Learn three must know blend modes for Photoshop and in particular for editing photos in Photoshop. Covers how to use Screen, Multiply and Overlay blend modes.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’ll introduce you to the three must know blend modes in Photoshop. I’ll explain how they work and how you might put them to use.
There are three blend modes that it’s really handy to know how to use in Photoshop, and we’re going to look at those three blend modes in this video tutorial.
In this particular image I have a picture of a building in Darwin and over the top of it I have a second layer. And on the right hand side is the exact duplicate of the layer below. And on the left hand side is just the color pink because we’re going to have a look and see how these blend modes work not only with images where you’ve got two layers that are identical but also what happens when you have for example a layer that is different. And the three blend modes that are really handy to use are got to by clicking this blend mode dropdown list in the layers panel in Photoshop.
If you can’t see your layers panel choose Window and then Layers and that will show you your layers panel. When you’re using blend modes you’ll always use the blend mode on the topmost layer or the layer that you want to affect. And it will affect how this particular layer blends in with the layer or layers below.
The first blend mode we’re going to look at it is this one here. It’s Screen. Now you’ll see that the blend modes here are grouped together. The blend modes in this particular group are the lightening blend modes. They are lighten, screen color, dodge, linear dodge and lighter color. And we’re going to look at screen in this particular group. And screen always lightens an image. So you can see here that the image is lighter than it was in the original. Here it’s colored this sort of pink tone. And here we’ve just got the original image over again, but it’s a lighter version. This is a blend mode that you can use to salvage an underexposed image. If you’ve got an image that doesn’t have enough light in it, you could use the image on each of the layers and then blend the top one into the bottom using the screen blend mode. And that will lighten the image and bring detail out of it.
The next blend mode we’re going to look at is similar but works in the opposite way. This is a darkening blend mode. And it’s accessible from this darken group of blend modes: darken, multiply color burn, linear burn and darker color. And in this case the one we’re going to use is multiply. And multiply darkens the image. You can see that we’ve got a darker version of the image with this sort of pink overlay. But here where we had the image on the two layers, the exact same image on each of the two layers, you can see that we’ve got a darkening of the image. This would be useful if we had an overexposed image. If we put the overexposed image on two layers and then blend them together with the multiply blend mode, we’ll bring back some of the detail in the overexposed image.
The other of the blend modes that you’ll typically use in Photoshop is overlay. It’s in this group of blend modes, and it’s one of the contrasty blend modes. What this does is it lightens everything that is lighter than a mid-gray and it darkens everything that is darker than mid gray. So it’s a nice contrasty blend mode. Let’s have a look here at what it’s doing to the image on the right. You can see that this is a flatter sort of image. And when I turn on this layer we’re getting a lot more contrasty image. And that’s what’s happening on the left too is we’re getting a contrasty, a colored version, of the original image. Anytime you want to boost the contrast in an image you can use the overlay blend mode.
So the three blend modes that I suggest that you look at using with your photos in particular are multiply to darken, screen to lighten, and overlay to add some contrast and punch. Now if you find that a certain blend mode is too much let’s just get rid of this particular layer and let’s duplicate the image itself. And let’s go and use the overlay blend mode. And if this is too much of a contrast enhancement to the image all you need do is to back off the opacity of this layer. This will give you some of the layer below and some of this additionally contrasty layer so that your image gets more contrast but perhaps not as much as it would have if you’d had this layer at 100 percent opacity.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel. Comment on the video and like it if you like it. And look out for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more at my website projectwoman.com.
Learn to use recursivedrawing.com to create a fractal tree that you can then use in a Photoshop collage. This video shows you step by step how to create the fractal tree and then how to copy and paste it into a Photoshop collage. Also, how to blend it seamlessly into the collage document.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create fractal trees online that you can then use in collages and other images in Photoshop. This is the kind of recursive tree that we’re going to draw. And one of the benefits of this is that we can grab it and use it in a Photoshop image.
So let’s have a look and see how it’s put together. It’s put together with a single rectangle that’s a long rectangle and then we’re just going to draw it as a fractal tree. So I’m just going to click down here, this plus sign, to get started with a new image and let’s start with our first tree.
To create a tree we’re going to start with a rectangle or square and drag it to make a nice long thin rectangle which is going to be the trunk of the tree. And I’ll just place it in position at the bottom here. Then I’m going to go and drag this element which is the element I just created but this time I’ve got multiple versions of it. I’m going to push it so that I make this sort of recursive element.
Now it is really easy for this tree to get away from you. And if it does just stop it and just go and start again until you get really used to the tool and what it’s going to do it because it can behave really, really recursive and go everywhere really, really quickly. So I’ve now got that part of the tree. Now I’m going to go and grab the tree back again because I want it in here. And this is usually where if I’m going to lose it I’ll lose it at this point. But let’s call that good for our tree because that actually is quite a good tree. You’ll watch it until it’s finished drawing and when it’s finished drawing you won’t see any more changes around the edges.
So this is looking pretty good to me so I’m going to press the Print Screen key to take a screen print of it. And now I’m going to launch Photoshop. In Photoshop you can see I’ve already got a few trees hanging around. I’m going to choose File and then New and then click Ok because that is an image now the size of my clipboard. So all I have to do is do Edit Paste. And here is my tree.
So the first thing I’m going to do is make a selection around the tree itself and then I’m going to choose Select Inverse so the rest of the image is selected and I’m going to delete it just to get rid of it. I’m also going to get rid of the background layer so all I have right now is the tree itself. I’m going to select the magic wand tool and I can just click on the white and just press Delete and that will get rid of all the elements except the tree itself. And at this point I can just crop it down to size.
Now I would save it at this point because that means I’ve got a tree then I can use in anything in future. Now I have a texture image here and it’s a pretty big texture. And this image is pretty small so I’m probably just going to reduce the size of this down say 50 percent so that our tree is going to look a little bit better on it. With the texture image and the tree image both visible I’m just going to drag the layer of my tree image onto my texture. And here it is. I’m just going to make sure that I move the tree and not the background.
Now if you find that there’s a little bit of haloing around the edges of your tree so if you brought in a little bit of white that you want to get rid of you can do so. And the easiest thing probably is just to set this blend mode to darken because what that does is the white pieces on the tree anything that was a sort of legacy piece of white isn’t going to be brought in because it’s going to be lighter than the background.
So there are all sorts of trees that you can create using that tool. You can be successful and less successful depending on how you go. You can see I’ve got some really nice trees and I’ve got some pretty horrible ones as well. But that tool can be used to create fractal trees that you can then access to use in your images in Photoshop this way.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. I hope you enjoy the recursive drawing tool. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel here and visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Illustrator, Lightroom and lots of other handy graphics techniques.
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.
PowerPoint just got a whole lot cooler, so come check out what’s new. I’ll walk you through many of PowerPoint 2013’s features, including the new start screen and account screens, how saving is new, using the new task panes, charting options, and discovering theme variants.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today we’re going to be looking at the new PowerPoint 2013 and asking what’s new and cool for PowerPoint users. There is a lot to like about the new PowerPoint 2013. And we’re going to have a look at some of the features of it here in this video.
The first thing is the Start screen. This opens as soon as you open PowerPoint 2013. And there’s a lot here for new users. You can actually turn the screen off. But I think most people are going to opt to turn it on. The default is to start with a new presentation with a default theme, but you can see here that we’ve got recent files that we’ve opened in PowerPoint so they’re all available to us. We could go online and search for templates and themes online. And there are some suggested searches here. We can also click here to open other presentations that we might have stored on SkyDrive or on our local computer or SharePoint. And up here is the current account. So when You open PowerPoint 2013 or any of the new Office 2013 applications you’re going to be logged into your SkyDrive account, and this is access to it. And here we could switch accounts if we wanted to. These are just for testers so I think that they’re probably going to go in the final production.
But let’s have a look and see what would happen if we selected one of these templates. So I’m just going to click this one to open it. And you can see here that there’s some variants in this theme. We’re having a look right now at the More Images so we can see what this layout is going to look like if we select this particular one. And there’s this title layout, and this is what the chart would look like, and then smart art graphics, and this is a photo layout. And then there are different variants, different color combinations that we could use in this particular theme. Now what they’ve done in PowerPoint 2013 is that they’ve removed some of the color options that we had previously and sort of scaled them down to a more manageable group. So this particular design has four color options and you choose one of them and go with it rather than having to select from a set of color schemes that are probably twenty or thirty of them.
So I’m really liking this sort of red one so let’s click Create. And we’re now all ready to start our PowerPoint presentation. None of this is going to be unusual for PowerPoint users. A little bit has changed with the interface here. You can see that it’s got a metro style look to it so everything is a lot flatter. There’s no dimension in the screen, no shading. The buttons have sort of all gone to the back and really what we’re doing is focusing a little bit more on the content of our presentation.
Let’s go to Backstage View before we come back here though and see what’s there. I’ll click File to go to Backstage View. Now some of these options have changed. There’s Save and Save as. If we go to Save as you’ll see that by default we’re now saving to SkyDrive so this is the SkyDrive account that I was already logged into. Details are up here, and it’s opting to save it to SkyDrive by default. If I want to I can save it to my own computer so I can click Computer and this gives me access to my own folder structure. I can also add a place. So I could add things like a SharePoint location or a different SkyDrive account. Print is pretty standard. There’s not much changes here but Share has some options. You can invite people to share your document on your SkyDrive account. You can email it. You can present it online or publish your slides here. Export here we’ve got our PDF, XPS document support. Here’s the video option. Here’s packaging it for a CD, creating handouts and changing our file type. Down here are the standard options. This is general options for working inside PowerPoint and there’s not much changed here. Let’s go back here however to this Account area. And this is where you manage your accounts. So at the moment you can see that I’ve got a connected service with my Facebook account, my SkyDrive account, Twitter. I can also add LinkedIn if I wanted to. I could add Flickr. There’s the ability to add SharePoint or another SkyDrive account, lots of options here. And I imagine that over time we might see even more appearing here. This is also showing me where I am with my product. I can get updates and get information about whether the updates are installed, whether there are any, and it’s just telling me which version of Microsoft PowerPoint I’m using. So there’s our Backstage View. There’s our Start screen.
So let’s go back now and have a look and see what’s different inside the PowerPoint interface itself. The ribbon is pretty standard from the older versions of the ribbon. The difference is that the Design tab is split in two now with the themes and the variants. So here we have the various themes that we can use. We’re using this one here, but you can see that what we’re using this variant of it. This is another one of the built in themes for PowerPoint 2013, and here are the variants so we could make it blue or pink, whatever we want to do here.
The Developer tab is now visible by default so that’s a big change for people who want access to macros. I’ve got some additional things open here, and it’s picked up my old handy Tools tab which is one that I added to my PowerPoint 2010 and it’s been brought forward into 2011. So too has the add-in Visual Bee. But these are things that I’ve added in myself. They’re not actually in the default PowerPoint install. There is a new button here on the toolbar. It’s the Touch Mode button, and you can enable it if you’re on a touch screen. With that enabled, if I just tap it what happens is that the buttons become a little bit further apart and everything is a little bigger for work on a touch screen. Click it again and everything shrinks down just a little bit.
Let’s have a look at adding a chart so I’m just going to go back to the Home screen. And we’ll do a new slide with a chart so I’m going to choose a title and a content slide. And let’s just add a chart to our Presentation and close this down. These settings here are new, and these are in Excel as well. So these give you the ability to add chart elements or remove them. For example if we don’t want a legend we could just disable the legend here. We could also for example disable the chart title if we planned to add the chart title in as the slide title. There’s access here to styles and color options. And you can see that we could change the colors but we’ve got a smaller subset of colors this time. And they’re more true to the theme itself. So we’ve been given smaller numbers of options but probably more relevant options if you could think of it that way. And then here we’ve got other settings. We can change the values and the names. So there’s options here for working with our chart.
Let’s go again and let’s add another new slide. This time I want to add an image. So I get a choice of selecting pictures from my own computer or online pictures. Online pictures allows me to select images from Office.com clipart. I can search them using Bing or I could go and get them from my SkyDrive account. It’s also possible for me to get them from my Flickr account. So let’s just go and get an image right now. Let’s go and get a coffee image. Okay, let’s grab this one here. And I’m going to insert it so I’m just clicking it and tap Insert. And now we’ve got our image inserted on our slide.
Now if we wanted to make changes to this image we would typically go to the Picture Tools Format tab. But watch what happens when I right click the image here and choose Format Picture. What we get is this new format picture pane here. It’s a task pane. And in it are all the things that we can use to format our pictures. So let’s go ahead and let’s add a reflection to this picture, just add a very simple reflection to it.
Okay, let’s go now and add another slide and this time I’m going to add a small art graphic. So let’s just add a default smart art graphic. But look what’s happened to our pane. Now we’re seeing Format Shape options because these are the options that we can use with this smart art graphic. If we go back to this slide here and click on the picture the pane is still there. It stays in place if we want it to, but it changes to show us the kind of options that we have for the object that we’re working with. And I think users are going to really like this because you don’t have dialogue sitting over the top of your slides. This is all tucked away on the side and you can leave it open as you work. And it’s just giving you much quicker access to things. You can see we haven’t moved away from the Home tab and yet we’ve got most of the smart art tools available that allow us to format the smart art as we work.
Now another handy tool we’ve got is the eyedropper tool. So I’m just going back to this image and I am going to click on the image and go to Picture Tools Format tab. And I’m going to select Picture Border. So instead of actually choosing one of these theme colors what I can do is use the new eyedropper tool. What the eyedropper tool does is to allow me to select a color from the image itself. So I can just mouse over an area of the image and select that as the color of my picture border for example. So it’s now my selected color so I can now add a border to the image that is a color that I’ve selected from the image itself. Now you may be missing the color options that you used to have inside PowerPoint, but we still have access to them. We just have access to them in a limited way.
So let’s say that we like this general layout, but we’d really like it to be a different color combination. In this case we’ll go to the View option and we’ll go to Slide Master View. In Slide Master View we can control the slide master that controls the look and feel of out presentation. And you can see here that the All Theme Color options are back again. So for example if we wanted to use a theme color for example medium we could do that. And here’s our medium color scheme that’s now been applied to the presentation. I’ll close Master View and let’s go back into the Design View.
We’ve still got the four options that came with this slide presentation, but we also have our own custom option that’s a Slide Master that we can use. Now if we like this color scheme in preference to the other variants we can save it as we always could, just drop down this theme option and save the current theme. So you do get the customization options of being able to change colors, but you get it where they really should have been all along which is in the Slide Master because you really want it to be thematically strong and you want this color scheme to be applied throughout the entire presentation. Now some of the other options that are available inside PowerPoint 2013 is the Video options so you can select Online Video or Video on your PC. There are a few more options in working with video content. You’ll find things in the Slide Show menu.
When you go to rehearse a slide show or set up a slide show you’ll have different options in terms of viewing presenter view so you can actually see presenter view if you want to. So let’s just do that. And let’s send the slide show to the monitor and the primary monitor which is not the one I’m using right now, and let’s do Presenter View. And let’s just view the slide show. So here’s our Presenter View. You can see that we can see which slide we’re on and we can navigate through the slides. In fact this is my title slide and this is the next one up. And there’s two and three. We can also use a See All Slides option where you can see the slides themselves. You can press Escape here and you’re just going back into Presenter View, not ruining the presentation which is actually running on my second monitor right now. You’ve got the ability to zoom into the slide show so you can click on here and zoom it up full screen. And there are the standard laser pointers so you can use a laser pointer on your screen and you can see other slide show options here.
So there’s plenty to like about this new PowerPoint 2013. I think you’ll like it a lot. If you haven’t already done so why not go and download the customer preview and install it and have a play around with it. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this presentation. You can find more of my videos here on my YouTube channel. I encourage you to subscribe to the video channel as we’re releasing at least two new videos every week. And also follow me at projectwoman.com where you’ll find tips and tricks for all the Office applications as well as much, much more. If you liked this video please go ahead and like it and I’m always happy to hear your comments.
