How to get the color picker to look the way you want it to look
or How to fix the Color Picker when it looks all funky
Sometimes when you open the color picker in Photoshop it looks one way and other times it looks a different way. It might even seem like there is no rhyme or reason to how it looks and that it changes without (what it may seem like) no input from you.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth but knowing that won’t solve the problem of why it changes and how to change it back!
To change it, don’t go looking under Preferences for all the Color Picker choices. While some preferences can be found in the Preference area the secret changes are made inside the Color Picker itself.
To see them at work, click to open the Color Picker. What you see here depends on what is clicked in the right of the dialog (when you realize this everything becomes blindingly obvious).
Click H for Hue to see this:
And S for Saturation to see this:
And B for Brightness to see this:
Each of R, G and B make the picker look different:
As does choosing L or a or b:
And each looks different if you have the Only Web Colors dialog checked:
Now you know what affects how the Color Picker looks you can choose the one that makes the most sense to you.
Create a cancelled postal stamp watermark to use in Photoshop and Lightroom. See how to use the path tools to create the watermark and then save it as a png image with a transparent background so it can be used over your images.
This is the video explanation of the blog post on the same topic which you can find here:
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a postage style copyright stamp that you can use on your images. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a copyright symbol like this which is a couple of concentric circles and some wavy lines and text. And it’s got an overall texture to it.
This is a tutorial that I created for digital-photography-school.com when one of my readers there was having a bit of difficulty following along. So that’s why I’ve created this as a video tutorial. And because of this I’m going to be doing it step-by-step as I did it for that particular tutorial on the Digital Photography School site. And you’ll see in the comments here just below the tutorial I’ve given you a link to that site if you want to follow along.
So the first thing that I did in that tutorial was to create a brand new image. So I’m going to do that now. I’m going to choose File and then New. And I’m going to do a letter size image, landscape. So it’s 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches tall, and it’s 300 pixels resolution, RGB color and the background contents are white. So I’m just going to click Ok. And here’s our starting image.
Now we’re going to add a new layer so I’m going to have my layers palette visible. So if you don’t have it visible choose Window and then Layers so that you can see it. And we’re going to add a new layer and we do that by clicking this little icon here. It’s the Add New Layer icon. It looks like I clicked it twice. So I only want one new layer here. And we’re going to draw our circles using the Ellipsis tool. And it’s here in the toolbar so let’s just have a look and see what we’re looking for.
We’re looking for this tool here. It’s the Ellipsis tool. And when you choose it you want to choose Paths from the tools option palette. Now the options are a little bit different in earlier versions of Photoshop. There are three icons here and you want to make sure that you click the icon that says Path when you mouse over it. They’re the exact same options. They just deliver differently. And this is Photoshop CS6’s version so I have Path selected.
I’m going to drag to draw an ellipsis, but you can see that this is going to be a sort of oval. I want it to be a circle so I’m going to hold Shift as I draw it. And if it’s not in the correct position before I let everything go I’m going to hold the Spacebar and move it into position, let go the Spacebar and just make sure that I have the outermost of my circles created. And when it’s dead right, I’ve still got the Shift key held, I’m going to let go of my Left Mouse button.
So now I have a circle the shape of this outer circle that we’re going to use. Now this is now going to be colored in and we want to stroke this circle. And we do this by going here to the Paths palette. Now the Paths palette you get to by choosing Window and then Paths. And the topmost path is going to be called your work path and that’s the one that you’re working with. This is this circle here. We want to stroke the circle with a brush so we’re going to go and select a brush to use.
So I’m going to click on my Brush tool and then I’m going to select the kind of brush that I want to use. And I’m going to use a hard sort of brush here. So I’m going to select that brush. It’s a hard brush. And let’s just check and see from the original tutorial just how big it needs to be. And apparently it needs to be 40 pixels. So let’s just take it up to around 40 pixels. That’s 39, but that’ll be fine.
I’m going to set black as my foreground color. So I’ve set my brush and my foreground color and what I want to do now is with this path selected I’m going to choose the option that says Stroke Path with Brush. So that’s this icon here. So I’ll click it to stroke the path with a brush. Now I’ve got a funny sort of stroke here and the reason is that my stroke is set to something I don’t want it to be set to. So let’s just wind that back with Edit, Undo.
Then I’m going to right click on this Path option here and choose Stroke Path. And I want to disable this option here, Simulate Pressure. I just want to stroke it with the brush so I’m going to click Ok. Now it’s working the way I want it to. So now I have my path stroked, well at least the outside stroked. Now I need to use the outside to make the inside because it’s going to be really easy to make a concentric circle. To do that I’m going to click on this tool here. It’s the Path Selection tool.
This is the one I want and it shares a position with the Direct Selection tool. But it’s the black one, the Path Selection tool that I want, and I’m going to click on my path so it is selected. Now I want to transform this. And the transformation handles have not appeared so I’m going to press Ctrl T to make them appear. I want to drag in on this handle. But I want to make sure that I don’t lose the circle and I want to make sure that I don’t lose the fact that it needs to be concentric. So I’m going to just hold down both Shift and Alt as I drag in on this handle. So let’s Shift Alt and drag inwards. And you can see that what I’m doing is making a concentric circle. It has the exact same middle as the original circle. I’m going to let go of my Left Mouse button and then let go of the shift and the Alt keys. Now my work path here is a much smaller path so I’m just going to click the checkmark here.
Now I’m going to do exactly the same thing. I’m going to select my brush and I’m going to stroke it, make sure black is my foreground color, and I’m going to stroke this path with the brush. And I get the exact same effect. Now what I need to do is to make a path for my type. And it needs to be a little bit bigger than this inside circle. So again, I’m going to click this Path Selection tool. I’m going to press Ctrl and T to show my handles, I’m going to hold down Alt and Shift, that’s Option and Shift on the Mac, and this time drag out just a little bit so that I get a path for my type, let go of the Left Mouse button, let go the rest of the keys and click the checkmark. Now I’m going to add my text. And to do that I’m going to select my Text tool and then select my type. And I want to use Myriad Pro.
So I’m going to go down here until I find Myriad Pro. And I think the type that I suggested in the article that we used was about 24 points so I’m going to click that. I have black as my type color. So everything looks pretty good. I’m going to hold my mouse over the line, over this path that is still selected, and when I do you’ll notice that the I-beam pointer changes from this I-beam to an I-beam with a short of squiggly line. That means I’m typing on the path. So I’m going to click to do that.
Now the first thing I need to do is to add my copyright symbol. So I’m going to hold down the Alt or Option key and type out 0169 on the keyboard because that gives me copyright, and now 2013, and I’m going to type my copyright details. And I think I’ll do this all in capitals. And I’m using Helen Bradley, projectwomam.com. And I think actually I just want to put a www in there so I’ll just arrow back and make that change.
Now so far my type hasn’t quite stretched all the way around my words. So the next thing we need to do is to stretch it just a little bit more. And I’m going to do that using the Character Spacing tool. So first of all, I’m going to make sure that all my text is selected and then I’m going to choose this dialogue here which will get me to the Character Spacing dialogue. Now this is two dialogues.
There’s a paragraph and a character, and we want the character. And what we want is this tool here, this VA tool. And it’s a scrubby slider so all I need to do is to adjust it a little bit. And can you see that the text is getting bigger every time I drag on it? And I think I’m going to wind that back just a little bit because I could probably add a trailing dash to this. And that’s now all the way around that shape. And let’s just up that to bold because I don’t think it’s really quite dark enough for me. And if I’m using bold I’ll going to have to wind back up on my character spacing a little bit. And so now I’ve created my text on a circle.
Now the only thing that I’m a little bit concerned about is I think that this circle could be a little bit smaller. So I’m going to reselect my text layer here, and again with Alt and Shift selected, I’m going to drag inwards just a little bit to resize that circle path that the text is on because I just think it was a little bit on the big side. So I’m a little bit happier with my text now.
So we’re ready now to go ahead and to create the wavy lines. And we’re going to do that by clicking on the Custom Shape tool here that shares that toolbar position with the Ellipse tool that we used earlier. But this time we want Custom Shape. And from the Shape dropdown list here what we’re looking for is this wiggly line wave shape. Now this is shipped with Photoshop so you will have the wave shape. If you don’t have it in your collection you can click this little fly out arrow and choose All to add all the shapes or append all the shapes to your shapes collection. But this is the one we’re using.
I’m going to drag the shape onto my image and then use the Path Selection tool to just move it into position. Now at the moment it’s a series of closed paths and I want to open these paths. And I’m going to do that by clicking here on the Add Anchor Point tool. Unfortunately you can’t just delete points in Photoshop to open up these curves.
We first of all have to add a point in here that we can then go and delete to open it up. It doesn’t work otherwise. It’s a bit of a nuisance. But this is how we’re going to do it. So I’m going to click once with this Add Anchor Point tool on the ends up all of the shapes. And now I’m going back to the Direct selection tool. And I’m going to make sure that I’m selected on this point that I just added, so it’s black and everything else around it is not, and I’m going to press the Delete key. And that will just break that path in two. And I’m going to repeat that for each of these points.
So select it and press Delete, select it, press Delete, select it, and press Delete. Now if Photoshop is running out of memory if you’ve been using it quite a bit, you might find as I just did earlier that that was not working. Every time I pressed Delete the entire path was going. So I just closed down Photoshop and reopened it and went back to where I was working and it’s working perfectly. So now I have my lines. And you’re probably beginning to see a pattern here because this is just another path. And we can stroke it because we have our tool that we can stroke it with.
So I’m just going to go back and make sure my brush is selected. The same brush is selected, black paint, click on the work path so that I have it selected and now I’m going to stroke it. And that is giving us our lines. And so if you wanted to leave it at this point you could because everything is in place. But I’m going to go ahead and add a Grunge effect to it.
Now we’re ready to create our Grunge effect. And to create that, first of all what we need to do is to flatten the image. But in flattening it I need to remove the white layer from the flattened version. That is because later on when I will put this copyright image over my photograph I want the background to be transparent. So I want to keep this white layer out of the action right now. So I have two visible layers. I’m going to click on the topmost layer and press Ctrl Alt Shift and E to create a new flattened version of this layer. So this is the version that I’m going to use. And now I’m going to bring in a texture layer.
So I have a texture image open here, and I think it’s a really nice texture to use. So I’ve got the texture open. And to add the texture to this particular layer I’m going to select the layer and click the Add Layer Mask icon because that adds a layer mask to the image. And now this texture has to be made the exact same size as this image so I’m going to choose Image and then Image Size. And I want to resize it to the exact same size as this one.
So I can do that by just clicking Window and just pointing to the image whose size I want to borrow. And that’s apparently the size of this image here so I’m just going to click Ok. And because it’s a texture image it doesn’t matter that I’m skewing it a bit out of proportion because nobody really knows what a scratch is supposed to look like. Having done this, and it’s critical that you resize the texture to the exact same size as this image or you can’t use this next technique, which is to apply the texture as a mask.
So I’m going to click on the mask, and I’m going to choose Image, Apply Image. And if you don’t have the texture file the exact same size it will not appear here. So it does obviously appear here so that’s exactly what I want. I want to apply the texture to the image. And at the moment it’s set to Multiply blend mode. But I can test other blend modes and I can even test inverting the layer. So I’m just going to look for the best effect that I can get here.
In fact in the tutorial I suggested that we use Hard Light. So that looks like the one that we’re going to use, Hard Light. So I’m just going to click it and click Ok. And that gives us the sort of texturize look to our shape. And again, I was going to create this as a new layer so I’ll click on this layer and again press Ctrl Alt Shift and E to gives me a newly stamped layer. Well it’s not appearing to work right now. So let’s just add a new layer and press Ctrl Alt Shift E because that will work. And then we’re going to save this as a PNG image. But before I do it I think it’s going to be cropped because I think it’s a bit too big at this stage.
So I’m just going to crop down to get rid of the bits of the image that I don’t want and click the checkmark. And now I’m going to save this but making sure that I have this background turned off because I want it to be a transparent image. So I’m going to save it as a PNG image. So I’ll choose File, Save as, and I’m going to call this HB copyright, black, and PNG. And I’m going to make sure that I select PNG from this list here. And here’s PNG. So I’m going to select it and just click Save and click Ok. And that’s now saved as a PNG image.
Having done that I then want to make it white. So I’m going to choose Image and then Adjustments and then I’m going to invert it so what was black becomes white. And now if I just test this with a black filled layer behind it, you’ll see that it’s now a white image. So we could use that to go over the top of for example a very dark image.
So having created that I’m going to turn off my background because I want this to be a transparent image, and I’m going to resave it this time as a PNG. But this time I’m going to call it white. So again, this is going to be HB copyright, and it’s going to be white, PNG. I’m going to save it as a PNG image, and Ok. And so this is now the copyright image that I can use on my images in future.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. And look out for more of my tutorials both on digitalphotographyschool.com and also on my own website at projectwoman.com.
Learn to create a vector sunburst in Illustrator – This works with all versions of Illustrator including the new CS6. The process is simple and uses a stroke to make the sunburst – it is quick and doesn’t require a lot of fiddling to create.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a sunburst vector shape in Illustrator.
Before we get started creating our sunburst effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for. Here I have a sunburst and it’s just offset in this rectangle, but you could have a circular one if you like.
We’re going to start with circular and then we’re going to crop it to a rectangle. So if you’re ready let’s have a look and see how we create this effect in Illustrator. And we’re going to start by creating a brand new document so I’ll just choose File, New. It doesn’t matter too much what my document looks like.
I’m going to start with the Ellipse tool. So, I’m going to select the Ellipse tool and drag a shape on my image. And I need this to be a perfect circle so I’m going to hold the Shift key as I draw it and then just let go. I want this to be black stroke and no fill so I’m just going to click on the fill here and turn the fill off.
Now let’s go to the Appearance panel for this selected path and I’m going to click the Stroke option. And I’m going to set the stroke to about 200 points. And when I do you’ll see that we get this sort of circle all the way around our shape which is pretty near exactly what we want when we click the Dash Line option. Now with the Dash Line option I can set the dashes to whatever I want and this is going to affect how many of these sunbeam things there are around the shape.
So let’s just go to 20 and try that. This is what I’m a little concerned about. You can see that there’s an uneven spacing here, but you’ll see that you can adjust that by clicking this option here. So just work out how many points you need to get the number of sunrays that you want for your particular shape. I’m going to do a few more in this one rather than less so I’m going to 10 points. And when I’ve got what I want I’m just going to click away from this. And this is the basic shape. Now before we can do anything with this shape we’re going to first have to expand its appearance.
So with the shape selected I’m going to choose Object and then Expand Appearance and then Object, Expand because I want this dialogue here. And I’m going to expand both fill and stroke So I’ll select both of those and click Ok. And now each of these sunbursts is a separate shape and I need now to close up the middle. And I can do that by grabbing the Lasso tool. It’s the easiest tool to use. And all I’m going to do is just drag around because I want to select all the nodes and pointers’ handles in the middle.
Now I’m going to choose Object and then Path, and I’m going to choose Average. And with Average I’m going to select both Horizontal and Vertical and click Ok. And what that does is it just closes up the middle nicely for me. So I’m going to click outside my shape and here is my sunburst shape. So with it selected I can then go to what is now my fill color and I can choose a different fill color for it. And we could fill it with a gradient.
We could do anything we liked at this point. So let’s see now how we’re going to crop it. So I’m going to select the Rectangle tool. I’m going to start by drawing a rectangle and I’m just going to hold the spacebar as I bring it in position over the top of my sunburst because I want to work out exactly where the sunburst is going and where the rectangle is going relative to it. So I think that’s a pretty good position for me. So I’m going to let go of the spacebar and let go of the left mouse button and now select all my objects. I’m selecting other everything, and in the Pathfinder I’m going to select Crop. And that crops the shape to the size of that rectangle. And we lost our fill here so let’s just click on the fill and put the fill back on.
So here is a shape that we could save to our Symbol library. And those sunbursts are very, very easy to create in Illustrator as vector shapes. And of course if you add it to your Symbol library then you’ll have it available anytime you want to use it. And it’s very easy to create ones with different numbers of rays in them.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my videos on this YouTube channel and please like and comment on the videos. Look out too for my website at projectwoman.com. There you’ll find more tutorials and tips and tricks for Illustrator, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, GIMP and a whole lot more.
Learn how to use Kuler color schemes in Photoshop via the Kuler Extension.
This video includes details of how to add color schemes to swatches and how to edit, customize, and create Kuler color schemes inside Photoshop CS4, CS5 & CS6.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can use Kuler colors in Photoshop. In this video tutorial we’re going to have a look at Kuler which is a way that you can find custom color schemes from inside Photoshop.
Now Kuler is also available online but we’re going to work with the Photoshop extension. And that’s been there since CS4. To see it choose Window and then Extensions and then Kuler. And when Kuler launches you get to see some of the color schemes.
Now I last looked for vintage car and that’s in actual fact what we’re going to look for now. So I’ve typed in vintage car and clicked the Search button and here are color schemes that are related to vintage cars. And if I can’t see anything I like there I can click the View Next Set of Themes option and we can go forward to see other themes. Now these themes have been designed by other people and they’re available online. And people put them up online when they create them and then they are accessible for us to use if we want to use them.
So I’m looking for a theme to use for my car. And let’s say that I find one, so let’s just go and find one that we sort of like. I’m thinking this one here. And if I like it I can just click on this arrow icon here and I can add it to my swatches panel. And when I do that it becomes the last five colors in my swatches panel and I can click on any of these colors to add it as my new foreground color. And that allows me to paint on it for example to recolor my car.
Now if I sort of like it but think I like to edit a color for example maybe the red in this, then I can click here and choose Edit this theme. And this opens the Kuler panel but this time in the edit mode. And this is where I can change some of these colors.
For example I can take the red and walk it around to maybe make it an orange. And if I like that then I can use this particular color scheme. If I want to save this theme to my swatches panel I can do so by clicking here, Add this theme to swatches panel, again this time all five colors go into the swatches panel. I could upload it to Kuler if I wanted to and I can name and save the theme.
You can also create your own custom themes here so for example if you wanted to create an analogous color scheme you could do that. So you could just click there and then you can drag around on these sliders to make the color scheme that you want to use. If you want to use a complementary one you can do that and just drag in and out on these colors to create your own complementary color scheme. And if you like it then you can add it to your swatches panel. You can upload it to Kuler.
Kuler is a really handy tool for finding color schemes if you’re not sure what you want to use and so you can quickly and easily find color schemes and add them to your swatches panel. So it can help you get inspiration when you want to use a limited color palette on your images and you’re just not really inspired to find it yourself.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more tutorials on this YouTube channel. Also visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.
Ok, confession time. Some of my websites still use FrontPage 2003 for the code. It isn’t pretty but it is one of those things that work and, if it isn’t broken, I don’t generally fix it.
However today I headed over to helenbradley.com to give it a once over. The problem was that I had seen in my stats that the PR company for a major software provider had trawled my site recently and when I looked at what they checked out I realized how out of date it all was. So it was time for an update. Instead of FrontPage I grabbed all the existing HTML and opened the pages in Dreamweaver and let out one very big groan. They were full of font tags – nearly every piece of text had a font face, size and color associated with it.
The obvious solution was to make a site wide .css file and put all the formatting in there. Well that is dead easy but what about all the garbage in my code – how to get rid of that? The last thing I wanted to do was to select and delete it all one code at a time.
Turns out that Adobe had already thought of that and there is a command you can select to strip code. I chose Commands > Clean Up HTML and then selected the code to clean up.
As my code had too many Font codes in it I chose to specifically remove all of them too.
One click and all the mess was gone leaving me with the content stripped of its formatting.
I created some CSS styles for the text formats to use in the external .css file, attached it to each page, applied the styles to the text and it was all fixed, tested and up.
Now that site is officially FrontPage 2003 free and working just fine in Dreamweaver. I have one more site to bring across and then I can say farewell to FrontPage!
Learn how to make plaids and checks in Photoshop very quickly. See how to save the plaids as patterns and how to fill a shape with a pattern in all versions of Photoshop.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this video I’m going to show you how to create quick and easy plaids and checks in Photoshop. And this is going to work with pretty much any version of Photoshop. Before we start creating our plaid pattern let’s have a look and see exactly what we mean by creating plaids and checks. This is a simple sort of gingham style pattern that we’re going to create, and I’ve used it to fill a shape. And you’re going to see how you can do that as well. So let’s just tuck that away for now and let’s go and create our pattern. I’m going to choose File New and I’m going to create a workspace that is a fixed size and it’s going to be square. So I’m going to make this 200 pixels by 200 pixels because that’s going to be nice and easy to see. And I’m going to for this one create background contents as white because I actually want white as the basis of my pattern. So I’m quite happy to have white there. I’m going to choose View Rulers because I want to see my ruler right now. And I want to add two guides just to make sure that this is perfect. I’m going to choose New Guide and I’m going to make this 50 percent Horizontal and then add another one at 50 percent Vertical. These guides are going to help me draw in my shape. So I’m going to select the Rectangular Marque Tool and drag over one side of this shape. I need to work on a new layer so I’m going to click the New Layer icon here. And let’s choose a different color to the one we were working on before. Let’s create a sort of purple gingham this time. So I have purple selected as my foreground color, a brand new layer. I can fill this layer automatically with the foreground color by pressing Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac. I’m going to add another layer. Still with this Marque Tool selected, this time I’m going to select the top area here, and I’m going to fill it again with the same color, Alt Backspace, Option Delete. And there’s the basics of my gingham check pattern. The only thing is is it doesn’t quite look the way it’s supposed to look yet. What I’m going to do is to make these layers both 50 percent opacity. And when I make both these layers 50 percent opacity you can see that we’re getting this sort of gingham check look. And I’m pressing Ctrl D, Command D on the Mac, to deselect my selection. To get rid of my guides I’m going to just click Clear Guides. So this is my gingham pattern. To make it a pattern I’m going to press Ctrl A or choose Select All to select everything and choose Edit and then Define Pattern. And I’m going to call this purple gingham and just click Ok. Now that pattern is created so I can just trash that document. But we might save it just for the moment because we might come back to that in a minute. Now let’s see how we could use our plaid pattern. I’m going to choose File New and create a letter size document with a white background. And here it is. Here I’m going to click the Custom Shapes Tool and I already have this rabbit shape selected. But you could select any shape. And I’m going to show you how to do this in any version of Photoshop because Photoshop CS6 is a little different. But the procedure I’m going to show you will work with any version. So with the custom shapes tool selected we’re going to make sure that we have path selected here. There are three options and they’re just different icons in earlier versions of Photoshop. But you want the Paths option. And we’re going to drag our rabbit shape. I’m holding Shift as I do so to constrain it to those proportions. Now in any version of Photoshop you can choose Layer New Fill Layer Pattern. Click to accept pattern fill and then you’ll find that it’s filled with the most recently created pattern which is the pattern we just created. If the scale of the pattern is too big, which it is really for me, I want to scale this down to 25 percent. I can just select Scale 25 percent and click Ok. And there is my rabbit filled with my pattern. Now in Photoshop CS6 you can do it a little differently. What we’re going to do is to choose a shape. And in this case we can fill our shape with a pattern. So now let’s grab our rabbit. And you can see that by default this is now created. It’s actually got a stroke on it. I don’t want any stroke. And with my pattern fill I can scale my pattern here in Photoshop CS6. So CS6 just makes it a little easier to do. But you can still do the same process in any version of Photoshop. Now let’s just go back for a minute to our original shape which is this one here. We could do some other things to make it a little bit more plaid like. For example I’m going to add a new layer, drag it to the very top, and I’m going to drag a very small stripe through here. And I’m going to fill it with a slightly darker version of this purple. So this is the foreground color, Alt Backspace, Option Delete. And then I could add another one again through here. This one I’m going to do twice. So I’m going to select the selection I have here and I’m going to Alt drag on it to create a couple of lines. Actually let’s do three. And I’m going to call that my new plaid shape. Having done that lets press Ctrl A to select everything, Edit Define Pattern. This is going to be my new pattern. It’s a little bit off in the spacing but I’m not going to worry too much about that. Let’s turn everything off here. Let’s go and grab a new shape. So for this one we’ll do a flower shape. And again, I’m just going to choose, well let’s go with Photoshop CS6. Let’s grab our pattern there and no stroke and just draw my flower shape holding Shift to constrain it to the shape. And you can see now that we have a more complex pattern fill for our object. We can again scale that down to 50 percent. But you can create plaids any way that you want to, and they’re going to fill any shape in Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. You can find more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more articles on Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator.
Learn how to make colored stripes in Photoshop. This uses a mosaic filter to turn a regular image into blocks of color from which stripes are extracted. Once you’ve done that you can then create a madras check from this stripe image and I’ll show you how to do that too.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create quick and easy stripes in Photoshop. And this is going to work in practically any version of Photoshop. Before we start and I show you exactly how to create this effect let’s have a look and see the kind of effect that we are creating. What I have here is a series of stripes in Photoshop. It’s a document that is full of stripes. And you can see here that I’ve also been able to create this as a sort of plaid look. So we’re going to look at both options here, and we’re going to create this set of stripes from a photograph really, really easily. So let’s just get rid of that document. And let’s go to our starter document. Now you can start with any document at all. I like to choose something that’s in the sort of range of colors that I want to see in my stripes. This is what I got my stripes from. So if you want pink and blue stripes then find an image that has say pink and blue flowers in it, or you could adjust it with a Hue/ Saturation adjustment later on. But we’re going to start with a filter. I’m going to choose Filter and then Pixelate and then Mosaic. And what the Mosaic Filter does is it turns this image into a sort of mosaic look. And what I want is nice big cells because that’s going to give me the stripes that I’m going to use in a minute, and the bigger the cells the less stripes I’m going to have. So I’m going to just choose quite a big value for us for now and just click Ok. And so there are the beginnings of my stripes. And now we’re going to use a tool, probably a tool that you’ve never used before and wondered what it’s purpose was, but this is this tool here. It’s the Single Row Marque Tool. And we’re going to click at the edge of a row because we want to take just one row of this image. And these are going to be the colors that we’re going to use. So I’m looking for something here with some blues and pinks and yellows in it. So let’s just select this one here. So I’ve selected a single row. And I’m going to choose Edit Copy because that’s copied that row. And now let’s create a new document. And I’m going to make it nice and big so let’s say three-and-a-half thousand pixels by three-and-a-half thousand pixels. And it can have white as its background. That’s Ok. I’ll click Ok. I’m going to add a new layer. And I’m going to paste my copied shape into it, Edit Paste. And it’s coming in here in the middle. It’s just such a small line, it’s almost impossible to see. But I’m going to target the Move Tool just by pressing the letter V. And now I’m going to drag it to fill the image because these are my stripes. And when I click the checkmark I now have my stripes. Now I’ve lost a bit of the yellow off the edge. So maybe I can just bring it in here. And I’ve got some slightly thinner stripes. And if I don’t like this color here I could just drag that off the edge and not even use it. So now I’m going to crop my image because I want to crop it to delete the cropped pixels. So I’ll just press Enter to crop it to size. And there is our stripe. So we could create this as a pattern if we wanted to use it over and over again, or if we just want to use it for now then we have it in place. So let’s see how we would make that into a plaid. I’m just going to duplicate this layer because I want to keep my stripes just in case I want to use them again later on. And what I’m going to do is reduce the opacity of this layer to about 60 percent, and then I’m going to duplicate it again. So I’ve got two layers each of about 60 percent opacity. And all I’m going to do is target this top layer, let’s grab the Move Tool, and I’m going to rotate it around 180 degrees. So I’m just going to hold the Shift key as I do that so it’s rotated to exactly the right number of degrees and just click the checkmark here. So now I have this sort of plaid madras sort of stripe pattern. I could change the blend mode if I wanted to by targeting the top layer and change the blend mode to something like Overlay. And that will give me a contrastier look. I could also try Difference or Exclusion. And that’s making a sort of otherwise brown and green pattern turn into a blue sort of pattern. So we have all sorts of options here. Here’s our original stripes garnered from our original photograph. And then what I’ve done is created two copies of it at an angle to each other and 60 percent opacity with a blend mode to create something that’s more like a madras stripe pattern. And this could be copied as a pattern or saved as a pattern by choosing Edit Define Pattern. We could use that as a pattern at any time. Before I create it as a pattern I’m just going to make sure that I’ve got rid of those pixels at the edge. I want it to be exactly square, and that’s not exactly square. But you can see the possibilities of working with stripes and patterns in Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. You can find more of my Illustrator, Photoshop and Lightroom videos on this YouTube channel. And visit projectwoman.com for more blog posts and Photoshop tutorials.
Photoshop CS6 has new tools for working with Paths and Shapes. Learn how to use these and how to turn shapes into paths and how to fill and stroke paths and shapes.
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 we’re going to look at the new vector tools in Photoshop CS6. And we’re going to answer questions like what’s a path, how do I find it, how do I turn a path into a selection, how do I make a path from a selection, and how I can work with the new vector tools.
Photoshop CS6 has some new vector tools and we’re going to have a look at those in this video. And we’re going to work out how you can use those tools to do exactly what you want to do.
Now the Custom Shape tool is in the position it always used to be and it’s sharing a toolbar position with things like the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon and Line tool. And all of these are Path tools. But we’re going to select the Custom Shape because it’s a little bit of an interesting tool.
And here are my Custom Shapes so I can select any of these custom shapes to draw on my space. Now I’m going to choose a filled shape such as this one here and just click it so it is selected. Now I can draw it on my workspace, but the way I draw it depends on what I have chosen here.
And I can choose a shape, a path or pixels, and we’re going to look at the shape and path options. So let’s start with shape. And let’s select some colors for this shape because when you’re working with shapes color is important. Now I have a shape selected I’m just going to drag this flower shape into my workspace.
If I hold the Shift key it’s going to be constrained to the shape of a flower that was originally drawn. If I don’t hold the Shift key you can see that I can make it wide or tall. And if I draw it with the Alt key pressed it’s going to be drawn around my initial starting point. Let’s just let go of that for now and let’s click and drag here to start drawing my flower.
Now if I want it placed around the initial starting point I’m going to press the Alt key and you can see that it jumps back into position. If I add the Shift key I can get it constrained to the right shape. And only when I let go the left mouse button does anything happen.
So what’s happening is I’m getting a filled flower. And we can see up here that the fill is the current foreground color, but it can be changed. While this shape is selected we can select a different fill for it. You can see that blue is now its fill but that’s not the foreground color for our workspace. And you can see that it has no stroke but we can add a stroke if we want to.
So let’s add a pink stroke to this shape. At the moment the Stroke is 3 points but we can increase that so we can make it thicker or thinner. And we can also change the nature of the stroke. For example we could have a dashed stroke or a dotted stroke. And there are other options that we’ll look at in future videos. But this shape is a path, so we can actually make changes to it.
I’m going to grab here the Direct Selection Tool because that allows me to select points on this path. And you can see by dragging over these points I can select anyone of these points. I’m just going to turn the stroke off for the moment because I think it might be easier to see the points without the stroke in the way.
When one of these points is filled and the others are empty this is the one that we’re going to affect. So let’s just drag out on that. And you can see that my shape has now changed shape because I have altered that point. So it is a path that is able to be adjusted. But still we can change the fill. And when we change the fill the fill of the entire shape is affected.
When we add a stroke back onto this the stroke of the entire shape is being affected by our choices. Now there are some other things that we can do with shapes. I’m just going to add a new layer to this image, just put it at the top, and I’m going to fill it with the red.
Now let’s consider the situation where we may want to for example cut out a shape from inside this red selection. So let’s go back and grab our custom shape tool. And we have our same flower shape selected. And I’m going to draw the shape onto my area. And because I was working with a red fill it has a red fill. But let’s just color it green so that we can see it clearly.
Now let’s consider the situation where really what we wanted to do was to create a path from this. Well, we don’t have to undo it and start all over again, particularly if this is a complex shape because what we can do is go to the paths palette. And here is our shape path, and we can do with that anything that we could do with a path originally in Photoshop.
One of the things that we can do is click on it and load that path as a selection. Now if that path is a selection then we can do things with it. For example we could come down to this red filled layer and we could poke a hole in this layer by just pressing Delete. And that will delete the contents of the layer where this selection is made.
One of the other things that we can do, I’m just going to Ctrl Z to undo that, one of the other things that we can do with selections is we can stroke them. So we could choose Edit Stroke and we could stroke this selection with a different color. So let’s stroke it around its inside.
Let’s press Ctrl D to undo the selection, and you can see that now we have a stroked flower because we’ve been able to stroke that selection. I’m just going to undo this again. And let’s go back to our shape up here. I want to just make sure that we just have a red filled layer here and we have our shape up here.
And here it is as a shape. And it can be moved around because it is a shape. So we can move it around the workspace. Let’s go back to the Path’s tool and there’s something else that we can do with shapes. What we can do in addition to loading the path as a selection is that we can stroke it with a brush. But to do this we’re going to have to make a work path out of the shape.
So what I’m going to do is with the shape selected I’m going to choose Edit Copy so I’ve copied the shape onto the clipboard. And now I’m just going back to this layer here and I’m going to do Edit Paste. And look what happens in my Paths palette. This time I have a Work Path. And a work path not only can be turned into a selection and not only can be filled with a foreground color, but I can also stroke it with a brush.
Let’s go and get my Brush and let’s go and get a brush to use. Now I’ve got lots of brushes here, but let’s create something like this particular little leaf brush. And I’ve got it at a fairly small size. I’m hoping that this is going to work just fine here for this particular image.
We’ve got a foreground color so I’m going to click Stroke Path With Brush. And what that does is it applies that brush to the current path. But we need to of course make that into a work path before that’s going to work. Now let’s have a look at how we can turn a selection into a path. Let’s just go and get another filled layer. I’m just going to get rid of everything that I have here right now.
Let’s fill this with white, and then we’ll just get rid of the Work Path as well. So I’m going to press Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac, and I’m going to make up a selection here. So I’m going to make a rectangle, and then I’m going to go and grab the elliptical marque, and with Shift held down I’m going to add to that. So this is now my selection.
Now let’s say I want to make this into a shape that I can use over and over again. Well with the Paths palette open I can create a work path from this selection. So I’m just going to click to Make Work Path From Selection. And now this is a path. Now because it’s a path we can do all sorts of things with it.
For example we can click on it to select it and we can change its points. And we can also do things like turn it back into a selection, stroke it with a brush and fill it, and we can make it a shape. Let’s choose Edit and then Define Custom Shape. And this now becomes a custom shape in my shapes collection. I’m going to call that a Tab shape and just click Ok. Let’s get rid of our Work Path.
And now let’s go back into our shapes collection. So I’m going to click on Custom Shapes. And this time I’m going to make it a shape and I’m going to give it a fill and I’m going to give it a stroke. And let’s go into our shapes collection and let’s go and grab our new custom shape.
And now when I drag it onto the workspace it’s going to behave like any of the custom shapes inside Photoshop. It has this stroke and we can adjust the stroke size. We can adjust the type of stroke that it has. We could fill it with everything that we can fill a regular shape with.
So there’s the basic introduction to some of the new shape and path features of Photoshop CS6. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video. You’ll find more of my video training sessions on my YouTube channel.
Learn how to make dashes and stitches in Photoshop using brushes and then how to paint with them and use them to stroke shapes.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make dash lines and stitches using brushes in Photoshop. And this is going to allow you to not only paint with stitches but also to use these to stroke things. One of the really nice effects that you can achieve in Photoshop is the idea of having dash lines that might show as for example faux stitching on an object. I’m going to show you the basics of doing that now. The first thing I’m going to do is create a really small document. So I’m thinking about 300 x 300 because I want to create my stitches. It’s going to be transparent. Now stitches are a brush so the first thing I’m going to do is go and grab my brush. And I’m going to use a rounded rectangle for this. So I’m just going to select the rounded rectangle tool, and I’m going to draw something that I can use as a stitch. Now I’ve drawn it as a shape. So let’s just undo that and let’s go and draw this as just pixels. It’s a much better option. And I’m just going to call that my brush shape. Now you can get into more detail with your brush shape. What I’m going to do is just show you how you can use this to create stitches. So now that we have this shape I’m just going to Ctrl Click on it so I have a selected. I’m going to make it a brush by choosing Edit Define Brush Preset. I’m just going to call this Stitch and click Ok. And now I can get rid of that document. So now we’re ready to use of the stitches to draw around this shape and perhaps across it as well. So I’m going to select my Brush tool and I’m going to select the very last of my brushes which is my new stitch. And right now it’s not going to do really very much of what I want it to do. But we’re just going to undo that and let’s go and set it up to be a bit more friendly. We’re going to open the Brushes Panel to do this. And this is my brush. And this is the reason why it’s painting the way it is is because that’s the way it’s set up to paint. So I’m going to adjust its spacing so it looks a little bit more like stitches. And I can make them close together or far apart. I can also change the size of them because they’re pretty large right now. But I could make them considerably smaller if I want to. Now I can adjust Shape Dynamics as well. And we’ll just see right now how this brush is going to paint and see if we need to make some changes to it. Now I’m going to add another object to this design. Let’s just add a shape up here. Let’s go and fill it with a darker orange color, Alt Backspace, Option Delete, Ctrl D or Command D to deselect the selection. And now with my brush I’m going to paint with white, and I’m going to paint some white stitches across this shape. So I can either paint with my paintbrush or I can click once up here to start my painting and then Shift Click across the other side so that I get evenly placed stitches, Click once, Shift Click on the other end. Now as you can see the brush is not really following the shape of my painting so I want to change the way that this brush is behaving. But to do that I’m going into shape dynamics. And I’m going to make sure that Size Jitter is disabled because I don’t want it to change size. And I don’t want the diameter to change either so I’m going to remove that. I don’t want the Angle to change so I don’t want it to change as I paint. But I do want it to follow the direction of my brush. And I also do not want any Roundness Jitter. So I’m going to make sure that everything is disabled except that the controls are for the Angle is now following the direction of the brush. And now look how it’s painting. Wherever my brush goes it’s starting to follow that brush. So that’s a lot more of the way I want that brush to be painting. Okay, let’s face the problem of this circle. I’m going to actually just increase the size a little bit for this circle. Let’s turn that off. So now I have my brush selected and I want a stroke around the circle. So let’s just go and get this layer. And I can Ctrl Click on this layer to make a selection but I want a stroke inside the shape. So I’m going to choose Select Transform Selection because that allows me to transform this selection. And provided I now hold Shift and Alt as I drag in I’m going to actually drag in on the shape so that it now becomes a concentric circle inside the original circle. I’m going to click the checkmark here. So now I have a strokeable selection. But I want to stroke it so I’m going to choose Window and then Paths, and I’m going to turn it into a Work Path. And when it’s a Work Path it can be stroked with a brush. And this is the option here. So I have my brush selected, my color, my stitch, and it’s all set up. I’m going to click here to Stroke Path With Brush. And we’re seeing not only the path but also the brush so let’s just trash the path for now. And you can see that I now have a stitching line inside the shape. And because I have the angle correct the stitching line is going around the shape as if that shape were actually stitched. So there you have a way of creating brushes in Photoshop that you can use for stitching. You know how to make straight stitching lines and you know how to make stitching lines that follow your brush. And you also know how to stitch a shape by creating a path and then stroking that path so that you have this really nice effect. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video training session. Look out for more of my video tutorials on my YouTube channel.
Learn how to use Distort filters to create a cool sunburst in Photoshop.
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Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a quick and easy sunburst in Photoshop. To create my sunburst I’m going to start with a new image. I’m going to make mine 3,000 x 3,000 pixels in size so it’s a reasonable size. I’ve yellow selected as my foreground color. I’m just selecting the Rectangular Marquee Tool and just selecting about half of this image and filling it with the foreground column by pressing Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac. I’m going to do Select Inverse so that I have the other half of the image selected. Again, I’ll select white as my foreground color and fill it with that color and then Ctrl or Command D to deselect the selection. So all I have right now is an image where half of it is yellow and half of it is white and it’s all on one layer. To distort it I’m going to start with the Filter Distort Wave, and that’s the first part of my sunburst. I’ll select Square as the type. And now I’m going to set the Wavelength. And you’ll find that the larger you set the Wavelength you get more of these stripes. Don’t worry that they don’t extend yet. What you’re worried about at this stage is the number of them. So I want about that number of stripes. Now I’m going to increase the Amplitude until I get stripes all across my image. So all I’m doing is square, equal values or nearly equal values for Wavelength and then adjusting the Amplitude until I get what I want in this little diagram here in this little preview window. And then I’m just going to click Ok. Before I leave here I’m just going to make sure that I Crop this because what I want is the exact same starting point and ending point. So here I’m starting on an orange stripe and I’m going to end over here on a white stripe. I’m just going to make sure that I have a pretty good crop here because that will make my wraparound work well in the next step. And the next step is to use the Filters again. We’ll choose Filter, and again this Distort option, but we want Polar Coordinates. And all I do is select the Polar to Rectangular or Rectangular to Polar that gives me the effect. If you don’t remember which one to use just flick between the two because it’s going to be really obvious which one gives you your sunburst and which one doesn’t. And obviously Rectangular To Polar is what I want so I’ll just click Ok. And here is my sunburst shape. It really is as easy as that. And I have a silhouette because I love to use silhouettes with sunburst shapes. So let’s just drag and drop a silhouette layer into here and then we can size it to suit. Now you can do all sorts of things with your sunburst effects. We could grunge this. We could texturize it. We could do all sorts of things with it. But to create it is as simple as a layer that is half of one color, half of the other color. Then you’ll Filter Distort, Wave to create a series off stripes, then you’ll Crop it so that you get the beginning of a stripe on one side and the end of the corresponding stripe on the other side. So you get this seamless sort of sunburst effect and you don’t have one really large stripe and then use Filter Distort Polar Coordinates to rotate it around. So there you have a sunburst effect in Photoshop.
