Crop your image to a shape in Word
It is easy to crop an image to a shape such as a star or a heart in Word by using the Crop to Shape feature.
First add the image to your document then click to select it. From the Picture Tools > Format tab click Crop > Crop to Shape.
Select the shape to use to crop the image to. You can then add a shadow or reflection or other effect to the shape as desired.
Labels: 2010, 2013, AutoShape, crop, format, heart, image, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Picture Tools, reflection, shadow, shape, star, thought bubble, tip, trick, Tutorial, Word, Word 2010, Word 2013
Categories:office
Create a cancelled postal stamp watermark to use in Photoshop and Lightroom. See how to use the path tools to create the watermark and then save it as a png image with a transparent background so it can be used over your images.
This is the video explanation of the blog post on the same topic which you can find here:
Click Here for Photography School Tip Blog Post
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a postage style copyright stamp that you can use on your images. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a copyright symbol like this which is a couple of concentric circles and some wavy lines and text. And it’s got an overall texture to it.
This is a tutorial that I created for digital-photography-school.com when one of my readers there was having a bit of difficulty following along. So that’s why I’ve created this as a video tutorial. And because of this I’m going to be doing it step-by-step as I did it for that particular tutorial on the Digital Photography School site. And you’ll see in the comments here just below the tutorial I’ve given you a link to that site if you want to follow along.
So the first thing that I did in that tutorial was to create a brand new image. So I’m going to do that now. I’m going to choose File and then New. And I’m going to do a letter size image, landscape. So it’s 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches tall, and it’s 300 pixels resolution, RGB color and the background contents are white. So I’m just going to click Ok. And here’s our starting image.
Now we’re going to add a new layer so I’m going to have my layers palette visible. So if you don’t have it visible choose Window and then Layers so that you can see it. And we’re going to add a new layer and we do that by clicking this little icon here. It’s the Add New Layer icon. It looks like I clicked it twice. So I only want one new layer here. And we’re going to draw our circles using the Ellipsis tool. And it’s here in the toolbar so let’s just have a look and see what we’re looking for.
We’re looking for this tool here. It’s the Ellipsis tool. And when you choose it you want to choose Paths from the tools option palette. Now the options are a little bit different in earlier versions of Photoshop. There are three icons here and you want to make sure that you click the icon that says Path when you mouse over it. They’re the exact same options. They just deliver differently. And this is Photoshop CS6’s version so I have Path selected.
I’m going to drag to draw an ellipsis, but you can see that this is going to be a sort of oval. I want it to be a circle so I’m going to hold Shift as I draw it. And if it’s not in the correct position before I let everything go I’m going to hold the Spacebar and move it into position, let go the Spacebar and just make sure that I have the outermost of my circles created. And when it’s dead right, I’ve still got the Shift key held, I’m going to let go of my Left Mouse button.
So now I have a circle the shape of this outer circle that we’re going to use. Now this is now going to be colored in and we want to stroke this circle. And we do this by going here to the Paths palette. Now the Paths palette you get to by choosing Window and then Paths. And the topmost path is going to be called your work path and that’s the one that you’re working with. This is this circle here. We want to stroke the circle with a brush so we’re going to go and select a brush to use.
So I’m going to click on my Brush tool and then I’m going to select the kind of brush that I want to use. And I’m going to use a hard sort of brush here. So I’m going to select that brush. It’s a hard brush. And let’s just check and see from the original tutorial just how big it needs to be. And apparently it needs to be 40 pixels. So let’s just take it up to around 40 pixels. That’s 39, but that’ll be fine.
I’m going to set black as my foreground color. So I’ve set my brush and my foreground color and what I want to do now is with this path selected I’m going to choose the option that says Stroke Path with Brush. So that’s this icon here. So I’ll click it to stroke the path with a brush. Now I’ve got a funny sort of stroke here and the reason is that my stroke is set to something I don’t want it to be set to. So let’s just wind that back with Edit, Undo.
Then I’m going to right click on this Path option here and choose Stroke Path. And I want to disable this option here, Simulate Pressure. I just want to stroke it with the brush so I’m going to click Ok. Now it’s working the way I want it to. So now I have my path stroked, well at least the outside stroked. Now I need to use the outside to make the inside because it’s going to be really easy to make a concentric circle. To do that I’m going to click on this tool here. It’s the Path Selection tool.
This is the one I want and it shares a position with the Direct Selection tool. But it’s the black one, the Path Selection tool that I want, and I’m going to click on my path so it is selected. Now I want to transform this. And the transformation handles have not appeared so I’m going to press Ctrl T to make them appear. I want to drag in on this handle. But I want to make sure that I don’t lose the circle and I want to make sure that I don’t lose the fact that it needs to be concentric. So I’m going to just hold down both Shift and Alt as I drag in on this handle. So let’s Shift Alt and drag inwards. And you can see that what I’m doing is making a concentric circle. It has the exact same middle as the original circle. I’m going to let go of my Left Mouse button and then let go of the shift and the Alt keys. Now my work path here is a much smaller path so I’m just going to click the checkmark here.
Now I’m going to do exactly the same thing. I’m going to select my brush and I’m going to stroke it, make sure black is my foreground color, and I’m going to stroke this path with the brush. And I get the exact same effect. Now what I need to do is to make a path for my type. And it needs to be a little bit bigger than this inside circle. So again, I’m going to click this Path Selection tool. I’m going to press Ctrl and T to show my handles, I’m going to hold down Alt and Shift, that’s Option and Shift on the Mac, and this time drag out just a little bit so that I get a path for my type, let go of the Left Mouse button, let go the rest of the keys and click the checkmark. Now I’m going to add my text. And to do that I’m going to select my Text tool and then select my type. And I want to use Myriad Pro.
So I’m going to go down here until I find Myriad Pro. And I think the type that I suggested in the article that we used was about 24 points so I’m going to click that. I have black as my type color. So everything looks pretty good. I’m going to hold my mouse over the line, over this path that is still selected, and when I do you’ll notice that the I-beam pointer changes from this I-beam to an I-beam with a short of squiggly line. That means I’m typing on the path. So I’m going to click to do that.
Now the first thing I need to do is to add my copyright symbol. So I’m going to hold down the Alt or Option key and type out 0169 on the keyboard because that gives me copyright, and now 2013, and I’m going to type my copyright details. And I think I’ll do this all in capitals. And I’m using Helen Bradley, projectwomam.com. And I think actually I just want to put a www in there so I’ll just arrow back and make that change.
Now so far my type hasn’t quite stretched all the way around my words. So the next thing we need to do is to stretch it just a little bit more. And I’m going to do that using the Character Spacing tool. So first of all, I’m going to make sure that all my text is selected and then I’m going to choose this dialogue here which will get me to the Character Spacing dialogue. Now this is two dialogues.
There’s a paragraph and a character, and we want the character. And what we want is this tool here, this VA tool. And it’s a scrubby slider so all I need to do is to adjust it a little bit. And can you see that the text is getting bigger every time I drag on it? And I think I’m going to wind that back just a little bit because I could probably add a trailing dash to this. And that’s now all the way around that shape. And let’s just up that to bold because I don’t think it’s really quite dark enough for me. And if I’m using bold I’ll going to have to wind back up on my character spacing a little bit. And so now I’ve created my text on a circle.
Now the only thing that I’m a little bit concerned about is I think that this circle could be a little bit smaller. So I’m going to reselect my text layer here, and again with Alt and Shift selected, I’m going to drag inwards just a little bit to resize that circle path that the text is on because I just think it was a little bit on the big side. So I’m a little bit happier with my text now.
So we’re ready now to go ahead and to create the wavy lines. And we’re going to do that by clicking on the Custom Shape tool here that shares that toolbar position with the Ellipse tool that we used earlier. But this time we want Custom Shape. And from the Shape dropdown list here what we’re looking for is this wiggly line wave shape. Now this is shipped with Photoshop so you will have the wave shape. If you don’t have it in your collection you can click this little fly out arrow and choose All to add all the shapes or append all the shapes to your shapes collection. But this is the one we’re using.
I’m going to drag the shape onto my image and then use the Path Selection tool to just move it into position. Now at the moment it’s a series of closed paths and I want to open these paths. And I’m going to do that by clicking here on the Add Anchor Point tool. Unfortunately you can’t just delete points in Photoshop to open up these curves.
We first of all have to add a point in here that we can then go and delete to open it up. It doesn’t work otherwise. It’s a bit of a nuisance. But this is how we’re going to do it. So I’m going to click once with this Add Anchor Point tool on the ends up all of the shapes. And now I’m going back to the Direct selection tool. And I’m going to make sure that I’m selected on this point that I just added, so it’s black and everything else around it is not, and I’m going to press the Delete key. And that will just break that path in two. And I’m going to repeat that for each of these points.
So select it and press Delete, select it, press Delete, select it, and press Delete. Now if Photoshop is running out of memory if you’ve been using it quite a bit, you might find as I just did earlier that that was not working. Every time I pressed Delete the entire path was going. So I just closed down Photoshop and reopened it and went back to where I was working and it’s working perfectly. So now I have my lines. And you’re probably beginning to see a pattern here because this is just another path. And we can stroke it because we have our tool that we can stroke it with.
So I’m just going to go back and make sure my brush is selected. The same brush is selected, black paint, click on the work path so that I have it selected and now I’m going to stroke it. And that is giving us our lines. And so if you wanted to leave it at this point you could because everything is in place. But I’m going to go ahead and add a Grunge effect to it.
Now we’re ready to create our Grunge effect. And to create that, first of all what we need to do is to flatten the image. But in flattening it I need to remove the white layer from the flattened version. That is because later on when I will put this copyright image over my photograph I want the background to be transparent. So I want to keep this white layer out of the action right now. So I have two visible layers. I’m going to click on the topmost layer and press Ctrl Alt Shift and E to create a new flattened version of this layer. So this is the version that I’m going to use. And now I’m going to bring in a texture layer.
So I have a texture image open here, and I think it’s a really nice texture to use. So I’ve got the texture open. And to add the texture to this particular layer I’m going to select the layer and click the Add Layer Mask icon because that adds a layer mask to the image. And now this texture has to be made the exact same size as this image so I’m going to choose Image and then Image Size. And I want to resize it to the exact same size as this one.
So I can do that by just clicking Window and just pointing to the image whose size I want to borrow. And that’s apparently the size of this image here so I’m just going to click Ok. And because it’s a texture image it doesn’t matter that I’m skewing it a bit out of proportion because nobody really knows what a scratch is supposed to look like. Having done this, and it’s critical that you resize the texture to the exact same size as this image or you can’t use this next technique, which is to apply the texture as a mask.
So I’m going to click on the mask, and I’m going to choose Image, Apply Image. And if you don’t have the texture file the exact same size it will not appear here. So it does obviously appear here so that’s exactly what I want. I want to apply the texture to the image. And at the moment it’s set to Multiply blend mode. But I can test other blend modes and I can even test inverting the layer. So I’m just going to look for the best effect that I can get here.
In fact in the tutorial I suggested that we use Hard Light. So that looks like the one that we’re going to use, Hard Light. So I’m just going to click it and click Ok. And that gives us the sort of texturize look to our shape. And again, I was going to create this as a new layer so I’ll click on this layer and again press Ctrl Alt Shift and E to gives me a newly stamped layer. Well it’s not appearing to work right now. So let’s just add a new layer and press Ctrl Alt Shift E because that will work. And then we’re going to save this as a PNG image. But before I do it I think it’s going to be cropped because I think it’s a bit too big at this stage.
So I’m just going to crop down to get rid of the bits of the image that I don’t want and click the checkmark. And now I’m going to save this but making sure that I have this background turned off because I want it to be a transparent image. So I’m going to save it as a PNG image. So I’ll choose File, Save as, and I’m going to call this HB copyright, black, and PNG. And I’m going to make sure that I select PNG from this list here. And here’s PNG. So I’m going to select it and just click Save and click Ok. And that’s now saved as a PNG image.
Having done that I then want to make it white. So I’m going to choose Image and then Adjustments and then I’m going to invert it so what was black becomes white. And now if I just test this with a black filled layer behind it, you’ll see that it’s now a white image. So we could use that to go over the top of for example a very dark image.
So having created that I’m going to turn off my background because I want this to be a transparent image, and I’m going to resave it this time as a PNG. But this time I’m going to call it white. So again, this is going to be HB copyright, and it’s going to be white, PNG. I’m going to save it as a PNG image, and Ok. And so this is now the copyright image that I can use on my images in future.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. And look out for more of my tutorials both on digitalphotographyschool.com and also on my own website at projectwoman.com.
Labels: Alt, Anchor Point, apply, Black, brush, copy, copy right, copyright, cs6, CTRL, digitalphotographyschool.com, Direct Selection, e, Ellipse, ellipsis, grunge, grunge effect, Hard Light, image, layer, light, Lightroom, mask, option, path, Path Selection, path tools, pixel, png, post, postal stamp, right, shape, shift, size, stamp, stroke, Stroke Path, T, technique, tip, tool, transparent, trick, Tutorial, video, video tutorial, watermark, white
Learn how to make half tone effects with hearts (instead of dots), in Illustrator. Uses the Blend and the Transform tools for this effect. This is part 1 of a two part series on halftone hearts.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make halftone hearts in Illustrator.
Before we get started creating our halftone heart effect let’s see what it is that we’re aiming for. And this is the effect that we’re going to create by the end of this video tutorial. And if you look at the link below for the next video tutorial in this series I’m going to show you have to create this effect and this one too.
But for now let’s get started on this effect. I’m going to create a new file by choosing File and then New and click Ok. I’m going to view my rulers so that I can drag a guide in that I will use as a guide for drawing my shape. I’m going to grab the Pen tool. I’ll click and drag on the guide. I’m going to add a curve over here, another one here, and one finally back here down on the guide. And I’m just going to Ctrl click outside to disable that Pen tool. And here is my shape. And obviously I need to do something with it before we go any further.
I’m just going to adjust these points so that we get something looking a little bit more like a heart shape. I’m going to get rid of my guides so I’m just going to clear my guide. And let’s go back over, select this shape and let’s give it a stroke. So with the shape selected I’m going to give it a pink stroke, and I’m just going to make that a bit of a larger stroke so we can see it clearly. To flip this shape to make the rest of my heart I’m going to first select the shape and then I’m going to click the Reflect tool which shares a toolbar position with the Rotate tool.
The first thing to do with this tool is to click on the anchor point across which you want to flip it. So that’s going to be either this top point here or this one here. It doesn’t matter which. I’m going to Alt click on it. Now I’m getting that reflected shape sort of across the vertical access and all I want to do is to click Copy to make that a heart shape. And now I’m going to join it together by selecting it and choose Object Path Join. And here is now my heart shape.
Now I want to size this down a bit. Actually I’m going to scale it in proportion. And I’m going to make a duplicate of it so I’m going to hold it as I drag a duplicate away. And I just want to tuck this duplicate out of the way for the minute. I don’t want it around but I’m but I’m going to need it a bit later on. So let’s go and select this one and let’s size it down to be the starting point for our halftone heart. So I’m just going to fill this with pink. And I want another duplicate of this so I’m just going to Alt drag a duplicate away. And this is going to be the top one of my hearts. And I want these to line up, although right now is not the time to line them up. I’m going to size it down first of all. So this is going to be my little heart. This is going to be my big heart. And now I’m going to place it in position.
So I want these to align perfectly to their mid lines. They’re not doing that right now. There we are. This is the line that I want. I want to make sure that they’re perfectly aligned so that the point of this heart lines up with the point of this one. And I’m going to change the color so this one I’m going to make quite a sort of dark crimson color. Only I wanted that for its fill and not its stroke. So we’ve got a dark large heart and a very pale pink small one. What we’re going to do now is to blend these two shapes together so we’re going to blend the little and the big heart together. So we’re going to use the Blend tool here on the toolbar. So I’m going to select it and then I’m going to click on the first of the shapes and click on the second. And that blends these two shapes together.
Well it does such a good job that it looks nothing like what it is that we really want. So I’m going to double click the Blend tool to open the Blend options dialog. First of all I’m going to enable Preview and I don’t really want Smooth Color. I want Specified Steps. At the moment there are 127 steps to blend these two shapes and colors together. And I don’t want that. I want to actually see the shapes. So I’m thinking I’m going to start with something like 25 steps and see how that looks. That’s pretty good. Probably let’s just try down to 20 on this one. The other thing that you can do is you can also use Specify Distance as well as Smooth Color. So we don’t want Smooth Color. We definitely want to see these shapes. And we can either go with steps or distance. But I think that’s pretty good so I’m going to click Ok to accept that.
So now we’ve got the first of our lines of hearts and we just want the rest. And we get the rest with a Transform effect. So I’m going to click Effects and then choose Distort and Transform and we’re going to choose Transform. And here’s the Transform dialog. Again I always want to click on Preview so I can see what’s happening here. And let’s do 15 copies. And what I want to do is to make each copy a little bit to the side of this one. So I’m just going to choose Horizontal Move here. And I’m going to move these apart until they are looking like what I want them to look like. Now I quite like that but I think I don’t have enough copies. So I’m going for 25. What I want here is I want these hearts to run into each other. I made it so that the ones would run into each other in the vertical direction. And I want these in the horizontal direction also to run into each other so that I get this final effect. So I’m just going to click Ok.
And there is my effect that we came here looking for. This is a halftone set of hearts. And they vary from light at the top, very small too dark at the bottom. And if we want to create these so that we can work with them we’ll expand them. So with this line selected I’m going to choose Object and then just Expand Appearance. And these are now grouped but their appearance is expanded so we can work on them a little more time. Here is the Link on working
Labels: 1, blend, curve, draw, effect, Half, Haltone, heart, Illustrator, Part 1, reflect, reflect tool, shape, technique, tip, tone, tool, transform, trick, Tutorial, video tutorial
Categories:Illustrator, video
This video covers the tools in the dialog and how to save the pattern. Make half drop repeats, brick and hexagonal patterns in a few seconds.
Transcript
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to make a repeating pattern in Illustrator CS6.
To make a repeating pattern in Illustrator we’re first going to need a shape to work with. So, I’m going to create just a little square shape to use, and I’m going to add a fill color to it. I’ll select a pink fill and then a blue border so we can see what we’re working with. And I’ll make it about a 5 point border. So that’s my shape that I’m going to work with. And I want it to be sort of like a flower shape so I’ll choose Effect, Distort and Transform, Pucker and Bloat. And I’m going to Bloat it to 200 percent and just click Ok. So, this is my shape that I’m going to be working with.
To make a repeating pattern all you need to do is choose Object and then Pattern and then Make. And we now have a pattern piece added to the Swatches panel so I’ll just click Ok. And that is as easy as it is to create a pattern in Illustrator. But of course now that we can see our pattern we may want to make some changes to it.
So firstly we can change the number of copies to say 3 by 3 but I have a 5 by 5 grid in place so I can see things clearly. Dim Copies allows you to dim the duplicate or the repeating pattern so that you can see which is your original piece and which is the repeating pattern I have that now set at 100 percent so the copies are not dimmed. Let’s go back to dimming them.
Now these settings here can be a little bit confusing when you first encounter them. What these Width and Height are is this blue box so that’s the box in which my pattern is created. So if I lock these together and if then I decrease them say to 150 these are going to be scaled proportionately because I have it locked. So I’m just going to press Tab. Now the box is squeezed up and you can see that my pattern is now going to overlap. And I can control how it overlaps by using these icons here. So I can show various pieces of my pattern. If I want it to be on top over here and underneath here for example I can adjust that. But if I take this up to larger than my pattern piece, and I know that this is going to be larger than my pattern piece, I’ve typed in 250 and pressed Tab.
Now you can see that we’ve built in extra space around our pattern piece so there is more room here for perhaps adding other elements. Here is the type of pattern. At the moment we have grid but we could do Brick By Row and then we can offset the brick by a certain amount, one third, three quarters and so on. There’s Brick By Column and the offset is in a different direction. There’s also Hex By Column and Hex By Row. And for this pattern piece I think Hex By Column looks pretty good so I’m going to settle on that. Now if I wanted to add a bit of extra horizontal spacing I could do so but I’ll need to size my tile to the art and then add it in because you can see that right now these are grayed out. But if I size the tile to the size of my art I can then add some extra spacing. At the moment this is unlocked so that’s 10 points of horizontal spacing and now 20 points of vertical spacing. But I prefer not to size my tile to the art so I’m just going to leave that as it is.
Now one of the other things that we can do in this pattern area is we can add extra bits to it. So this is actually looking a little bit small for me so let’s just take it up a little bit larger so I’ve got some extra room in here. And I’m going to select the Ellipse Tool and I’m just going to hold the Shift key as I draw in here a circle. And you can see that the circle has now become part of the pattern. So if I select on the circle here, hold the Alt key as I drag a duplicate away, I now have two circles. And they’re part of the repeating pattern. I’m going to hold my Shift key as I select over both, now hold Alt as I drag a duplicate away and here we have a total repeating pattern. But we’ve been able to add pieces to it because we were actually working in this Pattern Make feature in Illustrator when we did it. Now these can also be adjusted so we’ll see that in a minute. But for now let’s just click Done. And that has saved our pattern to the pattern Swatches in Illustrator.
So let’s just go and get our pattern piece and we’ll tuck it away here off the art board for a minute. I’m going to select a rectangle and draw a rectangle here and let’s turn off the Stroke and let’s fill it with our new pattern. And there it is. Now you might see a missing pixel through your pattern. Don’t worry. That won’t be there when you actually come to print it. It’s just a resolution issue. Now I have this shape here and I might say well that pattern is fine but it looks a bit big for the shape. So I’m going to choose Object, Transform and then Scale and I’m going to disable Transform Object so that will then scale the pattern down to 25 percent of its original size but not the object and then just click Ok. So there is my pattern filled shape.
Now this shape is, this pattern is in the Illustrator swatches. It is only going to exist for this document. So if you want to keep it go up here, select the dropdown list here and click Save Swatch Library as AI. So this means that you can get it back later on. I’m just going to call this flower55 and click Save. And so now that swatch will be available later on that I can come and get it if I want to reuse the swatch in another Illustrator document.
Now we’ve already seen how we can add shapes to our pattern. But what happens if we look at this and decide that the shapes are ok but the color is not? So what I’m going to do here is go to the Layers panel here and go and locate the actual pieces that are part of this pattern. So I’m going to select this piece here and with this piece selected I can now go and make changes to it. So I’m going to give it a green fill color and then I’ll go here and select the next piece. And this is now targeted and I’ll go and grab a different fill color for it. And let’s go and select this one. We’ll give it the same green fill color as we used previously. And then let’s target this one here and we’ll give it a yellow fill color.
So if you come back and look at your shape and say well yes the pattern looks really good but the colors are not right it’s very easy to open up the layers panel here and to make adjustments to it. So for example if we didn’t like the pink here I can grab the pink path here and you can see that the pink path here for the inside shape has been separated from the path that is the stroke. And then I can just select to apply a different fill color to this particular piece here. And it hasn’t adjusted the stroke. The stroke needs to be separately selected. Here is the blue stroke color here and we could perhaps make it a darker blue. So once I’ve got that looking the way I want it to I can just double check by filling it back in.
And if I say yes that’s fine, that’s exactly what I want, and now this has been created as a new pattern. But if it wasn’t, if I’d already created this as a pattern in the pink color and I wanted to also save a green version what I can do is click Save a Copy and I’m going to call this flower 45 and it will then be saved as a different pattern swatch so it won’t be created over the top of the original. And when I’m done I’ll just click Done.
So now I have two pattern swatches so I’m just going to click the shape here. You can see here now that we could fill it with this green pattern swatch or we can go back to the original pink one. If we go to green again we would probably want to scale this down. So we’ll go to Object, Transform, Scale, again transforming only the pattern, not the object itself. So there you have the ability to create repeating patterns very, very easily in Illustrator CS6.
Labels: Brick, brick by column, brick by row, dim copies, Ellipse Tool, Hex, Hex By Column, Hex By Row, Illustrator CS6, pattern, Pattern Maker, PatternMaker, repeating pattern, shape, swatches, Tutorial, video tutorial
Categories:Illustrator, photoshop, video
1. Set your History States
Choose Edit > Preferences > Performance or Photoshop Preferences > Performance on a Mac and set the number of History States. Having a high setting for History States ensures that you can undo changes that you make to your image. By default it’s set to a paltry 20 so this is the first change to make.
I set my History States to the maximum value 1,000 – but even a quarter of this would be a good setting.
Here too I ensure that Photoshop can use plenty of the available RAM so I’ll crank that up to a large value – what you use will be dependent on the amount of memory you have installed.
2. Set Cursor Shape and Size
Still in the Preferences panel I like to use a Normal Brush Tip for my Painting Cursor and Precise for my Other Cursors. This can be set in the Cursors area.
You may want to use something different but it pays to look at these options and decide how you want your cursors to look as you work with them.
3. Opening Files My Way!
I dislike that Photoshop opens documents as tabs and that they are docked to the toolbar. This behavior really grates on me. If you’re like me and you prefer your documents to float you can set this in the Preferences Panel.
Choose Interface and disable Enable Floating Document Window Docking and disable Open Documents as Tabs.
In this panel you will also find the new Photoshop Color Themes in Photoshop CS6 so if
the dark gray look is not to your liking you can return to a more “CS5” look by selecting the lighter gray color.
4. Control Where Files are Saved to
Photoshop can be set either to save images back into the original folder when you choose File, Save As or to the folder that was last used for saving files. You can choose which of these behaviors you prefer Photoshop to default to in the File Handling area of the Preferences panel.
To save back to the original folder, enable the Save As to Original Folder option. To default to the last folder you saved to disable this checkbox.
5. Write your own History
So I can go back and retrace my steps in a large project I like to store a History of all that I do in Photoshop. To do this, click the General tab and enable the History Log checkbox. I save to a Text file (rather than inside the file itself) and I save a Detailed history as that stores the richest data. Choose a filename and place to save it and Photoshop will keep a log file of everything you do to every file.
So, now it is over to you. What preferences do you set up when you first install a new version of Photoshop?
Labels: cursor, files, History, open, Photoshop, save, setup, shape, size, tips
Categories:photography
Crop an image to a heart shape or any other shape in Photoshop. Uses a filled shape and a clipping mask.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to crop to a heart or any other shape in Photoshop. Before we get started on this technique let’s just have a look and see what the end product is going to be. You can see here that I have an image of my cat. And what I’m going to do is to cut her face out in a heart shape. Now in Photoshop Elements this is relatively easy to do because there’s a cookie cutter tool that you can use. In Photoshop it’s not that easy. So we’re going to go through this step by step so that you know exactly how to do it. So let’s get started. I’m going to open up a duplicate of this image. And the shape that we’re using is a heart but this could be any shape at all. So it doesn’t have to be a heart and this process is going to be the same for any shape. The first thing we’re going to do is convert the background into a regular layer. And do that your favorite way. I’m just going to double click the layer and click Ok. And now I’m going to go and get my heart shape. So I’m going to click on the custom shape tool here, and I’m going to select a shape. Now I’ve already selected the heart I want to use but let’s have a look and see. There’s a couple of hearts here. There’s one in the sort of card collection, but I don’t actually like that very much. It’s a really sort of weird shape that one. I prefer this one here so I’m just going to select it, and then let’s go and add a new layer. So I’ve just added a new layer. And let’s go and select a color. Now it can be any color at all, and I’m going to make it this sort of black. It doesn’t matter what color it is. And we’re going to use pixels so this is really important this bit, the pixels bit. In earlier versions of Photoshop there’s actually three icons here and you want to select the one that is pixels. And I’m just going to draw my heart shape. And if it’s not in the exact right position I’m just got a hold the Spacebar as I draw the shape so that I can move it around. And this is actually a nicer shape so once I’ve finished drawing and I’m just going to let go. And now I have a black heart shape right over the top of my cat. It doesn’t matter what this color is because it’s about to disappear. It does matter that the order of these two layers is the wrong way around. So I’m just going to drag the bottom layer up over the top layer. So the photos are on top and the heart is underneath it. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to cut the photo to the heart shape and we do that using a clipping group or clipping mask. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. You see here that there is a keystroke that’s Alt Ctrl G. That’s something we could use as well. But what this does is it cuts the photo into the shape of the shape below. So if this were a star than we’d have a star shape. So essentially that’s all you need to do. If you’re already to go, go now because you know how to create a heart shape from an image. If you want to finish it off nicely than hang around and we’re going to finish it off. The way we’re going to finish it off is by adding yet another new layer, and we’re to drag it to the very bottom. And what we’re going to do here is to fill this with a nice color. So I’m going to choose a color of pink because this is a sort of Valentine theme. My foreground color is pink. I have the bottom layer selected. I’m going to Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac, to fill it with pink. Now we have our heart shape image over pink we can crop it. So I’m just going to crop it to size. And we’ll come in a bit on the edge here too. And now we want that nice finishing touch that we had on the original image. Let’s go and see the original image. You can see that this one’s got dimension and ours is very flat. If you want that dimensional look what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a drop shadow. And we’re going to do it to this heart layer because we want to the drop shadow to follow the heart shape. Here is the layer effects tool, the layer style tool. I’m going to click here and choose Drop Shadow Now my drop shadow at the moment is black. I would prefer a color that is similar to this pink but perhaps a bit darker than it. So let’s just go and get a darker version of our pink. We’re on multiply blend mode which is a good blend mode. I don’t like the angle of light. I prefer my light to be cast in this direction. And you can see that I can now drag my drop shadow around to place it where I want it to be. It’s a bit harsh so I’m going to soften it. Now this is where Photoshop is a little confusing. I think they’ve labeled these really wrongly because size actually adjusts the feathering and spread really adjusts the size. So we don’t want it to have a very big size or spread, but we do want it to have a nice feathering so I’m going to adjust the size to suit there. And on the other one I added an inner glow so I want to grab inner glow here. I again changed the color, this time sampling the pink from the image and going for a lighter pink for my inner glow. And then we’ve got it screen blend mode so that’s going to work nicely. But we do need to increase the size here and probably increase the choke a bit. And we just wanted to blend that around the edge and click Ok. So this is an effect that you can create with any shape in Photoshop. You can put any shape in here. You can put your photo on top. You’re going to add a clipping mask or create a clipping mask with Layer. And this will say Create Clipping Mask. At the moment it says Release because that’s what we would be doing at this point because we already have clipping mask created and we’re just dropping a filled layer below it. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Photoshop video. If you liked this video please would you give it a thumbs up so that others know that it’s a good video. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel and look at projectwoman.com for more tutorials about Photoshop.
Labels: Adobe, crop, cut out picture, frame, Helen Bradley, how to, mask, Photoshop, shape, video tutoial, YouTube
When you add an object to another scene you will typically want to anchor it using a shadow.
Here I have an image of a zebra that I want to incorporate in a larger image.
I masked out the zebra to add it to the image and included its own shadow with it.
In place, the result is less than satisfactory.
I would prefer to create my own shadow so the first thing to do is to remove the shadow that I brought in with the zebra which can be done by simply masking it out. With a mask you’ll paint on with white to reveal the layer it is attached to and in black to conceal it. In this case I want to paint in black to remove the shadow.
Once this is done I duplicated the zebra layer to create a second version of it and then dragged this layer’s mask into the trashcan. When you do this you’ll be asked if you want to apply the mask before removing it, and I clicked Apply to do this. This puts one version of the zebra by itself on a layer.
Now Ctrl + Click on the layer thumbnail for the zebra layer to select it. Press Delete to delete the zebra but to leave the selection intact. You’ll still see the zebra but you’re seeing the one from the layer below not the one you just isolated. Make sure that black or a dark gray is selected as the foreground color and press Alt + Backspace to fill the shape with the black color.
Target the Move tool and click on the shape. Choose Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical to turn the shadow upside down and then drag it into position. You will need it to line up correctly with the feet of the animal or with the base of the object that you’re trying to put into the image. In this case it didn’t line up exactly and needed to be rotated to the correct angle. Drag it into position and you can then shrink the shadow by dragging on the sizing handle to make it smaller.
You can also hold the Ctrl key as you drag on the corner handles to skew the shadow into shape. When you’re done, click to confirm the transformation. You can still continue to work on the shadow after this if necessary.
For example, you can also use Edit > Transform > Warp if you really need to bend the shadow into position. If the animal’s feet are on the ground the shadow should be attached to the bottom of the foot. Legs that are in the air like the rear leg of this zebra can be left floating.
Another tool that can be used is the Puppet Warp tool if you are using Photoshop CS5. You can also use the Liquify filter and use the Forward Warp tool to push the shadow around so that it matches the feet.
When you’re done blend the shadow into the underlying image using a blend mode. Modes such as Multiply and Overlay are good choices. Reduce the Opacity of the shadow layer until you get a blending of the shadow into the underlying image.
To move the shadow and the animal together make sure that you select both layers in the layer palette before moving them so that the two travel in unison.
For this image I finished off by cropping the image to remove the bottom part of it leaving just the zebra on the blue background.
Labels: changing shapes, color, Helen Bradley, how to, photo editing, Photoshop, shadow, shape, tip
Categories:photoshop
With Valentine’s Day coming up shortly you might be wondering how you create heart shape images in Photoshop. Well, here’s how:
Start by opening an image that you want to use and convert the background layer to a regular layer by double clicking the background layer in the layers palette and click Enter.
From the tool palette, select the Custom Shape tool, which sits below the Rectangle tool.
From the Shapes dropdown list on the Tool Options bar, select a heart shape.
If you don’t have a heart shape in your list, click the flyout menu and select All. Click Append to append all the shapes available which will give you access to at least one heart shape. In fact you probably have a Heart Card shape, a Heart shape and a Heart Frame shape.
To cut a heart shape out of your image you’ll want the Heart shape or the Heart Card shape.
Click the New Layer icon at the foot of the layers palette or choose Layer > New > Layer.
From the toolbar, select the option that says Fill pixels. Drag a heart shape over your image. Don’t worry that there is a fill color associated with the heart and that it is covering up your image. Size the shape using the move tool until it’s positioned pretty much where you want it to be.
Now with the heart layer selected, drag it below the image layer and select the image layer again.
Choose Layer > Create Clipping Mask and your image will be clipped to the heart shape.
This method of creating a heart shape is ideal as the heart can be moved into a different positioned and resized by selecting the heart layer and resizing the heart appropriately.
In addition, you can click to select the image layer and drag with the Move Tool (V) on the image to place the image inside the heart in an appropriate position.
If you want a background for your image, click the bottommost layer and then Ctrl + Click (Command + click on the Mac) on the new layer icon at the foot of the layers palette.
This adds a new layer below all the other layers.
Select a foreground color to use, target your new layer and press Alt + Backspace (Option + Delete on the Mac) to fill this layer with the foreground color.
Finish your Valentine heart effect by selecting the heart layer and apply a drop shadow to it by clicking the Add a Layer Style fx button at the foot of the layer palette and choose Drop Shadow.
Add some text and you’re ready to save and print the file.
There is a YouTube video of this process using Photoshop CS6 here – it is the same in any version of Photoshop.
Labels: crop, Crop image to heart shape, heart, Photoshop, shape, valentine
Categories:photoshop
