Saturday, March 23rd, 2013

Photoshop – Masking 101 for Use in a Collage

Learn to use Masks in Photoshop. Here we look at how to collage a series of images together, using masks in Photoshop.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to look at Masking 101. So we’re going to get you started with masks in Photoshop.

In this introduction to masks I’m going to show you how you can use masks to create images like this collage image. This collage image has been built up from a number of images and they’ve all been masked so that everything can appear nicely on top of each other.

The first image was the tail end of some cows and then I added an image of a tree. And this image has been masked so that we can see part of the cows’ tails behind it. But you can see that these two images are sort of blending into each other with this mask effect. Then we have the cow by herself and again we’ve masked her so that we can see the image of the tree behind her. And then we’ve added an image of some hay over here, and again added a mask to the hay image around the edge of the cow so that we’re getting this sort of almost seamless blended effect all the way across the image. And then we’ve got some milk cans and then finally we had some different effects that sort of tied the whole thing in together. But we’re going to have a look at masks and we’re going to have a look at it doing the last three images in this particular collage, just seeing how that would have been put together.

So I’m going to open the images. I’ve got a couple here open already. I’ve got the milk cans and the hay and let’s just go and get the cow. And I’m going to create an image that these will all going into. I think a thousand pixels is a bit too big so let’s try 800. And to start off with I’ll just drag and drop these images in. But this cow needs to be flipped first of all because I had her flipped in the original. So I’m going to flip her there and then just drag her in here. I’m just dragging on the layers and then just pressing V for the move tool so that I can move her into position. I’m holding Shift as I scale her up to full size. I don’t want to save the cow image. I want the hay image now so I’m going to drag and drop it into position. And I’m going to make sure I’ve got a fairly hefty overlap here because the overlap is going to allow me to blend these images together. And finally the milk cans and drag and drop them into position. And that’s a pretty big image too. I think actually it’s much bigger than the others. I’m pressing Ctrl T and then Ctrl 0, that’s Command T, Command 0 on the Mac, to just re-size these milk cans and just drag them into position.

So I’ll start off with a collage like this by just grabbing my images and just pulling them into position with a nice hefty overlap. And in this case I’m going to crop these images so that we don’t have anything extra hanging around. And now let’s go ahead and do the blending. And I’m going to do this by first looking at this layer here the cow and the hay. So I’m going to zoom into this area so that I can see what I’m doing, move the image across, and I need to mask this hay layer.

So to do that I’m going to click the Add Layer Mask icon here and that adds a mask to the hay layer. I need to have that mask selected. I need to select a brush to use. I’m just going to make sure that I have a brush here. I’m looking for a sort of solid-ish brush. This is a hard mechanical 38 pixels. Now it’s too hard but I can soften it by just taking down its hardness to make it nice and soft. And then I’m going to make sure that my mask layer is targeted and I’m going to set these colors here to their defaults by pressing the letter D.

Now we can already see that if this mask is white we’re seeing the hay. So that means if I want to see the cow I need to paint on it with black. So I’ve got black paint now. I’ve got the mask targeted and I’m painting on the mask where the cow is to bring the cow back in through the grass. Now I’m not going to be a 100 percent fussy at this stage because one of the benefits of using masks is that we can come back later on and edit it. So I’m looking for the edges of the cow but I’m not worried that I’m getting a bit of extra green here because I want to know where her edges are so then I can get a little bit closer to her in a minute. So I’ve got her pretty much there.

Now I just need to neaten it up. And to neaten it up I’m going to switch to white being my foreground color. I’m going to get a much, much smaller brush, make sure I’ve got my mask targeted and I’m going in close to the cow’s face here to make sure that I get an edge that gives me none of this green because it’s a really, really bright green that she’s standing on. And it’s not really doing a lot. The hay image I think is the prettier image. So again I’m just going to get close in to her here. Now this might take me half an hour to do to get a really nice result and the sort of result that I want. And I can also start working with a larger softer brush so I can make sure that I have it even softer. And I can work with a lower opacity if I want to and I can even paint in mid gray because with masks you can paint in black or white or any shade of gray because a mask is a gray-scale image. Now I’m just having a look at these milk cans. And I think that probably there’s one too many. So before I go much further I’m going to select the milk can layer and get rid of this first one because I don’t really like it that much. Now I’m going to grab the next three, I’m just going to move them over a bit.

There’s a bit of excess image hanging around but I’m not too worried about that. I’m going to add a layer mask to this layer. So now we have the overlap. And I want to bring the grass through the milk can so I’m going to paint on this layer again in black and white. So again a nice big brush, I’m going to switch colors by pressing the X key because I want to blend these images in together. I want to sort of suggest that there’s a seamless transition from one image to the other. And I’ll do that with a very soft edge so we almost can’t see where the grass image ends and the milk cans begin. And with this particular image I found that there was enough shine on the milk cans that we could perhaps even suggest that the grass image was showing through the milk cans. And I’m doing that by just adjusting down the opacity of the brush. So I’m not painting it full opacity and I’m just tapping where I want perhaps a little bit of the grass image to appear, again to really blend these images together. And if I’ve made a mistake and if I want to go back then all I need to do is change my paint colors and I can go back and paint out the effect that I’ve just painted in. And I can do this over and over again until I get the exact effect that I’m looking for.

Masks are a handy way of blending images in a way that allows you to come back later on and make changes to it. If I were saving this masked image because I want to make changes to it later, I want to come back and work on it a little bit later, I would do so by saving this as a PSD file. So I’d choose File and then Save As and make sure that when I’m saving it, it’s being saved as a PSD image. That will ensure that the masks and the layers are all there when I come back next time. The biggest mistake you’re going to make when you’re working with masks is when you actually work on the image instead of the mask itself. So if you start seeing that you’re painting in black, that’s telling you that you have the image layer selected not the mask layer. If you’re working on a mask you really need to have that mask layer selected.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more video tutorials on this YouTube channel and visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and techniques with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Illustrator and lots more.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:20 amNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, March 19th, 2013

Recolor Line Art in Photoshop

Learn how to recolor line art in Photoshop and how to change the colors very easily.

This video shows the use of the Lock Transparent Pixels option in the Layers Palette in Photoshop and also a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can recolor your art in Photoshop. In this video tutorial we’re going to have a look and see how we could recolor this car and how we can do it in a way that would allow us to perhaps change the colors later on.

I’ve got the car on one layer here and the background which is white on another layer. So I’m going to add a layer between these two layers where I can start painting my colors. I’m going to select one of these color schemes that in an earlier video I created from Kuler and I’m going to just grab my toolbar here so that I can grab a paintbrush and a relatively hard paintbrush, not totally hard but relatively hard. I think I’ll just back it off a little bit here to about 84 percent. And on this layer I’m going to start laying down paint. I’ve got my opacity right down from another job that I was doing so let’s just kick that up.

Now I’m just going to paint over the areas where I want the paint to be. And how detailed you are with this and how accurate you are with it depends on just what sort of effect you want. Now I don’t want it to be quite so accurate so while I am going to erase a little bit of this I’m not going to erase all of it because I do want some over-painting. Now I could leave this layer underneath but you’ll see that there is a little bit of white there that’s showing through. I can get rid of this by going to this layer here and setting its blend mode to darken and that will darken the areas but will let the white pixels blend in with the layer below. I think that gives me a better result.

So let’s go now and let’s get another color in this color palette and let’s just go and paint here. And I’m just going to pick the paintbrush up rather than the eraser and let’s Just paint in these areas. Again depending on what sort of effect I want I may be more or less accurate and I can always come back with the eraser and just tidy up if I want to. Most of these areas of the image are also trapped so if I wanted to I could just make a selection from the original image and pour paint into them. But I don’t really want that effect for this image. I just want it to be a little bit more organic than that. And I’m going to add the orange to various portions of the image but I’m going to do it all on this one layer. So that means that later on I can come back and replace the orange with another color and every element that was orange will be replaced accordingly. So let’s just go here. I think I’ve got a slight problem with my green. So I’m just going to continue until I have my car painted to my satisfaction and then we’ll come back and see how we would recolor it.

Now I’ve finished painting the car and I’m ready to go ahead now and have a look at my options for recoloring it. One of the ways I can change the color of this image is to click on the topmost layer and choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue/Saturation. And this allows me to recolor the entire image just using a single adjustment layer. So I’m just going to drag here and then if I drag around on this color selector here you can see that all of the colors bar that sort of gray color are now changing. And they’re changing in the same relationship to each other. So that’s one of the options I have for recoloring this vehicle is to just adjust the hue/saturation of the entire image using a hue/saturation adjustment

layer and just stopping when I get to the color scheme that I want to use for example.

Now another alternative is if I want to just selectively recolor areas because I put each of these colors on a different layer I can then just change those layers. So for example let’s go and pick up another Kuler color scheme. I’m in beach ball but that doesn’t really matter too much. Let’s go and get this beach combo color scheme from Kuler. And if you haven’t yet watched my Kuler video and if you want to know how to do this then I suggest that you go and have a look at it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec2JOWUjr3E

Now my mouse and my video tool aren’t running very well together right now so I’m having a bit of trouble selecting this. Ok, it’s now in the Swatches panel. So I’m going to go ahead and select this blue color as my foreground color. And I want to replace this color green with the blue. Now what I’m going to do is because there’s a lot of detail on this layer and I want to replace the whole lot, I’m just going to lock the pixels on that layer. And what happens when I lock the pixels is if now I press Alt and Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac, what I’m doing is flooding just the filled pixels on this layer with that Color and so now that layer has been recolored. I’m going to select this layer and lock the pixels on it and pick up a color to use for it and then I’ll Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac, to change its color.

And finally I’m going to lock the pixels on this layer and let’s go and get a color to use for that. We’ll choose this darker blue, Alt Backspace, Option Delete. Of course these layers are now locked so if I want to be able to edit them for example erasing any excess paint or making any changes to them, I’ll need to unlock them. But this Lock Transparent Pixels tool allows you to quickly isolate the contents of a layer, select a color to use for it and just Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac, to immediately select and refill all the pixels on that layer.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked this tutorial please give it a thumbs up and feel free to comment on it. Please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and visit me at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Illustrator, GIMP and a whole lot more.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:41 amNo Comments links to this post

Sunday, March 17th, 2013

Photoshop – Using Kuler Color Schemes

Learn how to use Kuler color schemes in Photoshop via the Kuler Extension.

This video includes details of how to add color schemes to swatches and how to edit, customize, and create Kuler color schemes inside Photoshop CS4, CS5 & CS6.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can use Kuler colors in Photoshop. In this video tutorial we’re going to have a look at Kuler which is a way that you can find custom color schemes from inside Photoshop.

Now Kuler is also available online but we’re going to work with the Photoshop extension. And that’s been there since CS4. To see it choose Window and then Extensions and then Kuler. And when Kuler launches you get to see some of the color schemes.

Now I last looked for vintage car and that’s in actual fact what we’re going to look for now. So I’ve typed in vintage car and clicked the Search button and here are color schemes that are related to vintage cars. And if I can’t see anything I like there I can click the View Next Set of Themes option and we can go forward to see other themes. Now these themes have been designed by other people and they’re available online. And people put them up online when they create them and then they are accessible for us to use if we want to use them.

So I’m looking for a theme to use for my car. And let’s say that I find one, so let’s just go and find one that we sort of like. I’m thinking this one here. And if I like it I can just click on this arrow icon here and I can add it to my swatches panel. And when I do that it becomes the last five colors in my swatches panel and I can click on any of these colors to add it as my new foreground color. And that allows me to paint on it for example to recolor my car.

Now if I sort of like it but think I like to edit a color for example maybe the red in this, then I can click here and choose Edit this theme. And this opens the Kuler panel but this time in the edit mode. And this is where I can change some of these colors.

For example I can take the red and walk it around to maybe make it an orange. And if I like that then I can use this particular color scheme. If I want to save this theme to my swatches panel I can do so by clicking here, Add this theme to swatches panel, again this time all five colors go into the swatches panel. I could upload it to Kuler if I wanted to and I can name and save the theme.

You can also create your own custom themes here so for example if you wanted to create an analogous color scheme you could do that. So you could just click there and then you can drag around on these sliders to make the color scheme that you want to use. If you want to use a complementary one you can do that and just drag in and out on these colors to create your own complementary color scheme. And if you like it then you can add it to your swatches panel. You can upload it to Kuler.

Kuler is a really handy tool for finding color schemes if you’re not sure what you want to use and so you can quickly and easily find color schemes and add them to your swatches panel. So it can help you get inspiration when you want to use a limited color palette on your images and you’re just not really inspired to find it yourself.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more tutorials on this YouTube channel. Also visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 9:21 amNo Comments links to this post

Friday, February 15th, 2013

Setup and Wait – the secret of great shots

Often the secret to a great shot is to stop and wait

I shot this image in London recently. I had stopped at a busy street corner waiting for the lights to change and I saw a double decker bus go past and I caught the reflection in the front window. It was bright and colorful – but before I could do anything the bus motored past.

I had a choice, keep walking or stop and wait. I waited. I stood on that street corner waiting for the next double decker bus to come past in a position where the reflection hit the window nicely and without any distracting vehicles between the bus and me. I also wanted a clean bus so the window would reflect well.

It took a while and I shot quite a few buses until I got this shot. It’s a lucky shot in part because I saw the possibilities, the rest of the shot is pure patience – waiting long enough for the situation to occur again.

Do you stop and wait for things to happen or do you just keep moving on?

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:08 amNo Comments links to this post

Monday, January 21st, 2013

Photoshop Layers Tips and Tricks

Learn how to create and use layers in Photoshop, in all versions. Includes how to unlock the background layer and how to add and fill new layers.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to look at some tips, techniques and tricks for working with layers in Photoshop. When you’re working with an image in Photoshop CS4 and later you’ll probably be working in this tabbed interface. It’s not my personal preference but we’re going to look at working in it and then also why you might look at other ways of working in Photoshop.

The first thing we’ll look at is the Background Layer. Now any image that you open from your camera is always going to have just one layer and it’s always going to be the Background Layer and it’s always going to be locked. In addition if you add a layer, I’m just going to add a filled layer to this image, I can’t drag this layer below the Background Layer. I can’t move the Background Layer above it. The Background Layer is in a sense fixed and there’s nothing much we can do with this image until we unlock the Background Layer. There are few a few ways to do that and the easiest I think is just to grab this little icon here which is the Lock icon and just drag and drop it into the trash and then this converts the Background Layer to a regular layer. Let’s just undo that and see some other ways. We can right click and choose Layer from Background. That has the same effect except that this time we get a chance of naming our layer. We can just click Ok. Let’s undo that again. We can also go up here with the layer selected and choose Layer, New and choose Layer from Background and again click Ok. But honestly I think dragging and dropping this Lock icon is probably the easiest way to convert a Background Layer into a regular layer.

Now you saw me earlier create a new layer. There are lots of ways again that you can create a new layer in Photoshop. You can do Layer, New, Layer or if you have a selection you can choose Layer, New, Layer via Copy so the selection will be copied to a new layer or Layer via Cut where your selection will be cut from the current layer and copied to a new layer. But another way of doing that is just clicking here on the New Layer icon that just creates a brand new layer. And you can drag it into position. You can also delete it by just dropping the layer onto the Delete icon. If I hold the Ctrl key as I click this New Layer icon the layer that I add is below the current layer. So just clicking on this icon adds a layer above. If we Ctrl Click on the icon we add a layer below. So you can target exactly where the layer goes. Let’s add one below this image, Ctrl and click on this icon.

Now I want to fill this layer with this green color which is the current foreground color. A quick and easy way to do that is to hold the Alt key and press Backspace on the PC. That’s Option and Delete on the Mac. That fills this layer with the currently selected foreground color. If I do Ctrl Backspace, Command Delete on the Mac, we fill this layer with the background color. Now we could do that just as easily using this Paint Bucket tool, target the layer and click on the layer that we want to add the color to. But it’s whatever suits you. I find those Alt and Option, Ctrl and Command, Backspace and Delete keys really easy to remember and very easy to do. I’m Just going to trash this layer.

Now I have another image open here and I want to start creating a collage from these two so I want to take this particular layer and drop it onto this image here. Now previous to Photoshop CS4 that used to be easy. Now it’s a pain in the neck but we live with it. I’ve created this as a new layer so it’s not the Background Layer any longer. I’m going to target the Move tool and I’m going to with this layer content selected I’m going to drag on it. And I’m going to drag it up here to the image that I want to paste it into and then I’m going to bring my cursor down. And because I want this centered I’ll hold the Shift key to center it over the middle. And now you can see I have two images, one on one layer, one on the other layer.

Now previous to Photoshop CS4 we didn’t have this tabbed interface. What we had was documents that were just floating and that made life just I think a lot easier. So I’m just going to trash this layer now and see. If you want to unfloat your windows by dragging them off the top bar here then you can simply target this layer and just drag and drop it into another image that easily. So I find that an easier way to work. If you do like the tabbed interface then let’s go back into this tabbed interface.

What we could do is choose Arrange two up Vertical and this would allow us to drag and drop. So in this case I’m going to take this Background Layer and drop it into here. So you can do it with the tabbed interface. It’s just your preference of ways of doing it.

Now we’re back with these two images. I’m going to close down one of them. Well actually I’m going to go back and arrange these images so I’m seeing just the images on a tab and I want this particular one which has two layers on it. I’m going to add a layer mask so I’ll just click the layer I want a Layer Mask on and click the Layer Mask. I’m just going to fill this mask with a Gradient because I want to show you a trick with layers. So let’s just blend these two layers together using a mask to do so. I’ve got my mask selected, a black and white gradient and I’m using a linear gradient. I’m just going to drag a simple linear gradient into the image. So we’ve now got these two images blended together, not particularly attractive, but that’s not really a big problem right now. I’m going to add an adjustment layer so let’s just add an Adjustment Layer. We’ll convert this to black and white just so that we have something to look at here. And I’m going to just make the blues a little bit lighter. Now we have this image.

Now if I wanted to sharpen it for example more appropriate to the web or something I would need to flatten it because you can’t sharpen multiple layers at once. So I would typically go and flatten this image. But if I hold Ctrl and Alt and Shift and press the letter E, that’s Command Option Shift E on the Mac, look what happens. I get a layer which is the merged image. It’s called stamp but what I also have is the original layers still underneath so I could use those later if I for example wanted to come back here and make this layer a little bit transparent so we got some of the color removed but not all of the color. So then I could go back and recreate my merged layer with Ctrl Alt Shift E, Command Option Shift E on the Mac. And then I could sharpen this layer. So this is a sort of have your layers and eat it too so you’ve got everything on one layer but you’ve also got the existing layers in case you ever need them.

Now up until now I’ve been dragging and dropping a layer onto the trashcan to remove it. Let’s just undo that. There’s also a way to delete a layer and that is just pressing the Delete key on the keyboard. You want to be in the layer itself. Right now I seem to be stuck in the opacity area here so let’s just click in the layer, press Delete and the layer has been deleted.

So there are some layer tips and tricks for you in Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my tutorials here on this YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more tutorials, tips, tricks and techniques for Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and lots more.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 1:54 pmNo Comments links to this post

Saturday, December 29th, 2012

Photography tip of the day – Hand holding a lens

This simple calculation shows how slow you can shoot and still hand hold your lens

There are some simple calculations you can make to determine the optimal length of time you can hand hold a lens for.

This is important information to know because managing a 70-200mm lens at 70mm is very different to managing it at 200mm. Increasing the zoom reduces the length of time you can handhold the lens because any movement in the lens will be exaggerated at full zoom.

The rule of thumb for calculating the length of time to handhold a lens is to take the inverse of the focal length. So, with a 70-200mm lens at full zoom the calculation gives you a handhold time of 1/200 sec, at 70mm  it is 1/70 sec.

For a 70-300mm lens at full zoom, your limit is around 1/300 sec.

You can improve these times with Image Stabilization or anti shake features if they are built into your lens or camera but these values give you a rough guide to help you avoid capturing blurry photos.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Word Tip – Quick Bold, Italics and Underline

When you want some text to stand out by being bolded you can press Ctrl + B and then type the text. To turn bolding off, press Ctrl + B again. This also works to bold already typed text – select the text and press Ctrl + B to bold it. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl + I can be used to italicize text and use Ctrl + U to underline it.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:office, trevor tip

posted by Trevor Payne @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Friday, December 14th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Photoshop Tip – Layer Style

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.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, trevor tip

posted by Trevor Payne @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post

Wednesday, December 12th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Illustrator Tip – Duplicate, Drag, and repeat

When you need to make a duplicate of an object without copying and pasting it you can do so. With the object selected hold down Alt as you click and drag to where you want the copied object to go. To do it again without having to click and drag, press Ctrl + D on a PC or Command + D on a Mac – it’s the command to repeat the previous action. Repeat as often as required.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, trevor tip

posted by Trevor Payne @ 8:00 am1 Comment links to this post

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

Trevor’s Quick Word Tip – Open, New Document

You can bypass the Open and New document dialogs in Word using shortcut keystrokes. To start a new blank document from inside the document you are working on now, press Ctrl + N. To open a document that already exists to reference or edit it press Ctrl + O and browse to locate and select the document to open and click Open.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:office, trevor tip

posted by Trevor Payne @ 8:00 amNo Comments links to this post

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