.
The other feature that I want to talk about is the ability to open and edit PDFs. So I have the open screen available here, and there is a PDF that I just downloaded. So I’m just going to click it to open it. Now you’ve never been able to do this before inside Word and that is to open a PDF for editing. Now the application is not perfect. In fact it’s far from perfect, particularly with complex documents like this one that actually has images and pieces in it. But if we go to the select pane here we’re able to actually locate the picture and the elements that are part of this document so I can actually find these shapes. And I’m just deleting them. So I’m getting rid of these shapes that made the image and now I have something more attune to the original PDF and I could make changes to it. I would probably need to reformat this table as tables aren’t particularly friendly. But you do get access to the internal contents of a PDF file which you couldn’t in the past.
So there’s a roundup of the features that are new in Word 2013. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel so that you’re advised of new videos. You can also find more blog posts and information on my website at projectwoman.com.
Learn how to create a Faux Orton Effect in Lightroom, which produces intriguing photos using glowy colors and contrasting details. I also demonstrate how to save the effect as a preset to reuse over and over again.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create the Orton effect or a faux Orton effect on an image in Lightroom.
I have an example of the Orton effect that we’re going to create here in Lightroom. This is the original image and this is the image with the Orton effect applied to it. What I’ve done is I’ve softened the image and then tried to boost the blacks a little bit. You can’t get a true Orton effect in Lightroom because you can’t apply layers in an image. So what I’m trying to do is to bring in some of the characteristics of an Orton effect, a slightly lighter more glowy sort of image with some sharp blacks in it and a sort of hazy look to it. So let’s see how we might do this.
With this image open in Lightroom, first of all I’m going to the Develop module and I’m going to upgrade this one because it’s been worked on in earlier version of Lightroom. So I’m just going to upgrade it to the new process version. And I’m happy with that so let’s just go back to the image that we’re working on. I’m going to make a virtual copy so we can see how far we’ve come. And we’re going to be working on this virtual copy.
Now the first thing I’m going to do is just adjust this image. I’m not so much worried about the histogram as I am about getting some things out of this image that I want to get out of it. But I’m going to turn off the highlight clipping because I’ve got that turned on here. You can see highlight clipping is showing here. So I want to hide this for now. Let’s turn off the histogram and let’s just adjust the image a little bit. I’m just going to set my black point. You can see I’ve got the Alt or Option key held and I’m just trying to darken this to get some blacks in the image. It needed quite a bit of darkness in the image. And let’s go up with the whites right now.
Okay, so once I’ve got the image adjusted reasonably well to get a little bit of contrast and I’m starting to see some blacks let’s start going for this Orton effect. And one of the things we’re going to do is to reduce clarity. So we’re going to bring the clarity right down on this image. I do want quite a bit of vibrance because I want a quite a bit of color. And now let’s go and add some more reduced clarity. I’m going to click the graduated filter. Now this allows me to apply a graduated filter to the image. And it needs to be anchored to a side of the image. So I want it anchored to the top so I’m just going to drag down here to create it. And because it has saturation set to minus one hundred what we’re seeing is that we’re seeing no saturation in this images at all. So that’s convincing us that this is the graduated filter. Of course I do want saturation in that image so I’m going to take it back to normal but I am going to reduce clarity. And that’s adding some more of that softening effect to this image. And I’ll click Done.
Now I can boost that even more by adding a second graduated filter to do exactly the same thing. So again, clicking on Graduated Filter, making sure I select New. This time I’m going to drag up. It doesn’t matter whether I go up or down but I just want two filters on this image. So I want to add the effect. So here’s the second filter. Again, the default on this one is for saturation to be minus one hundred. I just want to take that back to normal. And what I want to do is kill the clarity. And I can also kill the sharpness by taking that down a bit too. I might increase the exposure a little bit more in the way of highlights. And I can go to this one as well, click on this and again, bring down the sharpness on this layer, just tweak that a little bit and maybe add a little bit of exposure and highlights on that one, maybe even some shadows until I get the effect that I’m looking for. And I’ll click Done.
At this point I may want to come back and re-adjust my blacks on the whole of the image. You can see that the blacks have been affected by that adjustment and I don’t have nearly as much black as I had before. So let’s go in and adjust the blacks. Having done that I’ve brought way more black in I think than I want. So let’s just go and bring up the highlights a bit on the basic image underneath all those adjustments, and again, kick up the shadows a little bit.
So there’s the basic Orton effect applied to the image and having done that I could just go onto the next image. But I could also make this a preset that I can use in future. In the Develop module I can go up to presets here and I can click the plus symbol. So here we are New Orton because I think I have an old one, okay, and I’m going to select which options I want in there. I do want graduated filters. I didn’t use split toning. I did use color. I did use process version and calibration. I didn’t use any post-crop vignetting or grain. I didn’t use any lens correction or noise reduction here. I did use some color. I didn’t use any sharpening so I’m going to that out. I didn’t use any tone curve adjustment. But I did adjust clarity and I did adjust these settings. I didn’t adjust white balance. So now that I’ve made a selection of everything that I want added to this particular develop preset, I’m just going to click to create it.
Now this is a new Orton preset. And of course it’s been applied to this image by default. But let’s go and get another image shot in similar circumstances to this and let’s go and apply it to this image. And all I do is to click New Orton, and it is than applied to this image. The process version is applied and all of the settings that we included including the two graduated filters here and here. The reason why I used a graduated filter and not adjustment brush is that adjustment brush cannot be included in a develop preset whereas the graduated filter can. And now I’ve got a new Orton preset that I can use with any of my images. All I do is click on the image and then click on this new Orton preset and it’s automatically applied to the images.
Now if I don’t like it I can Ctrl Z to undo it. In the case of this image that I had already applied it to I kind of like it, but I think the saturation is too much. So I can use that as a starting point for working with this image. And I can then adjust the sliders because all you’re doing by creating a preset in Lightroom is actually recording what the sliders are set at. So you can use that as a starting point and then adjust the sliders as you like from there.
So there’s how to create a faux Orton preset in Lightroom to apply to your images. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please like the video here on YouTube. Think about subscribing to my YouTube channel so that you get updates whenever we launch videos which at the moment is a couple of times a week.
Create the Droste Effect in Photoshop CS4 or CS5 or CS5.5 (not supported in CS6). Uses Bender and the Droste Filter.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. I’m going to show you here how to create the Droste effect using Pixel Bender in Photoshop. Now you need Photoshop CS4, CS5 or CS5.5. This does not work at the time of recording with Photoshop CS6. Before we start creating the Droste effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re trying to achieve. And this is the Droste effect that we’re going to create. And you can see it’s just a set of repeating images inside of each other. They’re actually based on a cocoa company’s advertisement. Their box had the cocoa packet being repeated within itself. And it’s been named the Droste effect because of that. Now we’re going to do it using Pixel Bender which is not being supported in Photoshop CS6. And in the description of this video on YouTube you’ll find that there is details about where you can get Pixel Bender and how to install it. So I’m assuming that you’re working with Photoshop CS4, CS5 or CS5.5 and that you have Pixel Bender installed and the Droste filter installed. So let’s get going with this. Let’s just put this image aside and we’ll go and get our original image. As I said it works particularly well when you have somebody off center so let’s just zoom out of this image a little bit. And the first thing we’re going to do is to add some extra area around the image. And I’m going to do this using the crop tool. So I’m going to select the crop tool, select over the image and then hold Alt or Option and then just drag out to create some extra canvas around the area of this image and just click the checkmark here. Now the canvas has come in with the current background color which has suited me really well because that gives me a white edge. Let’s flip these colors around and let’s go and do the same thing. Again, Alt or Option, and this time I’m only going to add a very small black canvas. Now you can do this any way you like. I just want to do it the quickest way possible. So now we have an image that is a black and white frame around our image. We’re going to go and see just how big this image is, reading it off with Image, Image Size. And the image is 1,076 by 905. Now this is an important because the filter needs to know this. So you’ll want to write this down. And we’re ready to get started with the filter. So we’re going to choose Filter and then Pixel Bender and then Pixel Bender Gallery. Now we already have the Droste filter selected. If you haven’t used this filter before you’ll probably have something like Cassini so you’ll just want to go down and select Droste. And this is the Droste effect. And we’re just going to first of all regardless of what it looks like here we’re going to start with entering the values that we read off for the size of the image. So it’s 1,076 by 905. And then we’ll adjust things like the radius inside and radius outside when we actually need to. We’re going to leave strands ate 1 and periodicity at 1. Strands and periodicity are the number of times that this will rotate. So if we send it up to 2 you’ll see that we get something that’s actually got two rotations. We don’t want that for this effect. We really only want one. And periodicity at 1 is fine too. The zoom is going to allow us to zoom in or out of this image. And at the moment we’re just going to leave zoom all the way out. Center is going to center the image itself. So when I drag on this the image rolls over, not the center of the actual portion of the image that we’re working with. You can see that if I just center shift I’m getting a very different effect on the image. Now center shift is something that I typically will adjust because I want to make sure that she is sitting opposite the image and the image is not actually over the top of her which it would be here. I’m going to adjust the rotation because at the moment it’s rotated at an angle and I really want it straight. So I’m going to rotate it a bit so that she is straight up and down. And having done that I want to bring the center of the image down. So I’m just going to adjust the vertical and perhaps also the horizontal so that I get the effect that I’m looking for. And I can combine that with zoom. Background RGBA is just the background of the image if this were showing any background, which it’s not. And levels and levels start you just don’t need to be working with at all. Transparent inside just makes it circular so we don’t want to use that. There’s really nothing below these settings that we’ve been working with that we really even want to see. So let’s just check and make sure that we’re getting the result that we want. Perhaps adjust these radius values to get a bigger image. And I’m thinking I like that a bit better, straighten it up with the rotate, perhaps move the center a little bit. And when we’re happy with the result that we’ve got, we’re just going to click Ok. And there’s our finished Droste effect. If we added some more levels we would see some more repeats in here. You can see that the repeats have sort of stopped. So we could go back and add more levels and that would give us a better result. Let’s just go and do that because all our settings will be still in place. And so what we’ll do is we’ll just increase the number of levels here and click Ok. And that’s giving us more repeats in the image here. But there’s the Droste effect filter created using the Pixel Bender plug-in in Photoshop CS4, CS5 and CS5.5. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked this video please give it a thumbs up in YouTube. You’ll find more video tutorials on my YouTube channel and look out at projectwoman.com for more tutorials and articles on Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
PowerPoint just got a whole lot cooler, so come check out what’s new. I’ll walk you through many of PowerPoint 2013’s features, including the new start screen and account screens, how saving is new, using the new task panes, charting options, and discovering theme variants.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today we’re going to be looking at the new PowerPoint 2013 and asking what’s new and cool for PowerPoint users. There is a lot to like about the new PowerPoint 2013. And we’re going to have a look at some of the features of it here in this video.
The first thing is the Start screen. This opens as soon as you open PowerPoint 2013. And there’s a lot here for new users. You can actually turn the screen off. But I think most people are going to opt to turn it on. The default is to start with a new presentation with a default theme, but you can see here that we’ve got recent files that we’ve opened in PowerPoint so they’re all available to us. We could go online and search for templates and themes online. And there are some suggested searches here. We can also click here to open other presentations that we might have stored on SkyDrive or on our local computer or SharePoint. And up here is the current account. So when You open PowerPoint 2013 or any of the new Office 2013 applications you’re going to be logged into your SkyDrive account, and this is access to it. And here we could switch accounts if we wanted to. These are just for testers so I think that they’re probably going to go in the final production.
But let’s have a look and see what would happen if we selected one of these templates. So I’m just going to click this one to open it. And you can see here that there’s some variants in this theme. We’re having a look right now at the More Images so we can see what this layout is going to look like if we select this particular one. And there’s this title layout, and this is what the chart would look like, and then smart art graphics, and this is a photo layout. And then there are different variants, different color combinations that we could use in this particular theme. Now what they’ve done in PowerPoint 2013 is that they’ve removed some of the color options that we had previously and sort of scaled them down to a more manageable group. So this particular design has four color options and you choose one of them and go with it rather than having to select from a set of color schemes that are probably twenty or thirty of them.
So I’m really liking this sort of red one so let’s click Create. And we’re now all ready to start our PowerPoint presentation. None of this is going to be unusual for PowerPoint users. A little bit has changed with the interface here. You can see that it’s got a metro style look to it so everything is a lot flatter. There’s no dimension in the screen, no shading. The buttons have sort of all gone to the back and really what we’re doing is focusing a little bit more on the content of our presentation.
Let’s go to Backstage View before we come back here though and see what’s there. I’ll click File to go to Backstage View. Now some of these options have changed. There’s Save and Save as. If we go to Save as you’ll see that by default we’re now saving to SkyDrive so this is the SkyDrive account that I was already logged into. Details are up here, and it’s opting to save it to SkyDrive by default. If I want to I can save it to my own computer so I can click Computer and this gives me access to my own folder structure. I can also add a place. So I could add things like a SharePoint location or a different SkyDrive account. Print is pretty standard. There’s not much changes here but Share has some options. You can invite people to share your document on your SkyDrive account. You can email it. You can present it online or publish your slides here. Export here we’ve got our PDF, XPS document support. Here’s the video option. Here’s packaging it for a CD, creating handouts and changing our file type. Down here are the standard options. This is general options for working inside PowerPoint and there’s not much changed here. Let’s go back here however to this Account area. And this is where you manage your accounts. So at the moment you can see that I’ve got a connected service with my Facebook account, my SkyDrive account, Twitter. I can also add LinkedIn if I wanted to. I could add Flickr. There’s the ability to add SharePoint or another SkyDrive account, lots of options here. And I imagine that over time we might see even more appearing here. This is also showing me where I am with my product. I can get updates and get information about whether the updates are installed, whether there are any, and it’s just telling me which version of Microsoft PowerPoint I’m using. So there’s our Backstage View. There’s our Start screen.
So let’s go back now and have a look and see what’s different inside the PowerPoint interface itself. The ribbon is pretty standard from the older versions of the ribbon. The difference is that the Design tab is split in two now with the themes and the variants. So here we have the various themes that we can use. We’re using this one here, but you can see that what we’re using this variant of it. This is another one of the built in themes for PowerPoint 2013, and here are the variants so we could make it blue or pink, whatever we want to do here.
The Developer tab is now visible by default so that’s a big change for people who want access to macros. I’ve got some additional things open here, and it’s picked up my old handy Tools tab which is one that I added to my PowerPoint 2010 and it’s been brought forward into 2011. So too has the add-in Visual Bee. But these are things that I’ve added in myself. They’re not actually in the default PowerPoint install. There is a new button here on the toolbar. It’s the Touch Mode button, and you can enable it if you’re on a touch screen. With that enabled, if I just tap it what happens is that the buttons become a little bit further apart and everything is a little bigger for work on a touch screen. Click it again and everything shrinks down just a little bit.
Let’s have a look at adding a chart so I’m just going to go back to the Home screen. And we’ll do a new slide with a chart so I’m going to choose a title and a content slide. And let’s just add a chart to our Presentation and close this down. These settings here are new, and these are in Excel as well. So these give you the ability to add chart elements or remove them. For example if we don’t want a legend we could just disable the legend here. We could also for example disable the chart title if we planned to add the chart title in as the slide title. There’s access here to styles and color options. And you can see that we could change the colors but we’ve got a smaller subset of colors this time. And they’re more true to the theme itself. So we’ve been given smaller numbers of options but probably more relevant options if you could think of it that way. And then here we’ve got other settings. We can change the values and the names. So there’s options here for working with our chart.
Let’s go again and let’s add another new slide. This time I want to add an image. So I get a choice of selecting pictures from my own computer or online pictures. Online pictures allows me to select images from Office.com clipart. I can search them using Bing or I could go and get them from my SkyDrive account. It’s also possible for me to get them from my Flickr account. So let’s just go and get an image right now. Let’s go and get a coffee image. Okay, let’s grab this one here. And I’m going to insert it so I’m just clicking it and tap Insert. And now we’ve got our image inserted on our slide.
Now if we wanted to make changes to this image we would typically go to the Picture Tools Format tab. But watch what happens when I right click the image here and choose Format Picture. What we get is this new format picture pane here. It’s a task pane. And in it are all the things that we can use to format our pictures. So let’s go ahead and let’s add a reflection to this picture, just add a very simple reflection to it.
Okay, let’s go now and add another slide and this time I’m going to add a small art graphic. So let’s just add a default smart art graphic. But look what’s happened to our pane. Now we’re seeing Format Shape options because these are the options that we can use with this smart art graphic. If we go back to this slide here and click on the picture the pane is still there. It stays in place if we want it to, but it changes to show us the kind of options that we have for the object that we’re working with. And I think users are going to really like this because you don’t have dialogue sitting over the top of your slides. This is all tucked away on the side and you can leave it open as you work. And it’s just giving you much quicker access to things. You can see we haven’t moved away from the Home tab and yet we’ve got most of the smart art tools available that allow us to format the smart art as we work.
Now another handy tool we’ve got is the eyedropper tool. So I’m just going back to this image and I am going to click on the image and go to Picture Tools Format tab. And I’m going to select Picture Border. So instead of actually choosing one of these theme colors what I can do is use the new eyedropper tool. What the eyedropper tool does is to allow me to select a color from the image itself. So I can just mouse over an area of the image and select that as the color of my picture border for example. So it’s now my selected color so I can now add a border to the image that is a color that I’ve selected from the image itself. Now you may be missing the color options that you used to have inside PowerPoint, but we still have access to them. We just have access to them in a limited way.
So let’s say that we like this general layout, but we’d really like it to be a different color combination. In this case we’ll go to the View option and we’ll go to Slide Master View. In Slide Master View we can control the slide master that controls the look and feel of out presentation. And you can see here that the All Theme Color options are back again. So for example if we wanted to use a theme color for example medium we could do that. And here’s our medium color scheme that’s now been applied to the presentation. I’ll close Master View and let’s go back into the Design View.
We’ve still got the four options that came with this slide presentation, but we also have our own custom option that’s a Slide Master that we can use. Now if we like this color scheme in preference to the other variants we can save it as we always could, just drop down this theme option and save the current theme. So you do get the customization options of being able to change colors, but you get it where they really should have been all along which is in the Slide Master because you really want it to be thematically strong and you want this color scheme to be applied throughout the entire presentation. Now some of the other options that are available inside PowerPoint 2013 is the Video options so you can select Online Video or Video on your PC. There are a few more options in working with video content. You’ll find things in the Slide Show menu.
When you go to rehearse a slide show or set up a slide show you’ll have different options in terms of viewing presenter view so you can actually see presenter view if you want to. So let’s just do that. And let’s send the slide show to the monitor and the primary monitor which is not the one I’m using right now, and let’s do Presenter View. And let’s just view the slide show. So here’s our Presenter View. You can see that we can see which slide we’re on and we can navigate through the slides. In fact this is my title slide and this is the next one up. And there’s two and three. We can also use a See All Slides option where you can see the slides themselves. You can press Escape here and you’re just going back into Presenter View, not ruining the presentation which is actually running on my second monitor right now. You’ve got the ability to zoom into the slide show so you can click on here and zoom it up full screen. And there are the standard laser pointers so you can use a laser pointer on your screen and you can see other slide show options here.
So there’s plenty to like about this new PowerPoint 2013. I think you’ll like it a lot. If you haven’t already done so why not go and download the customer preview and install it and have a play around with it. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this presentation. You can find more of my videos here on my YouTube channel. I encourage you to subscribe to the video channel as we’re releasing at least two new videos every week. And also follow me at projectwoman.com where you’ll find tips and tricks for all the Office applications as well as much, much more. If you liked this video please go ahead and like it and I’m always happy to hear your comments.
Crop an image to a heart shape or any other shape in Photoshop. Uses a filled shape and a clipping mask.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to crop to a heart or any other shape in Photoshop. Before we get started on this technique let’s just have a look and see what the end product is going to be. You can see here that I have an image of my cat. And what I’m going to do is to cut her face out in a heart shape. Now in Photoshop Elements this is relatively easy to do because there’s a cookie cutter tool that you can use. In Photoshop it’s not that easy. So we’re going to go through this step by step so that you know exactly how to do it. So let’s get started. I’m going to open up a duplicate of this image. And the shape that we’re using is a heart but this could be any shape at all. So it doesn’t have to be a heart and this process is going to be the same for any shape. The first thing we’re going to do is convert the background into a regular layer. And do that your favorite way. I’m just going to double click the layer and click Ok. And now I’m going to go and get my heart shape. So I’m going to click on the custom shape tool here, and I’m going to select a shape. Now I’ve already selected the heart I want to use but let’s have a look and see. There’s a couple of hearts here. There’s one in the sort of card collection, but I don’t actually like that very much. It’s a really sort of weird shape that one. I prefer this one here so I’m just going to select it, and then let’s go and add a new layer. So I’ve just added a new layer. And let’s go and select a color. Now it can be any color at all, and I’m going to make it this sort of black. It doesn’t matter what color it is. And we’re going to use pixels so this is really important this bit, the pixels bit. In earlier versions of Photoshop there’s actually three icons here and you want to select the one that is pixels. And I’m just going to draw my heart shape. And if it’s not in the exact right position I’m just got a hold the Spacebar as I draw the shape so that I can move it around. And this is actually a nicer shape so once I’ve finished drawing and I’m just going to let go. And now I have a black heart shape right over the top of my cat. It doesn’t matter what this color is because it’s about to disappear. It does matter that the order of these two layers is the wrong way around. So I’m just going to drag the bottom layer up over the top layer. So the photos are on top and the heart is underneath it. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to cut the photo to the heart shape and we do that using a clipping group or clipping mask. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. You see here that there is a keystroke that’s Alt Ctrl G. That’s something we could use as well. But what this does is it cuts the photo into the shape of the shape below. So if this were a star than we’d have a star shape. So essentially that’s all you need to do. If you’re already to go, go now because you know how to create a heart shape from an image. If you want to finish it off nicely than hang around and we’re going to finish it off. The way we’re going to finish it off is by adding yet another new layer, and we’re to drag it to the very bottom. And what we’re going to do here is to fill this with a nice color. So I’m going to choose a color of pink because this is a sort of Valentine theme. My foreground color is pink. I have the bottom layer selected. I’m going to Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac, to fill it with pink. Now we have our heart shape image over pink we can crop it. So I’m just going to crop it to size. And we’ll come in a bit on the edge here too. And now we want that nice finishing touch that we had on the original image. Let’s go and see the original image. You can see that this one’s got dimension and ours is very flat. If you want that dimensional look what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a drop shadow. And we’re going to do it to this heart layer because we want to the drop shadow to follow the heart shape. Here is the layer effects tool, the layer style tool. I’m going to click here and choose Drop Shadow Now my drop shadow at the moment is black. I would prefer a color that is similar to this pink but perhaps a bit darker than it. So let’s just go and get a darker version of our pink. We’re on multiply blend mode which is a good blend mode. I don’t like the angle of light. I prefer my light to be cast in this direction. And you can see that I can now drag my drop shadow around to place it where I want it to be. It’s a bit harsh so I’m going to soften it. Now this is where Photoshop is a little confusing. I think they’ve labeled these really wrongly because size actually adjusts the feathering and spread really adjusts the size. So we don’t want it to have a very big size or spread, but we do want it to have a nice feathering so I’m going to adjust the size to suit there. And on the other one I added an inner glow so I want to grab inner glow here. I again changed the color, this time sampling the pink from the image and going for a lighter pink for my inner glow. And then we’ve got it screen blend mode so that’s going to work nicely. But we do need to increase the size here and probably increase the choke a bit. And we just wanted to blend that around the edge and click Ok. So this is an effect that you can create with any shape in Photoshop. You can put any shape in here. You can put your photo on top. You’re going to add a clipping mask or create a clipping mask with Layer. And this will say Create Clipping Mask. At the moment it says Release because that’s what we would be doing at this point because we already have clipping mask created and we’re just dropping a filled layer below it. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Photoshop video. If you liked this video please would you give it a thumbs up so that others know that it’s a good video. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel and look at projectwoman.com for more tutorials about Photoshop.
