One of the issues that I’ve had with painting on the iPad is I quite often run into the top of the canvas leaving the image no breathing space.
For example this image created in Art Rage tips the top of the canvas with plenty of spare room at the bottom.
The simplest solution is to email the image to myself on my desktop computer and then open the image in Photoshop.
To begin I cropped this image to a 1 x 1 ratio by clicking the Crop Tool, set the ratio to 1 x 1 and then drag on the image. Once I let go the Crop Tool I can then drag outwards on it to add some extra canvas at the top of the image.
Right now I’m looking for a smart crop plus some extra room at the top that I will fill with canvas shortly. So the blue area in this image is the bit I need to “manufacture” to get the result I want.
Once the image is cropped I’m ready to get rid of the blue and create some canvas from it.
One issue with this particular image is that the canvas itself has a texture in it so just filling it with white or a plain color won’t work.
So, with the Layers palette visible I’ll click on the Add Layer Mask icon to add a layer mask to the background.
Then I select black as my foreground color, a solid round brush with a hard edge and with the mask targeted I’ll paint out the entire painting, leaving only the textured canvas visible. It’s really important to get rid of all the original painting.
Because this is just a mask the image hasn’t actually been removed, it’s just been hidden for now. Grab the Magic Wand Tool, click on the image layer itself and make a selection of the area you want to remove.
To fill it with texture, choose Edit > Fill, set the Use list to Content Aware and click Ok.
The colored area will be removed and will be replaced with a texture matching the remainder of the image.
To finish, drag the Layer Mask onto the trashcan. When asked whether you want to apply the mask before removing click Delete and the mask will be removed leaving the image in place.
Choose Select > Deselect to remove the selection and then save the image.
Double click a layer’s thumbnail in the Layer palette to open the Layer Style dialog. Here you can add a style such as a pattern overlay or drop shadow to your layer.
Need an exact copy of a layer? Select the layer – click the layer in the Layer palette – not the thumbnail and press Ctrl + J on a PC and Command + J on a Mac. The new layer will appear above the original layer and will have “copy” added to the original layer name.
Just in time for the holiday season, I’ve updated the Photoshop brushes page with a brand new set of Christmas tree brushes. Dress up your greetings cards and gifts with 32 hand drawn trees of all varieties. Best of all, it’s completely free! Happy holidays!
To select the content on just one layer of your image to work on it or to make a mask from it, Ctrl + Click on the layer thumbnail on a PC (Command + Click on the Mac). Once the contents of that layer is selected you can work with it.
Learn to turn 360 degree panoramas and other images into Amazing Circles, mini planets—whatever you want to call them.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to make amazing circles in Photoshop. Before we look at how you can create an amazing circle let’s have a look and see exactly what we’re talking about. This is one of the Flicker set on amazing circles and this is a really, really nice amazing circle. And we’re going to create something like this but not with a white background. And there’s these here. They’re in black and white and they’re showing you There are two sorts of amazing circles we can create, either one that has all the detail on the outside or one that has all the detail on the inside.
So now you’ve seen what we’re aiming for let’s go and see how we would create this effect ourselves. I’m just going to open Photoshop and I have an image already prepared here. This is a panoramic image. It’s actually of the Seine in Paris. Now you could use any panorama to do it. Now the problem with my panorama is that of course it doesn’t wrap around but I have begun to create a duplicate of the tree on this end of the image so it will sort of partially wrap around. I’ll need to do a bit of cloning to fix it when I’ve actually done my amazing circle but this is a strip. If you’ve got a 360 degree panorama it will be even better. Add a little bit of image to the top and bottom of your panorama. What you want is an image that’s roughly four times as wide as it is high so I’ve added a bit of white on either side. And this will be either the outside or the inside of the amazing circle when we create it.
The first step is to resize the image. So I’m going to choose Image and then Image Size. I’m going to deselect Constrain Proportions because although this image is 8,000 x 2,000 I want it to be square but without losing any of the content. So I’m going to be deselect Constrain Proportions and type 8,000 in here because that’s the largest of these two values, so now I’m going to get a square image quite a bit larger than it was, and click Ok. And let’s just zoom out a bit so that you can see that this is the image just all squeezed up.
Now what we do next is to rotate the image and that gives us one of two possible amazing circles. So before we do that I’m just going to duplicate this image so that we have two images that we can make circles from. So you can see the two alternative shapes. Let’s start with this one and we’re going to just rotate it 180 degrees. So I’m going to choose Image, Image Rotation 180 degrees just to flip it upside down. And then all the work is done by what’s called a polar coordinates filter. It’s Filter, Distort, Polar Coordinates. And let’s just squeeze this up because rectangular to polar is the option that we want. The other option is polar to rectangular and that’s not the one we want. So now that we’ve got rectangular to polar I’m just going to click Ok. And that’s our amazing circle. That’s as easy as it is. You’ll see I’ll need to clone a little bit through the seam area because I didn’t do a very good job of making a circular panorama. But there is our amazing circle.
Now because we’ve flipped it upside down this one has the sky area on the outside and the river on the middle. This one’s going to be the opposite. Let’s just run the filter on this one without turning it upside down before we start. Just size the display, we can see what it’s going to look like and click Ok. And as you can see here the sky is on the inside and the river Seine would be on the outside. You can use whichever you like for your amazing circle.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Please if you enjoyed the tutorial, like it on YouTube. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel. Subscribe if you will. You can also visit projectwoman.com where you’ll find lots more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Illustrator and lots more.
To resize the content on a layer or an object in Photoshop CS6 bring up the bounding box or transform controls by pressing Ctrl + T on a PC or Command + T on a Mac. When the controls appear you can drag on them to resize the object. To resize the background layer of an image you’ll first have to transform it to a regular layer by double clicking it in the layer palette and click Ok.
Touch up your portraits with this quick video tutorial. I’ll show you how to remove blemishes and soften skin tones.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can do a quick and easy portrait makeover.
Let’s have a look and see before we begin exactly what we’re going to achieve. So this is the starter image that I started off with. And I did some spot fixing on it to make sure that I had removed the skin blemishes and then I brought out the detail from the shadows. And this is the starting point that I then had and this is the effect that we’re going to look at creating. We’re going to soften the skin and brighten the eyes in our model. So let’s have a look and see how we would start off with spot fixing this image.
I would go into this image and then I would start by selecting the spot healing brush tool here because this is a tool that you can simply just paint over problems on the skin and it will fix them. So I went over this image really, really carefully. I zoomed in and I got every single one of the blemishes on this model’s skin and it’s probably a five minute job to just neaten the image up and just to get a really good starting point for it. And then having done that I did a shadows and highlights adjustment to bring some detail out of the shadows. So I’ll choose Image, Adjustments, Shadows/Highlights. And the default setting is 35. Now I used that. It was probably a little bit high. So you could probably bring it down a little bit perhaps to around 23 or 24, but there’s a good starting point for your image. And from there you’re ready to go ahead with the softening effect.
So let’s go back to the image that I’ve spot fixed and now let’s get rid of the two layers that are the fixed layers. And we’re just going to work from the point at which we opened up some of the shadows and highlights. So the first thing that we’re going to do is to create a duplicate of this background layer, just duplicate it and then we’re going to blur it. So I’m going to choose Filter, Blur, and then Gaussian Blur. I’m going to set the blur value to sort of a lowish sort of value. What I want to do is blur the model’s skin and use that in a minute to paint over her skin. So I want something that’s sort of a little bit over what I want my final effect to be but not totally over. So I’m thinking here about 9 or 10 pixels will be a good amount for this image, so I’ll just click Ok.
And having blurred that layer a little bit I want to add a bit of noise into it and I’ll do Filter, Noise and then Add Noise. And we want to bring in monochromatic noise and we want it to be Gaussian. Gaussian noise applies more noise to the lighter areas of the image and less to the darker areas. And we want probably somewhere between 5 and 10 percent noise. And this slider is really hard to adjust at that level so I’m just going to type in 7.5 percent and that’s giving us a nice little bit of noise in her skin tones, so I’ll click Ok.
So we do not want the image to look exactly like this. We just want that to be a starting point. So let’s add a mask to this layer. I’m going to Alt or Option click on the Add Layer Mask icon. And what that does is removes the blur. it will remove the entire effect from the model. And we’re going to paint on this mask to bring back in the softening where we want it to be. So I’m going to select my brush tool and select a nice soft brush, this one’s a good brush to use, and I’m going to paint with white. I’m just going to size the brush up a little bit. Now you’ll be a bit more careful than I am being, but what I’m doing is selecting over all the areas, painting over all the areas that I want the skin to be softened. So that is basically everywhere but her nose and mouth and eyes. Although I want the skin on her nose to be softened, I don’t want to soften this detail around here. And I may want to soften this area, but I don’t want to soften her eyebrows themselves. So very carefully softening by painting on the image with white in the areas that you want it to be softened. And you can see on the mask here the areas that we’ve got and perhaps any areas that we might have missed out on at this stage. Again, I don’t want to soften that jaw line too much. that’s a nice strong line and I want to keep that there.
Now that I’ve done that I can adjust the opacity of this layer a little bit. I’m going to adjust it down to zero which is totally removing the sharpening effect. And now I’m just going to march it up using the scrubby slider until I get the amount of softening that I want. So I really want a subtle softening, not totally obvious but just subtle softening of the skin. And I think probably about 30 percent is a good value for this image.
Now I’m going to make another duplicate of this background layer and drag it to the top because what I want to do now is to fix her eyes. So all I’m going to do is focus on this top layer and I’m going to look for some stronger color and contrast in her eyes. So I’m going to choose Image, Adjustments, Curves. Curves is a good adjustment for this and again I’m going for slightly more than I need. So there is some more whites in her eye. Now I know that the blue color of her eye is in this area, so let’s add a bit more contrast through that area.
So let’s see. That’s the before and that’s the after on her eye. So I’m just going to click Ok to accept that, but of course that’s not the image effect that we what. We want more of this effect, but we’d like to borrow some of the eyes from this effect. So again I’m going to Alt or Option click on the Add Mask icon to add a layer mask. And again with my paintbrush which is already preset and my white paint I’m going to target the mask and paint over her eye. Now again this is probably going to be too much, but we can tone it down a little bit by again adjusting the opacity of the mask. So we’ll just take it up to what we want it to be. I am thinking it’s probably going to be a little too much, maybe about 50 percent.
So let’s have a look at the starting point for the image. This is post having been spot fixed and post having had shadows and highlights applied to it. Then we added the skin softening and finally we added a little bit brighter eyes in our portrait.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please click to like it on YouTube. Consider also subscribing to my YouTube channel. You’ll be advised when new videos are launched and right now that’s about twice a week. You can also visit my website projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements. Lightroom, Illustrator and more.
Quickly learn how to create a Landscape glow effect in Photoshop to give your photos a dreamlike quality.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to apply a landscape glow effect.
Before we get started with creating this landscape glow effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for. This is the original image that I’m starting with. It’s from sxc.hu which is a stock image site and this is just a little house in the middle of a paddock. And this is the result of applying my landscape glow effect to it. The image has a bit more of a glow to it and a slightly more painterly look. I have another image that I’ve applied it to. Let’s just hide that one for now. Let’s have a look and see what this image looked like before. Again it’s a stock image and this is what it looks like after we’ve applied the effect.
So let’s get started creating this effect. I’m just going to remove these three layers from this image, and let’s see how we would do the effect ourselves. We’re going to start on the background layer of the image. And we’re going to choose Select and then Color Range because this allows us to pick out the darker areas of the image without having to make a selection which is really nice because they would be really hard to identify otherwise. So I’m just clicking to select shadows. And Photoshop has automatically selected all the shadow dark areas of my image so I’m just going to click Ok. And this is the selection it has made.
Now I’m going to put this on a new layer so I’m going to choose Layer, New, Layer via Copy. And that’s going to copy the blacks onto their own layer. So you can see this is what we’ve got. I’m actually going to hide that layer for now. Now I’m going to make two additional copies of the background layer. I’m going to right click it and choose Duplicate Layer and click Ok and then do that again. With the topmost of these duplicate layers I’m going to set its blend mode to Screen and that will lighten the image considerably. And then I’m going to merge this layer into the layer below by choosing Layer, Merge Down.
Now I have a lighter version of the image on top of the original. And I’m going to duplicate this so I have two light versions of the image on top of each other. And I’m going to set the blend mode for this particular top layer to Multiply and that will darken it all again. Now with this darkened layer I want to blur it so I’m going to choose Filter, Blur, and then Gaussian Blur. And I’m going to set my blur to a quite high value, something like sort of 9 or 10 but in that sort of higher value area so I’m going to get this sort of glow look to my image and click Ok.
So there’s my blurred darkened layer, my light layer underneath and my original layer below. And now that I’m ready to do so I’m going to make the top layer this dark tree visible again. And you can see that in actual fact the pixels in that layer are really quite light in comparison now to the rest of the image underneath. And I can even make it lighter by blending this particular tree back in in Screen mode and then just adjust the opacity down to suit. So that’s giving my landscape a very sort of glow look. It’s a lot richer color and a lot more of a glow look to it.
So I hope you’ve enjoyed this video tutorial. Thank you for joining me for it. If you liked the tutorial please like it on YouTube and subscribe to my YouTube channel to be advised when new videos are released which is a couple of times a week. You can also visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Illustrator and others.
Some of you may already know that I’m a bit of a brush junkie, and hopefully you’ve checked out Project Woman’s brush collections before. If not, now is the perfect time! I’ve recently updated the page to include a new collection of adorable hand-drawn bird brushes. The set is entirely free and all pertinent licence information is included.
I update the collections regularly, so make sure to keep an eye out for any new brushes!
Original photo by: Falk Schaaf
original photo by: Gisela Royo
original Photo By: Gisela Royo