Learn to turn an image into one that looks like it is cut from paper and taped to a page. This effect uses the Quick Selection tool, Stroke Style, a filled layer and commercial brushes.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’ll show you how you can create a hand cut image effect in Photoshop. Before we get started with this tutorial let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for.
I’m going to show you the original image I’m going to be starting with here. And what we’re going to do is isolate the image on its layer. We’re going to add a sort of white border around it so it could be used in various collage projects. And what I’m going to do here is actually show you it on a background here so I’ve got it dragged into a collage project. And so we’re going to see how we can create this sort of white edge look very easily for our images. So first of all let’s tuck this one away. I’m just going to delete those layers before we start and let’s just tuck that away and let’s go back and get our bird image.
Now the first thing that I would do with this particular image is to convert the background layer into a regular layer. So I’m just going to get everything back to what it was. And if this layer here that we’re seeing in front of us were the background layer I would just double click it to convert it into a regular layer. The next thing I’m going to do is to isolate this bird and the pieces that I want. Now I’m using the Quick Select tool because it’s quite a good tool for this and it’s going to make the job go pretty quickly.
So I’m just selecting over the areas of the bird that I want. And if the selection goes too far like it just did there I’m just going to hold the Alt key as I drag over the area that I want to remove from the selection. So I can select over the pieces if I want to add a bit to it. I’m just checking to make sure the bird looks pretty good but this could be edited later on. This effect is actually editable. So if you find that there’s a chunk of the bird missing or there’s a chunk of the background in it that you don’t want to include you can easily get rid of that later on.
So I’m just making a reasonable selection here and then I’m going to add a layer mask to this layer. So I’m just going to click here on the Add Layer Mask icon and that isolates the bird from its background. And you could brush this layer with black or white paint to make the edges smoother or whatever you want to do or you could add more of the bird or subtract it by just painting on this mask. But for now we’re going to assume that the mask is just fine. I’m going to add a new layer by clicking the Add New Layer icon here and I just want to fill it with this blue color.
So with the blue color as the foreground color I’m going to press Alt Backspace, Option Delete. You can see I could do a bit of tidying up in here. I’m going to leave you to do that yourself. With this particular layer selected I’m now going to add a stroke to it. So I’m going to click the Add Layer Style. I’m going to click Stroke. The color stroke I want is white or whatever you were opting as your sort of paper color because we want the idea that this bird has been cut out of a piece of paper.
So you could use an off white if you wanted to. I’m just using plain white. And I’m going to increase the size of this so it looks as if there’s a border edge around the bird and you can make that size whatever you want. It needs to be on the outside. If you put it on the inside you’re just shrinking your bird down and you’re losing detail here. It doesn’t want to be in the center either. You’ll have the same problem. It must be on the outside.
So having done that, I’m just going to click Ok. So essentially that’s my cut out bird and I could just drag and drop him into a collage if I wanted to. But I want to show you quickly how to do that tape effect. I’ve got this installed as a brush and all I did was look for tape as a brush and there are a lot of free commercial brushes that you can use. So here’s my tape brush. I’m just going to use this one. I’m going to make sure that I’m using red because I kind of like using red tape and I’m going to do it on a brand new layer.
So I’m going to size my brush down using the square bracket key and just press three or four times to get that tape effect. Now if I want to use the same piece of tape over and over again I’ve got this brush panel open so I can now rotate the brush so that the tape is where I want it to be. If I just open up the spacing we’ll be able to see what angle it’s going out at and that will allow me to then stick it onto the bird in the angle that I want it to appear at. And I could obviously have of course used a different piece of tape if I wanted to but I’m just doing this very simply and very quickly.
So now that we’ve got our tape let’s go back and get our background, this stripe background that I created, and we’re going to our bird image. I’m going to take the tape layer and the bird layer and just drag and drop them together into my collage. And now I can move it using the Move tool, size it if I want to and it’s now in position on the collage. So that’s how you create a sort of cut out taped on effect in Photoshop very easily using a stroke.
I’m Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel. Please consider subscribing to my channel and visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.
Learn to add vignettes to your photos in Photoshop using three different methods. One uses a Inner Glow style, one a filled and blurred layer and the third the Lens Correction filter.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create vignettes in Photoshop in three different ways. Before we get started with this tutorial let’s have a look and see what a vignette is so that we can understand what it is that we’re aiming for.
This image has a vignette. It’s a darkening around the edges of the image. If I turn this layer off you can see the original image and now there is this darkening edge. And that’s the vignette that we’re going to create. And I’m going to tuck that image away for now and let’s go and get the original image and we’ll create that same vignette style. To do this, first of all I’m going to add a new layer to the image so I’ll click on the Add New Layer icon at the foot of the layers palette. I’m going to target the Rectangular Marquee tool and I’m going to drag in here to create a marquee just inside the edge of the image because this area is going to be my vignette.
Because I have selected the middle of the image I need to invert my selection with Select Inverse and that inverts the selection so just this edge is selected. I’ll now grab a color from my image. I’ve used the Eyedropper tool here and I’m just going to grab a brown color from my image as my foreground color. And now I’m going to fill the edge here with that color by pressing Alt Backspace on the PC or Option Delete on the Mac. Now I’m going to choose Select, Deselect because I’m about to blur the edges of this and I need to get rid of the selection before I do or else I won’t be able to blur it correctly.
With this layer selected I’ll choose Filter, Blur and I’m going to choose Gaussian Blur because that gives me a nice blurred edge. I’m going to wind up the blur until it’s nice and soft and so you can do this as much or as little as you like. I’ll click Ok. Now to get this effect on the image rather than being painted on like this to blend it in I’m going to set the blend mode to multiply. And that multiplies the edges. It darkens it all around the edges where the image is darker and it’s not quite so dark where the image is lighter. And now I’m just going to adjust the opacity until I get a pleasant darkening of the image.
Now if I wanted to I could go one step further with this and I could with this layer still selected choose Edit and then Transform and then Warp and this would allow me to warp this layer. So for example I could pull it away from the edges but leave it more definite in the corners. So you might want to try something like that if you’re using this particular effect. It can’t be done with all other effects. So there’s one of the vignette possibilities. Let’s go and get a second version of our image and we’ll try another vignette. This time I’m going to choose Filter and I’m going to choose the Lens Correction filter.
The Lens Correction filter has two panels. I’m going to click Custom because what I want to do is to add a vignette and I’m going to drag towards the darken side so that you can see that the edges of the image are being darkened. And when I have the vignette that I want here I’ll just click Ok. So now I’m going to wind this back so that you can see the effect. That’s the original and this is the vignetted version, before and after. For this final vignette we’re going to use a style. This layer has been converted from a background layer into a regular layer so I’m going to click the Effects or Style button and we’re going to add an inner glow to the image.
Now a glow can be something light but it can also be something very dark. So I’m going to click here and we’re going to choose a really dark color for our glow. So I’m looking for a sort of brown color here to use. Let’s click on that. Because I want it to be darker I need to use a different blend mode than screen because screen will always be lighter. So I’m going to use multiply and I’m going to increase the size of this quite a bit so it comes in around the edges of the image. And you can see it in place here.
And now I can adjust down the opacity if I don’t want it to be quite as dark and here I can work on the choke and I can also change the contour. So for example you can get different effects by choosing different contours here. You get a different effect again by choosing one of the ones that is looped inwards rather than bent outwards. And once I’ve got the vignette effect that I’m looking for I can just close this dialog. Now one of the things about a vignette done this way is that it’s able to be saved. For example we could save this and call it vignette and then in future we could add it to an image by adding that vignette style to it.
So I’ve just dropped the style off but let’s select this layer and now let’s choose Window and then Styles and this opens up the styles panel. This is our vignette style. We can just click to apply it to that image. So that is a very reusable vignette created using a style. So you can create vignettes using styles. You can create them using filled layers that are blurred or you can create them using the Lens Correction tool in Photoshop.
I’m Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel. Please if you liked the video consider subscribing to this YouTube channel. And visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.
Learn three things about using Filters in Photoshop – including how to control the colors used (and why sometimes the colors look horrible), how to combine and reorder filters and how to add them so you have maximum flexibility when using them.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to look at three things that you need to know about using filters in Photoshop. In this video I’m going to cover some of the important things that you need to know about filters.
And the first one is that what you have selected as the foreground and background color is critical when you’re using filters. Now I’m going to convert this layer into a Smart Object layer. So I’m going to choose Filter > Convert for Smart Filters and that makes this a Smart Object so that the filters will be editable.
If you’re using Photoshop CS4 or later you’ll want to do this. Now I’m going to choose Filter > Filter Gallery and notice that my foreground and background colors are sort of a lime green a bright pink. And they’re exactly the same colors that are being applied here with this halftone pattern filter.
Now you might come into this filter dialog and take one look at this result and say well this is not for me. Well the reason why it’s probably not for you is that you’ve got selected these foreground and background colors and if you weren’t using those colors then this halftone filter wouldn’t look like this.
Let’s just click Cancel to exit out of here and I’m going to press the D key which sets the default foreground and background color. Now let’s go back into the filter gallery and you can see that the halftone pattern looks very different this time.
It’s black and white. And it’s black and white because of this black and white here. Now again if I exit this dialog and if we switch black and white around and I go back into the filter gallery you’ll see that we’re getting this sort of negative look on our image. Because white is now the foreground color we’re getting the effect of a digital negative with a halftone on it.
So you can see how critical it is that you’re using these colors as black and white with the darker color in the foreground before you go into the filters if you want a sort of standard filter effect. So I’m just going to make this sort of a brown color so that I can use brown and white and I’m going into Filter and then Filter Gallery.
And now we’ve got a brown and white sort of color halftone effect. So that’s the first trick in Photoshop, always make sure that you have the correct foreground and background colors selected. And if things look funky in here then just exit the dialog and start again. Now this is not going to be the case for most of these effects.
The artistic effects for example do not generally rely on those colors the foreground and background color so you’ll probably find that most of these work just fine. For example sponge is working just fine. With brush strokes you might find that the colors are being used but you can always test this to make sure by choosing some really, really bright colors and see if you see these colors in the resulting filter.
If you do see the colors then you can say to yourself well yes these colors are being used by the filter and if I don’t like the effect then I’m going to need to exit this filter gallery and go and do something about it. You can see that the diffuse glow filter is using the background color, the pink that we have selected as a background color. Again, glass knot, ocean ripple knot, all the sketch filters, pretty much all of them use these foreground and background colors.
Chrome is an exception to that but all the others are using it. Water paper is different, again glowing edges will be different. The texture filters probably aren’t going to use these colors but certainly all of these sketch ones are. Now the other thing to be aware of here is that you can add multiple filters.
So for example I’m just going to set up this filter pretty much the way I want it to look on this image. I just probably want the size to be a bit smaller. But having done that to the image I can now click here on this New Effect Layer option and I can add a second effect. So for example I could go and put some sort of painterly effect over the top of this, for example accented edges. And this is accented edges over a halftone pattern filter.
But if I reverse these I may find that the result is quite different and it is in this combination. If I do the halftone first and accented edges second the entire result looks very different. So working these filters out the ones that you want to use and the order in which you want to use them is critical.
To turn a filter off deselect its eyeball here and that just turns its effect off in the image. You can add new effects layers, new filter layers by clicking New Effect Layer and if you to remove an effect layer just click it, for example accented edges, and click the Delete button and it’s now been removed. I’m just going to go back and put accented edges in and click Ok.
Now because of the way I set this up with Smart Filters there’s one option here for the filter gallery. When I open it I can then change both of these filters. It is also possible to create separate filters. So while this object has been created for Smart Filters I’m just going to trash my filters and let’s go back and put them in one at a time.
So first of all I’m going to go in and add my accented edges. So I’m going to remove the halftone filter. So I’m just going to click that and click Ok. And now I’m going to add a second filter. This one’s not going to be accented edges. This is going to be my halftone pattern. And then I’ll click Ok.
You’ll notice that what we’re seeing is pretty much the halftone filter. This is the halftone filter on top and this is the accented edges underneath. Now in this case these two filters can be dragged around inside the layer palette to reverse the order. So I get a bit more flexibility here if I add the filters separately because in this case I can drag to reorder them outside of the filter gallery.
I don’t have to go back into the filter gallery to edit them and I can also disable a filter if I want to by deselecting its eyeball here. So that’s another thing to consider when you’re applying filters to images inside Photoshop. Before we finish up let’s have a look at another reason why I like to add my filters one at a time and then reorder them as required.
At the moment we have green and pink selected as our foreground and background colors but I’m going to press the letter D to change these around so that they’re now the default colors. I have my image selected and I’m going back into the filter gallery. And this time I’m going to choose a different sort of filter effect.
I’m actually going to choose a sketch filter because I want to make use of the black and white. So I’m thinking graphic pen will probably be a good choice here so I’ll just click Ok. And now this is the filter that we’ve just applied and it’s been applied on top of the other filters. Now I can click here to change the blending on this filter and instead of normal I’m going to choose multiple so I get this darkening effect on the image.
But you’ll notice that this filter is using the black and white colors and these other two filters are using the original pink and green. And if I go in and try and edit this filter by double clicking on it you can see that we’re working with the pink and green filter. I’m working on accented edges. Although I’m seeing the halftone dots it’s the accented edges filter that I’m making changes to while I’m in here.
And I can change the edge brightness and the smoothness. I’ll click Ok. And now I want to have a look at the halftone filter and that’s this one here. I’m going to double click on it to open it. This time we’re looking at the halftone pattern filter and any changes that we’re making are to that pattern filter only.
So I’m going to make it a little bit larger size dots and click Ok. And you can see the result in the image. Halftone pattern filter, accented edges filter, both of these were they using a foreground and background color are using the original pink and green because that was the color combination when we applied those filters.
This filter is the brush strokes on the top and it’s black and white because when we applied this filter we were applying it using the then current black and white colors. So you can see that there’s really a lot more to filters in Photoshop than may first meet the eye.
I’m Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this YouTube video. Look out for more videos on this YouTube channel.
Subscribe to my channel and visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.
Learn how to make bracket frames in Photoshop, how to save them as shapes and how to use them over and over again. This process is guaranteed to be fool proof! It is easy, repeatable and doesn’t need a wealth of Photoshop skills. The frames can be used for digi scrapping as well as for displaying photos – pretty much whatever you want to do with them, you can.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make bracket frames very quickly and very easily in Photoshop.
Before we get started with this tutorial let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for and I’m going to show you how you can create this sort of bracket frame in Photoshop.
And I’m also going to show you then how you can fill it and add a background so you could get this kind of effect.
I’m going to tuck this one away for now and let’s start with a brand new image.
I’m choosing File, New and my image is going to be 1,200 pixels by 1,200.
I think if you start with an image this size you’re going to find that it’s a workable solution.
So I’ll click Ok.
Now we’re going to use some guides so I’m going to choose View and then New Guide.
And I need a number of guides and they need to be 200 pixels in from the edges.
So I want a horizontal one at 200 pixels.
I want another new guide at 1,300 pixels because that’s 200 in from the other edge.
Now I’m going to choose New Guide and do some verticals exactly the same values, one at 200 pixels and one at 1,000.
So this is going to help us align everything.
I’m now going to choose the Text tool and I’ve got a really large font size or I’m going to select a really large font size about 400 points which is really quite big.
I’m going to click here and I’m going to type a curly bracket and that’s just a curly bracket shape.
Now we can’t see it because it’s white on white so let’s just go and get a color for it right now.
Now this is an extremely unattractive for my purposes here curly bracket so let’s just select it and let’s find a nicer type.
So I’m just going to run through my typefaces until I find a curly bracket that I think is attractive.
I want it to have a fairly short start and something pointy or nice and curvy so that we can actually use it.
And it would be nice if it was sort of balanced.
I think this one might actually make quite a good frame so let’s settle for this one.
Having created it the next thing I’m going to do is this is the text layer, I’m going to right click it and I’m going to convert this to a shape.
So this character is now a shape.
And I’m going to select the Move tool and I’m going to hold the Shift key as I do because I want to constrain this so that it is created at a very large size and so it doesn’t lose its nice curviness.
And so I’m going to just make sure that it lines perfectly with these guides that I’ve created.
And because I’ve got smart guides turned on you can do this by choosing View and then Show and then Smart Guides you’ll see that you’ll see actually little red lines when everything is lined up.
So now that it’s lined up to the guides that I’ve created these two at the top and the bottom, now I’m going to drag it out and align it perfectly to this other guide here as well.
So I’m looking for nice little red lines to appear telling me that it’s lined up in this box here absolutely perfectly.
I’m not totally convinced right now.
Let’s just make sure that it is, okay.
So once it’s in position I’m going to hit the checkmark here.
You can see that it’s extending a bit beyond the edge of the image.
I’m not a slight bit worried about that.
All I need to do is to choose Image and then Reveal All and we can see its edge.
So now that we’ve got one in place the rest of it is really easy.
I’m going to drag this layer down onto the New Layer icon so I now have two.
I’m going to make sure that I target this layer and that I have the Move tool selected, I’m going to choose Edit and then Transform Path and I’m just going to flip this horizontally.
And what that does is create a mirror image of my shape.
Now provided I select the shape that I want to move and start moving it, if I hold the Shift key it will be constrained so it can only be moved in a horizontal direction.
So it’s going to line up perfectly to these guides here and all I need to worry about is that it lines up with this guide here that I’ve created.
And again, I’m just going to choose Image, Reveal All so that we can see both sides of this.
Now I’m going to select both these layers and I’m going to drag the selected layers onto the New Layer icon so that I’ve got another set of these braces.
And I’m going to link these.
I’m going to right click and choose Link Layers because I want these two to travel together.
And what I’m going to do with them is simply rotate them through 90 degrees.
So I’m going to make sure that I have them selected and that I have the Move tool selected and I’m just going to rotate these around 90 degrees and so they’re going to move exactly into position.
And I’m going to click the checkmark here to accept that and again, Image, Reveal All so that I can see the image.
Now I’m going to unlink these layers by clicking them and click Unlink Layers.
And the reason why I want to unlink them is that I want to now move each one of these layers independently of the other.
So I’m going to select this one first and I’m just going to use the arrow keys to nudge it in because I want to join up these gaps.
And I’m going to nudge it in and I’m going to count as I go.
Now I nudged that 20 times.
This one’s got a much bigger gap than I normally see so I’m going to have to do that 20 times for each of these.
And I’m going to continue all the way around.
And then I’m going to continue and do it again.
I’m moving the edge ones inwards and the top ones down.
Now you can see that some of these are coming in more quickly than others.
I’m not really worried about that because you’re not going to see it later on if it’s slightly off skew.
I’m just going to bring this one down a bit too.
I just want to join it up so that the edges are pretty even all the way around and some of them are going to join up in different ways.
It’s going to depend on the curly braces that you’re using.
I’m going to press Ctrl semicolon to turn off the guidelines now.
And this basically is my new curly bracket shape.
But of course I want to save it as a shape so that I can reuse it.
So I’m going to click on the topmost layer and then click on the bottommost of these four shape layers.
I’m going to right click and I’m going to choose Merge Shapes because what that does is it merges these into a single shape so they can be sized and moved and dealt with as a single shape.
And now so that I can use it later on as a shape I’m going to choose Edit and then Define Custom Shape.
And I’m going to call this bracket shape and click Ok.
And now of course we’ve created this bracket we can just discard that shape, that image.
We don’t need it any longer.
So I’m going to choose File, New and let’s create a brand new image.
Now we’re going to find this custom shape in our shapes collection so we’ll click here on the Custom Shape tool.
It shares a toolbar position with the Rectangle tool and a number of others.
But it’s the Custom Shape that we want.
And I’m going to go to the very bottom of my list because this very last one is the bracket shape that we just created.
You can see that I’ve created a few others using different fonts.
Now that I’ve got my shape I’m going to hold the Shift key as I draw it out on this image.
And you can see it’s coming in as a new shape layer because I had it designated as a shape.
In earlier versions of Photoshop you won’t have this dropdown list but you’ll be able to select the shape from the toolbar.
So now that I’ve got my shape let’s have a look and see how we would create some of the other effects that were around that original shape.
The first thing I’m going to do is add a background.
And I have already created a very simple pattern so I’m going to choose Edit, Fill and I have a pattern fill that I’m going to fill the background layer with.
And it’s just a little blue strip pattern.
But I don’t want it to be blue so I’m going to choose Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation and I’m going to adjust the layer so that it’s a color that works a little bit better with the shape color that I’m using.
So I’m just going to select that and click Ok.
Now I can of course go back to my shape and change the fill color for it.
So I might make it a little less obvious of a pink.
So I’ll select that.
I’m also going to add a stroke to it so I’m going to choose a white stroke or a creamy short of stroke and I’m going to make it a dot stroke.
So we can now see that we’ve got a dot stroke here.
Now I want the middle of this pattern to be a different color again.
And this is the important to see how you can actually create a fill for this shape so that it blocks out the background behind it.
To do that I’m going to take the shape layer and drop it on the New Layer icon so I have a duplicate.
And I’m going to right click and I’m going to rasterize this top layer.
So it’s now a raster layer.
Because it’s a raster layer I can now use the Magic Wand tool and I’ll click just outside the frame so that I select all the area around this shape.
And then I’m going to choose Select Inverse so that I’ve got the entire area of the shape selected.
And because I want to just miss the edge of this shape I’m going to bring this selection in 2 or 3 pixels.
So I’m going to choose Select, Modify, Contract.
I’m just going to bring it in a couple of pixels to make sure that I’m well clear of the border.
And now that I am clear of the border I’m going to select a color here, a sort of orangey yellow color and I’m going to fill my selection with this sort of yellowy orange.
But I don’t want to fill the layer that has the pink on it so I’m going to create a brand new layer and fill that.
So Alt, Backspace, Option, Delete and I’ll press Ctrl D to deselect the selection.
Now I’m going to get rid of the shape copy because I only needed that to create my fill and now I’m going to drag this below the frame and above the background.
And when I do we end up with the final effect that we saw in the original image.
So this was the original image that I created.
And the only real difference between these two is the style of bracket that I used to create the bracket edge.
So I’ve chosen a rather plain one here but in this case I chose a very fancy one.
But the process is identical to create these frames.
And once you get used to it you’ll be able to create these very quickly and very easily.
And this gives you the ability to create your own frames at any time to your own specifications.
I’m Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more tutorials on my website at projectwoman.com where you’ll find tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and a whole lot more.
And please subscribe to my YouTube channel so that you’ll be notified when new videos are released.
See how to turn simple shapes in Photoshop into ornate circles. The process is simple and you can source the elements to use from the web as free shapes – I tell you where to get them from.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make circular ornaments in Photoshop.
Before we get started with this tutorial let’s have a look and see what we’re aiming for.
This is one of the floral ornament shapes that I’ve created and I’m going to show you how you can create this quickly and easily in Photoshop.
And I’m using Photoshop CS6 for this technique.
If you’re using an earlier version you may need to adapt parts of the tutorial but you can still do it.
So let’s just close this down and let’s create a new document, File, New.
And it doesn’t really matter too much.
I’ve just got a 600 x 600 RGB document with a white background.
You can create pretty much anything.
Now before we actually start making our shapes we’re going to need to find some things to make them with and what I’ve done is I’ve located some places on the web that you can get these from.
So I’m going to this particular site here which is all-free-download.com.
It’s all-free-download.com.
And if you go searching for vector floral clipart you’ll be able to find this file here.
And this is the one that I’ve used so you just click it and then go ahead and download it.
And once you’ve downloaded it you can open it.
And I’ve got it open here now in Windows Explorer and I’ve actually gone ahead and extracted all the files.
And in this particular file there’s a floral clipart AI which is an Illustrator file and there’s also a CSH file.
And the CSH file is a Photoshop one so you can use that.
And what I did was I put the shapes in Photoshop’s shapes collection.
So I’m going to show you how you can do that now.
I’m just going to size the Photoshop screen down so that I can see the Photoshop screen as well as my Windows Explorer screen here.
And I’m going to grab the tools and I want the Shapes tool because I want the Shapes panel here.
So I’m going to open this up here and click this icon here which opens up the Shapes fly out menu.
And I’m going to choose Load Shapes because when I do that Photoshop takes me to the custom shapes location.
So this is where it expects the custom shapes to be.
So what I’m going to do is show here my Windows Explorer folder and I’m just going to drag and drop floral clipart into here.
In fact I’ve already done it.
You can see it’s here so I’m not going to drag it in a second time.
But you would drag the floral clipart CSH or the shapes file which is a Photoshop file into this custom shapes folder.
And when you do the custom shapes are now available inside Photoshop.
So you can close everything down.
I’ll just close this for now.
Okay, let’s go back to our document untitled2.
I’m going to make this screen, Photoshop screen, the full screen size.
So now we’re ready to go to our shapes.
I’m going to click here.
This is the Shapes collection.
Usually you’ll see the Rectangle tool but we’re actually going for the Custom Shape tool.
And because my image is 600 x 600 in size I’m going to put a couple of guides in here.
So I’m going to choose View, New Guide and I’m going to put a vertical one at 300 pixels, that’s 300 px, and click Ok.
And I’m going to go ahead and put a horizontal one in, click Horizontal, type 300 px and click Ok.
So now I have my center point marked and that’s just going to make things a whole lot easier in a minute.
So I’m going to create a new layer by just clicking the Create New layer icon here at the foot of the Layers palette because I want to work on an empty layer.
Now I used Kuler a little bit earlier to get my color scheme and I have a video on using Kuler in Photoshop that you may want to look at on this YouTube channel.
But basically what I did was I went to Window Extensions, Kuler and I launched Kuler.
Well, that’s just hidden it, hasn’t it.
So here’s Kuler and I went looking for flowers and I searched for flowers and I located a flower color scheme that I really like.
So I just clicked here and choose Add to Swatches Panel.
And here are the flower colors added to my Swatches panel so I thought we’d choose a different color flower this time.
So I can just tuck Kuler away because I don’t need it anymore.
I do need my Layers panel.
I do need my tools and I will like my swatches to be open.
So with the custom shape selected I’m going to go and first show you how you would add these shapes in because I’ve already done that.
But you’ll click the fly out menu and you should see your shapes in here.
They should be listed.
If they’re not then you can click Load Shapes and go and load the floral clipart shapes and click Load and then they’ll be loaded into your panel.
So they’ll be here.
Now I’ve got two sets of them but that doesn’t matter too much.
Now the first thing I’m going to do is choose one of these shapes to work with and the ones that I worked with were the fairly small ones, things like this or this that had sort of nice floral elements.
But they were fairly simple.
So I think we’re going to start with something a little bit more complex this time.
So let’s select this one.
I’m just going to click it.
And on the toolbar here I want to be working in shapes so I want this to be shape not path or pixels.
In earlier versions of Photoshop you will need to select an icon here.
It won’t be on a dropdown menu and you won’t have these features here for fill and stroke.
But you’ll be able to select the fill color and I don’t want a stroke on this at all.
But I do want a fill color and I’m going to select one of my floral colors that I used or grabbed from Kuler.
So now I’m going to make a blue shape with no stroke and I’m just going to draw it out here.
And I’m going to hold the Shift key so it’s constrained to its original proportions.
I’m just going to let go.
So you can see now I have this shape on a new layer and it’s just a blue shape.
I’m going to drag it into position.
Now I think in actual fact that I would like the bigger end on the outside so I’m going to drop it down here because that means that this bigger end is going to be on the outside of the circle as I work.
And now I’m going to press Ctrl or Command T because this gives me my Transform tools.
And what I want to do first of all is find this little marker that’s in the very, very center of the image.
And I’m going to drag it around and I’m going to pop it just right over the middle the image.
And then I’m going to set this option here this angle option to how many degrees I want to transform this image in.
And there is 360 degrees in a circle so we need something that will divide into 360 equally.
So for example if we want 10 shapes around it we could do 36 degrees.
Numbers like 30, 60, 45, 10 are good values.
I’m going to choose 30.
So I’m going to type in 30 here and you can see that the shape has started to rotate.
And I’m going to click the checkbox.
So it’s started its rotation and to complete the rotation all the way around the circle I’m going to hold Ctrl and Shift and Alt all at the same time.
So I’m going to press Ctrl, Shift, Alt on the Mac, that would be Command, Shift, Option and then the letter T for Transform.
And every time I press the letter T because I have Ctrl, Shift and Alt held down you can see that it’s adding another shape.
So all I have to do is to press the letter T enough times that my shapes creates an entire circle.
And here is my shape here.
Now you can leave it as a shape layer if you want to.
You can resize it if you want to by holding Shift and Alt as you drag in or out on the handles.
I’m going to drag mine out a little bit.
I think this is going to be the larger of the shapes and I’m going to click the checkmark to confirm it.
Now so that my computer doesn’t get stressed out with having such a large shape I’m going to rasterize this.
So I’m going to right click and just rasterize the layer.
But you could leave yours as shapes if you wanted to.
Now I’m just going to click Create a New Layer.
And we’re just going to repeat this over and over again.
So I’m going to choose my Shape tool, my Custom Shape tool.
I’m going to choose a different shape this time.
So I’m looking for something interesting that will complement the shape that I have here.
And last time I used this shape as my final shape so I think I’m going to do that again.
So we’ll wait for a minute before we use that.
But let’s go and get this one that’s sort of like a leaf shape.
I’ll click on it.
And now on a new layer I’m going to turn this layer off for a minute so that I can see what I’m doing here.
I’ve got no stroke.
I’m going to change my fill this time to a green color and I’m going to just drag out my leaf shape.
I’m going to hold the Shift key so it’s constrained to its original size and dimensions and I’m going to position it pretty much over the center of the image.
And I’m doing that by holding the Spacebar down as I drag it into position.
And now I’ve got my green shape.
I’m going to select the Move tool so I can now rotate it and press Ctrl or Command T.
I’m going to drag this little indicator into the very middle of the intersection where those two gridlines are.
So I’m going to rotate around that location and I’m going to select the amount of rotation.
And I’m going to use 30 degrees again so I’ll type 30 and then I’m going to press the checkmark here to accept that transformation.
Now I’ll press Ctrl, Alt, Shift T to repeat that transformation and copy that shape.
And I’m going to do that until I get all the way around the circle.
So this is my second shape and if I click to show my first shape I can see the two shapes as they’re interacting.
I think I want to change the size of my top shape so I’m going to select that layer and with Shift and Alt held down I’m going to size it so that it appears as a much smaller shape here.
And I many also want to rotate it for example because I initially set 30 degrees as my rotation.
If I rotate this through 15 degrees it’s going to be slightly offset.
And I think that will be a good choice here.
So now let’s go ahead and make a third shape, again creating a brand new layer, selecting the Custom Shape tool and this time I’m going to go for this sort of filler shape.
I think this one here is going to be a good choice although this leaf could be used as well.
I’m going to select it and select a different color to use.
This time I think I’m going to choose this very light green color.
I’m on a new layer.
I’m going to drag out my shape.
I’m going to hold the Spacebar to move it into position and perhaps even hold the Shift key so that it’s constrained to its original proportions the way it was drawn originally.
And then I’m going to let go the Mouse button and then let go the Shift key so that it is now drawn on this new layer.
Now this is really quite a big element so I’m not going to need to have too many of them.
I’m just going to use the Move tool to line it up very neatly here.
I’m going to press Ctrl or Command T to get into free transform mode.
I’m going to move its little indicator all the way down to the middle here so that it is going to rotate around the circle and this time I only want a small number.
So if I rotate it through 90 degrees I’m going to get four of these shapes on the screen.
And that will be plenty.
I’m going to press the checkmark here to confirm this transformation and then let’s go back and press Ctrl, Alt, Shift T to make the additional shapes.
I’m going to press that three times so that we get this finished shape.
Now I’m thinking this particular shape might look better with a border on it so I’m going back to the Shape tools and this time I’m going to select a stroke.
And I’m going to add a lighter green stroke around it.
I’m going to make it a single line stroke and I’m just going to make sure that the size of the stroke is correct or sufficient for my needs.
I’m thinking probably about a 2 point stroke will be nice.
And I’m going to again make this into a rasterized layer by right clicking and choose Rasterize Layer.
And so there’s my additional shape.
I’m now going to drag on my greenery layer and move it on top of the original layer and I can also resize this layer if I want to make it smaller or larger or even moving it behind everything else.
Now one of the things that you can do then is to make the background layer a different color such as black.
I’ve selected the background layer and I’m pressing Alt Backspace to fill it with black.
I can also add effects to these layers.
Let’s go to this greenery layer and let’s add an outer glow.
So I’m choosing the Add Layer Style icon here and I’m going to add an outer glow.
At the moment it’s a white glow.
So I’m just going to increase its spread a little bit.
You can see it’s some dimension and a little bit of a glowing effect here.
And then let’s go and get a green color from the underlying image and use that as our glow.
Now we may not want it to be quite as feathered and we may just want it to a more harsh sort of glow which is quite possible and just click Ok.
And then we can do the same for this shape here and we could add a glow to it, again, Outer Glow.
Again, I’m going to sample a color.
I’m actually going to sample this blue color and then use something in that sort of same color range perhaps a bluey green for my outer glow.
I’m going to increase the spread and also soften it up a little bit so it really looks like a glow.
Perhaps we could use a different blend mode such as lighten or we could play with overlay or color dodge.
Some of these will work and some of them may not.
But you can certainly experiment with how these interact with not only the black layer but also the green sort of colored layer below.
And I’ll click Ok and then I’m going to press Ctrl and the semicolon to turn off the gridlines.
Now this shape is very different from the shape we saw earlier.
It’s created in exactly the same way but you can see the color scheme and the actual elements that I used to create these shapes are quite different.
But I’ve got two very interesting shapes that I could now use as backgrounds or elements in a collage or for some other purpose.
It’s very easy to create these rotated shapes and lots of fun.
I’m Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more tutorials on this YouTube channel and follow me at projectwoman.com where my blogs include tips and tricks on Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, Photoshop Elements and a whole lot more.
Editing your Image: Make your Image look as it did in you Camera
You may find that the Lightroom previews look different to those you’re used to seeing when you view the image in your camera.
To make them closer to the camera version, select the Camera Calibration panel in the Develop module and from the Profile list choose Camera Standard – this better matches more closely the image you saw on the back of your camera.
These profiles are a starting point for further adjusting your image so choose the one which works best for you.
Learn how to download and install free fractal tree brushes and a texture and see how to use these to create your own Photoshop art.
Covers how to install brushes in Photoshop. How to add new layers, how to use masks and a gradient fill. Also shows how to add a drop shadow and an outer glow layer style. The land is created using a filled shape and made more organic using the Warp transform feature.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can download and install the fractal tree brushes from projectwoman.com and how you can use them to make art in Photoshop.
Before we get started with this project let’s look and see what we’re going to do.
We’re going to create an image that’s something like this.
It uses one of the fractal tree brushes and also uses part of the brush to create a sort of highlight effect that is the result of the sun going down.
So we’re going to add our tree and then we’re going to make this sort of background look with this blue fill background and we’re going to use the texture that we’ve downloaded.
So I’m going to show you how you can put it all together using the brushes and a texture file.
I’m just going to tuck this away for now and let’s have a look and see where we’re going to get the bits and pieces that we need.
Well first of all we’re going to flicker to some images that are offered by a gentleman called Skeletal Mess and we’re going to download this image.
And it’s in his 2009 texture of the day.
So here it is, texture of the day 2009, and this is the one that you want.
So just click on it, from Actions choose View All Sizes and then you can just go and download the largest size of this image or the original.
It doesn’t really matter too much.
I’m just going to work on the larger size one for now.
So I’m going to open the folder that it has been stored in and its here.
And I’m just going to open it in Photoshop so I’m going to right click and I’m going to open with Photoshop CS6.
Well it’s not in the list there so I’m just going to go and grab Photoshop and we’ll just drag and drop it in there.
Okay, so the image is now in Photoshop and now we need to get our brushes.
And they’re available on my website so that is at projectwoman.com.
So you’re going to projectworman.com and click here on the Free Photoshop Brushes option and just scroll down because the ones we’re looking for here are the rendered fractural tree brush set.
So click on that and then click here to download the brush set and that’s going to download to your Download folder.
And what you’ll do then is just double click on the file so that you can locate and expand the fractal tree brushes file.
And you need this in Photoshop so again I’m going to tuck this just out of the way for now and open Photoshop because there’s a quick and easy way of installing brushes in Photoshop that I want to show you.
So the way I install brushes in Photoshop is to first go and get the brushes option here.
So I click on Brushes and I’ll choose the brush dropdown list here and then click here and go to Save Brushes.
And what that does is it shows me the folder where Photoshop brushes are saved and you can see here that it’s a long string of folders that you need to go through.
But it’s easier if you just open this up in Photoshop and then what you’ll do is you’re go and get your file, your brushes file that you downloaded and then just drag and drop it.
Now my machine is playing games with me right now so I’m just going to make Photoshop a little bit smaller and bring up my brushes file at the same time which is hiding all the way around here.
So let’s just go and get the brushes again and we’re going to open this up.
I’m going to go to Save Brushes.
So I open this folder.
Here are my fractal tree brushes and I’m just going to drag and drop them in there.
So that’s done now.
The brushes are installed where Photoshop can find them.
So what I need to do now with my brushes palette is to go and open that set of fractal tree brushes.
So here are the fractal tree brushes and when Photoshop asks me if I want to replace the current brushes, cancel or append I’m just going to select append because that’s going to add them to the very end of my brushes collection.
Now, I’ve added them twice but they’re here now.
So we’re ready to get started and create the effect that we had on this image here.
So any time that we work with an image like this we’ll want to be working on a new layer to paint our tree so I’m going to add a new layer.
I’m going to go and get my tree.
I’m just going to choose a tree to use.
I think this one this time.
I’m going to size it up using the open square bracket key and I’m going to select black.
So I want to be looking at my swatches.
So I’m going to select black as my foreground color and let’s also go and get our tools so that we can see what we’re doing here.
So I’m going to paint with black on this layer and I’ll probably press it a couple of times in the same place so I make sure I get a really dark tree there.
Now what I’d like behind the tree is some sort of a sort of land mass if you like so I’m going to select the Rectangular Marquee tool here and on a brand new layer I’m just going to drag out a rectangle behind the tree.
I’ve add a new layer below.
And I’m going to select a sort of dark reddish color as my foreground color.
That’s a sort of maroon.
Let’s go a bit more for dark red.
And I’m going to fill that layer with this.
Since it’s my foreground color I can press Alt Backspace, Option Delete to fill that layer.
To blend it in I’m just going to use the multiply blend mode because that gives me a darker sort of effect.
Now this is probably not dark enough for me so I’m just going to open the color up and let’s select a much darker version and again Alt Backspace, Option Delete.
So now I’ve pressed Command D to deselect the selection.
Now the land mass is a little bit too regular for me so I’m going to Ctrl Click on this layer and choose Edit and then Transform and then Warp because warp allows me to create a sort of a bit more organic land mass.
So I’m just going to do that very, very simple, not very much happening there at all.
Now we need our setting sun so again a new layer.
I’m going to select a sort of lighter color.
Let’s go for a sort of lighter orange color.
I’m going to use the Elliptical Marquee tool and drag a circle by holding the Shift key to constrain the ellipse to a circle.
I want to move it into position so I’m going to hold the Spacebar as I move the circle down into position, let go of the Left Mouse button and then let go the Spacebar and the Shift key.
Again, this orange is my foreground color so Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac will fill the shape with this orange color.
Again, I think it’s way too light so I’m just going to redo that with a darker color.
Now I want my sun to be behind my land mass so I’m just going to drag on the sun layer and move it behind the land mass layer.
Now I think I’ll blend my sun in a little bit so I’ll probably select multiply as the blend mode to darken it.
And I also want to add a slight glow around the edge so I’m going to select the Add Layer Style option.
I’m going to add an outer glow here.
The white is not the color I want.
I really just want to grab the color that I had for the sun and maybe just go a little bit lighter than that as my outer glow.
Size is really the sort of ambit of the glow.
It’s not really how many pixels it is.
It’s a bit more feather than anything.
And spread is a bit more pixels.
So I’m just going to add that glow in.
And I can also multiply it if I want to so I can get a sort of darker glow.
Now I’m trying to keep things pretty light right now because I don’t want to be working on a totally dark image.
But what I do want here is I really want the tree all over.
Again, I want a sort of drop shadow for the tree.
So, one of the ways that I can do this is by just adding a light drop shadow layer.
2,368So I’m going to add a layer style.
I’m going to choose drop shadow but instead of doing a darker drop shadow I’m going to do a lighter drop shadow.
In fact let’s just sample the color from the sun for this and maybe just go a little bit lighter than that.
Maybe a little bit more yellow still, okay.
And this is going to be a drop shadow.
And we want it to look as if it’s coming from the sun so it’s going to be out this direction.
But we’re going to screen this because we want it to be lighter and we also don’t want it to be both sides of the tree.
So we’re going to just play around with the spread and the size until we get the slightest suggestion of lightening on this side of the tree but not too much, probably about 4 pixels.
Something like that looks pretty good to me so I’m going to click Ok to select it.
Now what I want is to be able to work on this shadow independent of the tree itself so I really want to move the shadow to a new layer.
So I’m going to right click that and choose Create Layer.
And what that does is it creates the drop shadow as a new layer so I’m just going to click Ok.
So here’s my drop shadow on a new layer.
And because it’s on a new layer I can add a mask to it by clicking the drop shadow layer and click the Add Mask icon.
I’m going to select my brushes.
Let’s just go and grab a brush.
And this time I’m going to select a soft, round brush, something like this, make it a bit larger.
I want to be painting with black because I want to paint out this shadow area and make sure I have the mask targeted and on this side of the tree I’m just going to remove the shadow.
Now because this is a mask layer I can switch and paint with white and I can bring the shading, the highlighting back anywhere I want it.
So I can just paint it on or off as I wish.
I think too I’m going to soften this edge because I think it’s a bit harsh.
And again a mask will do that.
Just click on the layer, click on the layer mask, click on black paint.
This time I’m going to reduce my opacity way down and just gently tip over the edge here, press X to go back.
So I can make that as dark or as light as I want and I can just sort of blend that in to the background by just switching colors, painting with black on the mask to blend it, painting with white to bring it back again.
Now what I did on the original image that we haven’t done right now is to add a blue to white layer over the top of this background layer to just blend everything in so I’m going to that now.
I’m just going to add a new layer.
I’m going to select the Gradient tool and then I’m going to select a sort of darkest blue.
I’m thinking it needs to be a bit darker and a big grayer than that.
So that sort of color blue to white.
So I’m just going to select white here or a light blue.
It doesn’t really matter too much.
And then we’re going to use the gradient to apply that.
So let’s just have a look.
We’re on this foreground to background gradient.
We have linear gradient selected.
We have the layer here and I’m just going to drag to fill it with the gradient.
And I’m holding the Shift key down as I do so my gradient goes in nice and level.
Now it’s going in blue at the top, white at the bottom and I’m just going to blend it using the multiply blend mode.
You can see that my edge here is way too much but we can go back and fix that, again with brush and again, painting with white this time.
I’m just going to be painting on this mask and just bring back that edge a little bit and then we could fix the tree up.
So there you have a small project that you can do using the fractal tree brushes to create a sort of sunset landscape image in Photoshop.
You now know how to download and install the brushes.
And you can find this interesting texture online at Flickr to use and you can go and create your own art in Photoshop.
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 visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.
Learn how to darken the edges of an image using a Vignette in Lightroom
Vignettes are a darkening or lightening of the edges of an image – they can make an image look very attractive.
To add a vignette, open the Effects panel, set the Style to either Highlight Priority or Color Priority – Paint Overlay is the least attractive option. Drag to the left on the Amount slider to add a dark vignette and to the right to add a light one.
The Midpoint slider adjusts how the effect is applied to the edges of the image. Increase it to remove the vignette from the edges leaving it mainly in the corners.
Roundness controls the roundness of the vignette, drag to the left to make it more square, to the right to make it more circular. Feather controls the softness of the edges so use 0 for a hard-edge and 100 for a very soft edge.
Highlights applies when you use a negative Amount to create a darkened vignette. Zero gives no change and larger values preserve highlight contrast when you select Highlight Priority or Color Priority.
How to use the Masking Slider to limit image sharpening to only the edges in the image
The Masking slider in the Lightroom Detail panel allows you to control the areas of the image that are sharpened and those that are not.
Hold Alt (Option on the Mac) as you drag on the Masking slider. As you do you will see a black and white overlay on the image. The areas that are black are not sharpened, those that are white are sharpened. The farther you drag to the right the more the sharpening is limited to just the edges in the image where you want it to be applied to.
Drag on the slider to control just how much of the image you want to have sharpened. When you’re done, adjust the Amount to a value that makes sense for the image.
Learn how to suppress halos with the Detail Slider when Sharpening in Lightroom
The Detail slider in the Detail panel in Lightroom lets you suppress the haloes you create with the Radius slider.
At zero position you will fully suppress any halos and at 100 you will have no halo suppression so you will see all the halos added using the Detail slider.
This means that a low value for the Detail sider sharpens only the largest edges in the image and a large value for Detail will tend towards sharpening everything.
Hold Alt (Option on the Mac) as you drag on the Detail slider to see the effect on the halos around the edges in the image.
Typically if you use a high Radius value then you will want to use a low value for Detail and vice versa.
