Thursday, October 25th, 2012

Droste Effect in Photoshop

Create the Droste Effect in Photoshop CS4 or CS5 or CS5.5 (not supported in CS6). Uses Bender and the Droste Filter.

Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.

Complete transcript of this video:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. I’m going to show you here how to create the Droste effect using Pixel Bender in Photoshop. Now you need Photoshop CS4, CS5 or CS5.5. This does not work at the time of recording with Photoshop CS6. Before we start creating the Droste effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re trying to achieve. And this is the Droste effect that we’re going to create. And you can see it’s just a set of repeating images inside of each other. They’re actually based on a cocoa company’s advertisement. Their box had the cocoa packet being repeated within itself. And it’s been named the Droste effect because of that. Now we’re going to do it using Pixel Bender which is not being supported in Photoshop CS6. And in the description of this video on YouTube you’ll find that there is details about where you can get Pixel Bender and how to install it. So I’m assuming that you’re working with Photoshop CS4, CS5 or CS5.5 and that you have Pixel Bender installed and the Droste filter installed. So let’s get going with this. Let’s just put this image aside and we’ll go and get our original image. As I said it works particularly well when you have somebody off center so let’s just zoom out of this image a little bit. And the first thing we’re going to do is to add some extra area around the image. And I’m going to do this using the crop tool. So I’m going to select the crop tool, select over the image and then hold Alt or Option and then just drag out to create some extra canvas around the area of this image and just click the checkmark here. Now the canvas has come in with the current background color which has suited me really well because that gives me a white edge. Let’s flip these colors around and let’s go and do the same thing. Again, Alt or Option, and this time I’m only going to add a very small black canvas. Now you can do this any way you like. I just want to do it the quickest way possible. So now we have an image that is a black and white frame around our image. We’re going to go and see just how big this image is, reading it off with Image, Image Size. And the image is 1,076 by 905. Now this is an important because the filter needs to know this. So you’ll want to write this down. And we’re ready to get started with the filter. So we’re going to choose Filter and then Pixel Bender and then Pixel Bender Gallery. Now we already have the Droste filter selected. If you haven’t used this filter before you’ll probably have something like Cassini so you’ll just want to go down and select Droste. And this is the Droste effect. And we’re just going to first of all regardless of what it looks like here we’re going to start with entering the values that we read off for the size of the image. So it’s 1,076 by 905. And then we’ll adjust things like the radius inside and radius outside when we actually need to. We’re going to leave strands ate 1 and periodicity at 1. Strands and periodicity are the number of times that this will rotate. So if we send it up to 2 you’ll see that we get something that’s actually got two rotations. We don’t want that for this effect. We really only want one. And periodicity at 1 is fine too. The zoom is going to allow us to zoom in or out of this image. And at the moment we’re just going to leave zoom all the way out. Center is going to center the image itself. So when I drag on this the image rolls over, not the center of the actual portion of the image that we’re working with. You can see that if I just center shift I’m getting a very different effect on the image. Now center shift is something that I typically will adjust because I want to make sure that she is sitting opposite the image and the image is not actually over the top of her which it would be here. I’m going to adjust the rotation because at the moment it’s rotated at an angle and I really want it straight. So I’m going to rotate it a bit so that she is straight up and down. And having done that I want to bring the center of the image down. So I’m just going to adjust the vertical and perhaps also the horizontal so that I get the effect that I’m looking for. And I can combine that with zoom. Background RGBA is just the background of the image if this were showing any background, which it’s not. And levels and levels start you just don’t need to be working with at all. Transparent inside just makes it circular so we don’t want to use that. There’s really nothing below these settings that we’ve been working with that we really even want to see. So let’s just check and make sure that we’re getting the result that we want. Perhaps adjust these radius values to get a bigger image. And I’m thinking I like that a bit better, straighten it up with the rotate, perhaps move the center a little bit. And when we’re happy with the result that we’ve got, we’re just going to click Ok. And there’s our finished Droste effect. If we added some more levels we would see some more repeats in here. You can see that the repeats have sort of stopped. So we could go back and add more levels and that would give us a better result. Let’s just go and do that because all our settings will be still in place. And so what we’ll do is we’ll just increase the number of levels here and click Ok. And that’s giving us more repeats in the image here. But there’s the Droste effect filter created using the Pixel Bender plug-in in Photoshop CS4, CS5 and CS5.5. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked this video please give it a thumbs up in YouTube. You’ll find more video tutorials on my YouTube channel and look out at projectwoman.com for more tutorials and articles on Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.

Helen Bradley

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

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Photoshop Heart Shape Crop

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.

Helen Bradley

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

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

Thursday, October 18th, 2012

Photoshop Masks 101 – Spot Color effect

Create a spot color or isolated color effect in Photoshop. The image is black and white and only a portion of the image is in color. Learn how to do this and how to get started with masks as you do this.

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 begin to use masks in Photoshop and I’m assuming that you’ve never used a mask before. And so that we actually create something in this tutorial we’re going to use it for a spot color effect. Before we get started on actually introducing what a mask is let’s have a look at the effect that we’re looking at here. This is my original image and it was shot in color on a very wet night in Wales. And what I’ve done is converted the image to black and white but I’ve left this person in the middle of the image in color. And I’ve done it in such a way that we can edit it. So if I didn’t make the selection correctly to begin with I can adjust it at any time. I can also remove the effect. So you can see here I’ve removed the mask here and the image has been reverted to fully black and white. I can reinstate the mask and this converts the image into black and white but leaving this person in color. This is a black and white adjustment layer here, a very simple adjustment layer. But because I’ve got a mask here I’m able to control where the color is on the image. And with masks you can paint with black and white. Black will reveal the layer underneath or the color underneath and white hides it. So if I get a really big brush right now, let’s go and get a really big brush on this image, and just see what happens when I paint on that mask. Can you see that I’m bringing color back into the image because I’m painting was black. If I paint with white I’ll removes the color from the image. I’m painting on the mask so I have the mask targeted but my paint is being painted onto the image itself. So I’m painting here. You can see that the color is going on the mask and we’re poking a hole in this black and white layer to see the color below. If we change to paint in white we’re removing it so we’re seeing what is on this particular layer. So now that we’ve seen what we’re aiming for let’s go and see how we could achieve that result with another image. Here I have another image. This one was shot in Cambridge. And I’m just going to size it down. And to make a start on this image we’re going to convert it to black and white using an adjustment layer. I’ll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, black and White and click Ok. And now I can make my black and white adjustment. But because my phone boxes are going to be colored red later on I’m not worried about the color in the phone boxes but I am worried about how the black and white is converted in the image around the edges. So I’m just going to focus on these edges. I do want it to look a little bit dark. So I’m probably going to go to the black end of the scale on most of these. And there’s my black and white image. And now we’re ready to add the color back into it. There any number of ways that we can bring the color back into the image. I’m going to show you a couple of them. Because we created a new adjustment layer you can see that there’s already a mask in place. So we can use this mask just by painting on it. Because it’s white that’s automatically telling us that we’re seeing just the black and white elements in the image. So if we start painting with black, and I’m just going to choose a paintbrush to use, I’m going to choose a slightly softer one to start off with. Now if we paint with black on the mask we’re going to start seeing the color appear underneath. And if we go too far then we can paint over it by painting in white. And you can see that we would really need a harder edge brush to really get a good effect here. But we could get a soft effect if we wanted to with this sort of almost not really quite transparent but it almost is in the edges brush. So I could just brush that effect on. It’s not fully opaque at these edges but it’s still giving me a spot color effect. Now I’m just going to trash that mask, drag it off and I’m going to delete the mask. At any time I want to add a mask I can just click this Add Layer Mask icon and that will add it to an adjustment layer or to a regular layer. Now let’s turn off this entire adjustment layer. Let’s go to the background layer and let’s use the quick selection Tool to select over these telephone boxes because this is another way that we could mask things. And now because I have my selection in place we can go back to our adjustment layer, turn it on, make sure I have the mask selected. I have black as my foreground color, I can Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac to fill the mask with the black color that then shows the red through it. If I press Ctrl or Command D I’ll deselect the selection. And now I can zoom into areas that I think may need to be fixed a little bit, move them into position and go and get my black paintbrush. I’m going to make it a fairly hard edge paintbrush because the edges of these phone boxes are pretty hard. And I’m just going to paint over these edges and just make sure that in every place that I created my mask or my selection that everything is working correctly. I’ve actually got some color here so I’m going to switch colors by pressing X to make white my foreground color. I’m just going to tidy up a little area here where I had too much of the background color. And now I’ve gone the other way, again press X and this time bring it back in by painting with black. I’m painting on the mask. Although I’m using the image, I’m actually physically painting on the image but it’s appearing on the mask layer. And again I can just check around here to make sure that I have everything looking the way I want it to look. Let’s just zoom out again. Now there’s another way that I could have created this entire effect and that would have been to have made a duplicate of this background layer, Layer, Duplicate Layer. And I could have converted this to black and white just using Image, Adjustments, Black and White. Now for this one I’m just going to select the default adjustment. And now I’ve got a black and white layer on top of a color layer. Again I can add my mask here and I could paint on that with the paintbrush and black paint to bring my color back in or I could go to this layer and make my selection on this layer just as we did earlier. I’ll just go and quick mask this, really quick mask it. This is a very quick and dirty mask this one. Ok and then let’s go back into this layer and because I have this selection made, in fact it needs to be a little bit better made, I can just Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac to again mask this layer. And then we can go back and tidy it up with the paintbrush and just paint over any areas where we want to bring back the color from the layer underneath. So this is done with two layers, one of which is black and white and one of which is color. But you could do it with an adjustment layer. There are lots of different ways to do it. It’s this Add Mask icon that allows us to add a mask. We’ll always put the mask on a top most layer because we want to poke a hole through this layer to see the one below. We’ll paint with black or white on the mask, and we can also paint with shades of gray. So let’s go and get a shade of grey here. It’s under my paintbrush so let’s see what happens when I paint with it. What we get is part of the current layer here but not all of it. So you can see I’m getting a mix here of the layer below and this layer because I’m painting with gray. Anywhere I paint with black I’m going to get only the layer below. Anywhere I paint with white I’m only going to get this particular layer. So there’s an introduction to masks by creating a spot color effect which is fully editable. Provided we save this as a PSD file, the image is going to be editable at any time by just painting on that mask. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked this video please give it a thumbs up on YouTube. Subscribe to my channel if you’d like to know when new videos are being released. And visit Projectwoman.com for more tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.

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

Monday, October 15th, 2012

Photoshop Make Custom Buttons

Make your own custom glossy buttons in Photoshop – shows how to layer pieces on top of each other, and how to use Styles, a gradient and Warp to quickly and simply create a button in just a few steps.

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 make custom buttons in Photoshop. This video was really born of necessity. What I needed was for a project that I was working on I needed a stop and a go sign. And all I could find on the stock websites that I liked and that really worked for me was a stop sign. I couldn’t find a matching go sign. So instead of buying just the stop button and then going ahead and reworking it to make my go button I decided I’d make it from scratch.

So here’s my stop button, and we’re going to make it. And I’ll show you have to turn it into a go button so that you can do that as well. I’m going to start with a new document. And I’m going to start with a relatively small one but you can make yours as large as you want and if you were using this at a lot size you’d want a large size document. So I’m just going to click Ok. And it has a white background and that’s Ok for now.

So I’m going to choose Window and then Layers so we can see our layers palette. I’m going to start with the shape that I’m going to use. So I’m going to show my toolbar which has disappeared here, and I’m going to go and get a custom shape. Now there is already a shape that I can use here and what it is is the polygon shape. And all I need to do is to set the number of sides.

Now this is a sided figure so it’s already preset. Let’s just click on a new layer and we’re going to choose pixels. And I’m going to go and get a red color to use. So now that I have Pixel selected and my red color and a brand new layer I’m just going to draw my polygon. Now I’m going to hold the Shift key so it’s constrained to a regular shape. And because it’s being drawn in exactly the wrong place I’m going to hold the Spacebar down and move it into the middle of my image. And only when I’m ready am I actually going to let go the left mouse button which I’m doing now. As you can see it’s not actually rotated correctly but we can fix that with the move tool.

I’m going to go to Edit Free Transform and I’m just going to rotate it 15 degrees because that’s all it needs to be straightened up. So we’ve got our starting shape now. Now we need this white bit. So what I’m going to do is to actually just put this on a new layer. So I’m going to create New Layer via Copy which means I’m going to copy the exact shape into a brand new layer. I’m going to make white my foreground color. I’m going to fill this layer with white using Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac.

Now if I click on this icon here you can see that now I have a white shape. I want it to smaller than this bottom shape. So I’m going to click and drag on the corner but I’m going to do it with the Alt key selected because that is going to size that relative to the middle portion of the shape. So now I’m just going to size it in and let go the left mouse button and then let go the Alt key. So now I have a second shape on that layer.

So again once I’ve created this layer I’m going to choose Layer New Layer via Copy. And this time we’re going back to our red color. So I have that selected. I’m going to click here to lock these pixels, Alt Backspace Option Delete to fill it with that color. And again I’m going to size it in by dragging with the move tool and do that with the Alt key selected so that I can actually set this border here so it’s sort of even all the way around and then let go and click the checkmark here. And now we have our shapes.

Now we’ve got basically all the bits that we need except for the text. So let’s go ahead and put the text on. So I’m going to go and grab the text tool. I’m going to reset these so that I have white as my foreground color. I’m just going to go and find a font to use. I’m really not that fussed about what font we use because you can go ahead and find a really good font yourself. I think I might just use Calibri. Nowhere near big enough in actual fact, so let’s just go in here and let’s make it 200.

Not nearly big enough even still. 350 pixels is pretty good. And let’s just move that down into position. Ok, so there’s my stop sign. What it’s missing right now is this sort of look that gives it a sort of dimension. Now the dimension that we’re going to give our shape is going to be created using styles so I’m going to click here and add a style. And I’m going to choose bevel and emboss. Now we’re on the back layer so we’re on this outside edge. And what I want to do is to add quite a deep bevel. And we’re just going to size that to suit.

Now you can see that the highlight mode here is Screen but it doesn’t have to be screen. We could actually multiply it and we could use a slight color here if we wanted to darken up the edges of the highlight. And here around the shadow areas we’ve got again multiply and a darker color. In this case I may want my dark red, but I may want it a bit redder. So instead of using a sort of black color to multiply I’m multiplying with a darker version of the color I’m using. But you can play around with that.

You can also play around with the shape of the bevel. So you can make it all sorts of different shapes. And you can even click here and change it manually by dragging on the curve. But I’m just looking for a beveled edge here. And it needs to be an inner bevel, but we could make it chisel hard or we could make it chisel soft as well. They’re alternatives that we could use. Once we’ve done that I’ll just click Ok. So that’s taken care of the outside edge, and we’ve got the white mark. All we need to do is to deal with the middle.

So again I’m going to select the middle and I’m going to again add a slight bevel to it. So let’s go to bevel and emboss. This time again in a bevel I want quite a large one, but I want it to be really, really soft in shadow. I just want it there, only just barely. So I’m going to call that good for that inner bevel right now. If you have a look at this particular stop sign you can see that it’s got a line through it. And now we’re going to create that affect again here in Photoshop.

There are any number of ways that you can create that sort of custom shape. But I’m going to show you just one way that you can do it. I’m going to start with a new layer and I’m going to drag a rectangle on it. And this rectangle is going to be over the top of my stop sign. And I’m going to go and grab the same colors as I’ve used in my stop sign, this red, and I’m going to choose a slightly darker version of the red. And let’s make this a slightly lighter version of it, but again all in the same color palette.

Now that I have these colors I’m going to fill this shape with a gradient made from those colors. And the gradient I want is this foreground to background gradient. So I’m going to select it, and I’m going to drag it into here. And I want a linear gradient. And I want it the other way around because I want the lightness at the top. So I’m going to reverse it. So once I’ve got my linear gradient in place I’m going to call that good. And I’m going to then clip it because what I’ve got right now is a gradient that’s going to give me the beginnings of the effect that I want.

The problem is is that it’s much bigger than the shape underneath. But if I create a clipping mask it’s all going to work perfectly. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. And you can see that that shape is now clipped to the shape of the layer below. Now I just need to drag down the opacity a bit. Ok, now we want to make that nice shape. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Edit and then Transform and then Warp. And now I can warp this shape to the shape that I want. So I’m just going to drag down on this edge. And I’m going to look to make a smooth warp over my image.

If I want some more darkness into my image I can just pull up the darker edge of this rectangle. I don’t want to twist these if I can help it. I did in my shape and it didn’t end up quite the way I wanted it to look. But here we’ll be a bit more careful. So now that I’ve got my sort of warp look I’m just going to click the checkmark here. And that’s now in place. And if I want it a little bit differently I can just drag on this shape and just bring it down or I could re-warp it. But there’s the basics of a stop sign. And that’s all been created now inside Photoshop. So I could save this off as stop. Now to recolor this and make this the go sign all I need to do is to put in an adjustment layer.

So I’ll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue/Saturation and click Ok. And this hue/saturation adjustment layer is going to affect everything below it. And so all I need to do is to drag around until I find a green for go. And somewhere in here is a pretty good green, decrease the saturation a bit and just work out exactly where my correct green is. Ok. So now we’ve actually turned stop into go. And we’ve done that just using this layer. And all I’d need to do now is to just go ahead and type a layer that has go written on it. Let’s click the text tool. Let’s make sure we’re typing in white, click here and just type go. So my stop sign is now a go sign.

Here is the stop version. And then with the adjustment layer that changes the color and then a text layer here’s my go sign. And these two signs match exactly. And it was really fairly quick to create them inside Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked this tutorial place give it a thumbs up and like it on YouTube so that you tell others that it’s a good tutorial. You’ll find more of my tutorials on this YouTube channel. If you subscribe you’ll be advised when new videos are launched. And look out for my website at projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tutorials, Tips and tricks for these applications.

Helen Bradley

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

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Lightroom Import Presets

Speed up and streamline importing images into Lightroom using Import Presets. Learn how to create and edit presets for importing images into a Lightroom catalog, includes backup on import, renaming, import presets, choosing previews and folders for storing images.

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 you can streamline the importing process in Lightroom with import presets. An import preset helps you speed up the process of importing images into Lightroom because you don’t have to make all the settings each time that you import. I’m in the Library module. I’m just going to click here on Import. I already have a disk in the drive. I’ve got a camera card in the drive. And we’re going to have a look at an existing import preset because you can see that the default here right now is craft images. What this is is in import preset that I created to import images that I shoot of the crafts that I make. And it has certain settings already in it. There’s no file renaming because I don’t rename my files. Apparently there are no develop settings here but there is some metadata that’s being added to the images as they’re imported. And the destination is already selected. You can see here that the destination is craft images. This Into Subfolder is not actually being used because it’s not checked. So in actual fact everything is going straight into the craft images folder. So let’s go and create an import preset. And the way that we do it is just to make the settings that we usually want to use. Here’s the camera card. I only want to bring in new photos. In this case these are daily photos. So let’s just check. I do want standard previews made. I don’t want to import suspected duplicates. If I wanted to make a second copy I could automatically set that up but I’m just seeing that my backup drive is not attached at the moment. So let’s leave that blank. If I wanted to rename files I could select that and set up the renaming, but I don’t usually do that. Apply during import. Now there is a develop setting that I want to use here. And here it is in my user presets. And it’s a camera standard profile. What that does is makes my images when they appear inside Lightroom look the way they did on the back of the camera. And then I can go to metadata and I can select the metadata. I’m just going to click Edit Presets just to see what this metadata preset looks like and make sure it’s the one that I want to apply. Well no, that one looks a bit empty. So let’s go to Helen Bradley copyright. This looks like the right one. So I’ll click Done. Now I’m not going to apply any keywords to these image. The problem with keywords is that they’re going to be applied to all of these images. So you can see that there’s a whole range of images here. And there’s really not a keyword that I would apply to everyone of these images. So I usually keyword later on if I keyword at all. So let’s just close Apply during import. And now I need to select my destination. Now I already have a folder for these images on my removable disk. It’s actually this one. Toshiba hard drive green is where my images are kept. I’m going to go into photos and I want to pick up my daily walk from 2010 onwards. So this is the folder in which the images are going to be placed. And once I’ve made all these settings I can go ahead and import the images. But if I want to use these settings or most of these settings again in future I’m better off creating them as an import preset. So I’m going to choose Save current settings as a new preset. And here is my preset dialog. And I’m just going to call this daily walk, whatever it is that is going to remind me that these are these images and click Create. And now I have an import preset that’s going to be saved with Lightroom. It’s going to be available from this dialog anytime I come into Lightroom. All I need to do is to select daily walk and all these settings will be automatically applied to my import. Now if for example I do go and reconnect my backup drive then I could click here and just make a change to the settings. It’s not going to change the import preset but I can actually vary these things if I want to. But it gives me most of the settings that I need most of the time. So I’m going to go ahead and just click Import. So there’s the basics of using an import preset in Lightroom. You’ll find that if you repeatedly choose to use the same settings that an import preset will save you a lot of that setup time. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video training session. If you liked this video please click the Like button here in YouTube to tell others that you liked it. If you’d like to see more of these videos and be notified when they’re released please subscribe to my channel. You’ll find lots of other Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom tutorials in this YouTube channel. And visit my website at Projectwoman.com for more blog posts and interesting articles on these programs.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

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

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

Lightroom Frame a photo

Learn how to add an image as a frame to use in Lightroom to print around your images. Uses the Identity Plate option to do this. Shows you how to create the effect using one of our frames that we sell here and also how to do this using your own hand drawn frame.

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 you can frame an image ready for printing inside Lightroom so you don’t even have to leave Lightroom to add a frame to it. Before we start on this process let’s have a look and see what our end product is going to be. I have here Lightroom open and you could do this in Lightroom 4 or 3 or 2. It’s not specific to Lightroom 4. I’m in the print module and here I have a series of images that I want to print. And what I’ve done is I’ve created this frame that now sits over this image. Now you can see that the frame pulls apart. So this image can be altered. So for example I can just change the image there, move the frame back into position, and I’m ready to print this. Now I can print it direct to the printer or I have these going to print to JPG because I want to use them on my blog. Now we sell these frames on projectwoman.com, and I’m using one of the frames that we sell. But let’s have a look and see how you can do that with your own hand-drawn frame or how you could use one of our frames to do it. And to do that we’re going to start in Photoshop if you’re using your own frame because you’ll need to create it yourself. Here I am inside Photoshop and I have a frame that I’ve already created. Now what I did was I took a piece of white drawing paper and a nice thick black felt tip pen and I drew this frame. And then I scanned it in using my scanner. But if you don’t have a scanner you could always just take a photograph of it. Now I’ve cleaned this up. And what I’ve done is I’ve cut out the middle so this is hollow in here. If I add a new layer below this, and let’s just go and get my Tools Palette, and let’s drop some color in there so that you can see that it’s actually a hollow frame. So let’s just go and get a different color to the frame color. And I’m just adding a filled layer beneath it so you can see that there is actually a hollow in the middle of the frame. And that’s really important because that’s where your picture is going to go. And here my frame I’ve added a boarder to it, so a plain blue border. But you don’t have to have a border. You could remove it. And this is just white with black. So once you’ve got your frame created what you’ll want to do is to save it, and I’ve saved mine as a PNG file. Now the reason I’ve used PNG is twofold. First of all you get a nice flattened document. But PNG will store transparency. You can’t store transparency in a JPG file. So you can’t use JPG for this because you won’t have a hole in the frame for your picture to sit in. So what I’ve done is create it as a PNG with this hollow cutout because when it comes to Lightroom that hole is still going to be there. So having saved it to disk, let’s just do that, File Save As. I just want to put this in a place that I know where it’s going to be. So I have a folder here for video images. So I’m just going to put my hand-drawn frame in there and just click Save so I know exactly where it is. I’m just taking the options here, just the standard PNG options from Photoshop. So let’s close that out, close down Photoshop for now and let’s go and get Lightroom again. Okay, so let’s go and get a different folder of images because I don’t want to start with anything that we’re sure of. And I know I’ve got some really nice Safari West animals. So let’s go with the animals. And let’s go to the Print Module. And let’s go to a brand new layout. So let’s close down this preview. And I’m just going to go and start with a brand new layout. It can be anything at all. I would set up my page. And I want to be working in landscape. I’m going to click Ok. And I want this to go to a JPG file. So I’m just going to set JPG there, and I’m working in a landscape letter size image. So everything’s looking perfect there except of course that this is not what I want my print job to look like. I have an Identity Plate turned on. So I’m going to turn that off for now. I’m going to get rid of these pieces. Okay, so now I’m going to add my first image. So let’s go and find an image that is in landscape mode because my frame is a landscape image. So let’s just go and get something. There’s some distinctly not Safari images in this folder by the looks of it. I really like this one so I’m going to add it in here. So I’m just placing it. Because we’re using a custom package I can just drag and drop the image into position. And Lightroom won’t let me skew this image so whatever I do with it it cannot be skewed out of alignment. So I’m just going to put the image there. And what I want to do is to put my frame over the top. It looks like we’ve got a few settings coming in with this image such as a photo border and an inner stroke. I’m going to take all of those off. And now let’s go and get our frame. And the way that we add the frame is from the Page Panel here. We going to add it as an Identity Plate. So I’m going to click to select Identity Plate. But I want to add my own so I’m going to click here and choose Edit. Now the type of identity plate I’m going to use is Graphical. So I’ll select that, and I’m going to locate the file that I created. Now one thing I didn’t mention that is critical is that the dimensions of this frame need to be the same dimensions as the image that you’re working on. So I’ve made mine the size of a letter size sheet of paper. Now it’s very large. That’s fine. I’m going to use it anyway. And I want to save this. So I’m just going to click Save As. And I’m going to put this blue hand-drawn frame and click Save, so now I can use it anytime and click Ok. And the frame is now added to the image. And I can size it. Now the reason why I have to make sure that it is a letter size frame is that Lightroom won’t let me scale it any larger than letter size. So I have to make sure that it’s in the correct proportions before I start. And I’ve got grids and guides turned off so we’ll be able to see everything really clearly. Now the reason why the frame is in front, and we do of course want it in front but we do need to check and make sure that it is in front, is that Render Behind Image is not turned on. So if we had it behind image than it would be behind the image. We want it on the top. Now I’m ready to print that. And once I’ve printed that I can then use it for another image. And all I’m going to do is move the frame out of the way a little bit, drag and drop a replacement image into position and then just put my frame back in. Now I’m ready to print the second image and then I could continue through to create other images ready for printing. If I want to save this, and typically having done the work of setting this up I would want to save it, I can either create a saved print which will save this print layout and the image or I can just save the user template. So I’m going to click here. I’m going to call this blue frame template. Blue frame one up will tell me that it’s going to be just one up, one image on this, and just click Create. And it’s going here into User Templates. And that means that I can select it any time in the future for any image at all, and it’s going to be preset for me. So there you have the ability to create your own framing for images inside Lightroom.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

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

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Photoshop Create Plaids & Checks

Learn how to make plaids and checks in Photoshop very quickly. See how to save the plaids as patterns and how to  fill a shape with a pattern in all versions of Photoshop.

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 video I’m going to show you how to create quick and easy plaids and checks in Photoshop. And this is going to work with pretty much any version of Photoshop. Before we start creating our plaid pattern let’s have a look and see exactly what we mean by creating plaids and checks. This is a simple sort of gingham style pattern that we’re going to create, and I’ve used it to fill a shape. And you’re going to see how you can do that as well. So let’s just tuck that away for now and let’s go and create our pattern. I’m going to choose File New and I’m going to create a workspace that is a fixed size and it’s going to be square. So I’m going to make this 200 pixels by 200 pixels because that’s going to be nice and easy to see. And I’m going to for this one create background contents as white because I actually want white as the basis of my pattern. So I’m quite happy to have white there. I’m going to choose View Rulers because I want to see my ruler right now. And I want to add two guides just to make sure that this is perfect. I’m going to choose New Guide and I’m going to make this 50 percent Horizontal and then add another one at 50 percent Vertical. These guides are going to help me draw in my shape. So I’m going to select the Rectangular Marque Tool and drag over one side of this shape. I need to work on a new layer so I’m going to click the New Layer icon here. And let’s choose a different color to the one we were working on before. Let’s create a sort of purple gingham this time. So I have purple selected as my foreground color, a brand new layer. I can fill this layer automatically with the foreground color by pressing Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac. I’m going to add another layer. Still with this Marque Tool selected, this time I’m going to select the top area here, and I’m going to fill it again with the same color, Alt Backspace, Option Delete. And there’s the basics of my gingham check pattern. The only thing is is it doesn’t quite look the way it’s supposed to look yet. What I’m going to do is to make these layers both 50 percent opacity. And when I make both these layers 50 percent opacity you can see that we’re getting this sort of gingham check look. And I’m pressing Ctrl D, Command D on the Mac, to deselect my selection. To get rid of my guides I’m going to just click Clear Guides. So this is my gingham pattern. To make it a pattern I’m going to press Ctrl A or choose Select All to select everything and choose Edit and then Define Pattern. And I’m going to call this purple gingham and just click Ok. Now that pattern is created so I can just trash that document. But we might save it just for the moment because we might come back to that in a minute. Now let’s see how we could use our plaid pattern. I’m going to choose File New and create a letter size document with a white background. And here it is. Here I’m going to click the Custom Shapes Tool and I already have this rabbit shape selected. But you could select any shape. And I’m going to show you how to do this in any version of Photoshop because Photoshop CS6 is a little different. But the procedure I’m going to show you will work with any version. So with the custom shapes tool selected we’re going to make sure that we have path selected here. There are three options and they’re just different icons in earlier versions of Photoshop. But you want the Paths option. And we’re going to drag our rabbit shape. I’m holding Shift as I do so to constrain it to those proportions. Now in any version of Photoshop you can choose Layer New Fill Layer Pattern. Click to accept pattern fill and then you’ll find that it’s filled with the most recently created pattern which is the pattern we just created. If the scale of the pattern is too big, which it is really for me, I want to scale this down to 25 percent. I can just select Scale 25 percent and click Ok. And there is my rabbit filled with my pattern. Now in Photoshop CS6 you can do it a little differently. What we’re going to do is to choose a shape. And in this case we can fill our shape with a pattern. So now let’s grab our rabbit. And you can see that by default this is now created. It’s actually got a stroke on it. I don’t want any stroke. And with my pattern fill I can scale my pattern here in Photoshop CS6. So CS6 just makes it a little easier to do. But you can still do the same process in any version of Photoshop. Now let’s just go back for a minute to our original shape which is this one here. We could do some other things to make it a little bit more plaid like. For example I’m going to add a new layer, drag it to the very top, and I’m going to drag a very small stripe through here. And I’m going to fill it with a slightly darker version of this purple. So this is the foreground color, Alt Backspace, Option Delete. And then I could add another one again through here. This one I’m going to do twice. So I’m going to select the selection I have here and I’m going to Alt drag on it to create a couple of lines. Actually let’s do three. And I’m going to call that my new plaid shape. Having done that lets press Ctrl A to select everything, Edit Define Pattern. This is going to be my new pattern. It’s a little bit off in the spacing but I’m not going to worry too much about that. Let’s turn everything off here. Let’s go and grab a new shape. So for this one we’ll do a flower shape. And again, I’m just going to choose, well let’s go with Photoshop CS6. Let’s grab our pattern there and no stroke and just draw my flower shape holding Shift to constrain it to the shape. And you can see now that we have a more complex pattern fill for our object. We can again scale that down to 50 percent. But you can create plaids any way that you want to, and they’re going to fill any shape in Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. You can find more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more articles on Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

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

Thursday, September 27th, 2012

Photoshop make stripes quickly and easily

Learn how to make colored stripes in Photoshop. This uses a mosaic filter to turn a regular image into blocks of color from which stripes are extracted. Once you’ve done that you can then create a madras check from this stripe image and I’ll show you how to do that too.

Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.

Complete transcript of this video:

I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create quick and easy stripes in Photoshop. And this is going to work in practically any version of Photoshop. Before we start and I show you exactly how to create this effect let’s have a look and see the kind of effect that we are creating. What I have here is a series of stripes in Photoshop. It’s a document that is full of stripes. And you can see here that I’ve also been able to create this as a sort of plaid look. So we’re going to look at both options here, and we’re going to create this set of stripes from a photograph really, really easily. So let’s just get rid of that document. And let’s go to our starter document. Now you can start with any document at all. I like to choose something that’s in the sort of range of colors that I want to see in my stripes. This is what I got my stripes from. So if you want pink and blue stripes then find an image that has say pink and blue flowers in it, or you could adjust it with a Hue/ Saturation adjustment later on. But we’re going to start with a filter. I’m going to choose Filter and then Pixelate and then Mosaic. And what the Mosaic Filter does is it turns this image into a sort of mosaic look. And what I want is nice big cells because that’s going to give me the stripes that I’m going to use in a minute, and the bigger the cells the less stripes I’m going to have. So I’m going to just choose quite a big value for us for now and just click Ok. And so there are the beginnings of my stripes. And now we’re going to use a tool, probably a tool that you’ve never used before and wondered what it’s purpose was, but this is this tool here. It’s the Single Row Marque Tool. And we’re going to click at the edge of a row because we want to take just one row of this image. And these are going to be the colors that we’re going to use. So I’m looking for something here with some blues and pinks and yellows in it. So let’s just select this one here. So I’ve selected a single row. And I’m going to choose Edit Copy because that’s copied that row. And now let’s create a new document. And I’m going to make it nice and big so let’s say three-and-a-half thousand pixels by three-and-a-half thousand pixels. And it can have white as its background. That’s Ok. I’ll click Ok. I’m going to add a new layer. And I’m going to paste my copied shape into it, Edit Paste. And it’s coming in here in the middle. It’s just such a small line, it’s almost impossible to see. But I’m going to target the Move Tool just by pressing the letter V. And now I’m going to drag it to fill the image because these are my stripes. And when I click the checkmark I now have my stripes. Now I’ve lost a bit of the yellow off the edge. So maybe I can just bring it in here. And I’ve got some slightly thinner stripes. And if I don’t like this color here I could just drag that off the edge and not even use it. So now I’m going to crop my image because I want to crop it to delete the cropped pixels. So I’ll just press Enter to crop it to size. And there is our stripe. So we could create this as a pattern if we wanted to use it over and over again, or if we just want to use it for now then we have it in place. So let’s see how we would make that into a plaid. I’m just going to duplicate this layer because I want to keep my stripes just in case I want to use them again later on. And what I’m going to do is reduce the opacity of this layer to about 60 percent, and then I’m going to duplicate it again. So I’ve got two layers each of about 60 percent opacity. And all I’m going to do is target this top layer, let’s grab the Move Tool, and I’m going to rotate it around 180 degrees. So I’m just going to hold the Shift key as I do that so it’s rotated to exactly the right number of degrees and just click the checkmark here. So now I have this sort of plaid madras sort of stripe pattern. I could change the blend mode if I wanted to by targeting the top layer and change the blend mode to something like Overlay. And that will give me a contrastier look. I could also try Difference or Exclusion. And that’s making a sort of otherwise brown and green pattern turn into a blue sort of pattern. So we have all sorts of options here. Here’s our original stripes garnered from our original photograph. And then what I’ve done is created two copies of it at an angle to each other and 60 percent opacity with a blend mode to create something that’s more like a madras stripe pattern. And this could be copied as a pattern or saved as a pattern by choosing Edit Define Pattern. We could use that as a pattern at any time. Before I create it as a pattern I’m just going to make sure that I’ve got rid of those pixels at the edge. I want it to be exactly square, and that’s not exactly square. But you can see the possibilities of working with stripes and patterns in Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. You can find more of my Illustrator, Photoshop and Lightroom videos on this YouTube channel. And visit projectwoman.com for more blog posts and Photoshop tutorials.

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

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

Monday, September 24th, 2012

Photoshop CS6 Shapes, Paths, Vectors and Selections

Photoshop CS6 has new tools for working with Paths and Shapes. Learn how to use these and how to turn shapes into paths and how to fill and stroke paths and shapes.

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 we’re going to look at the new vector tools in Photoshop CS6. And we’re going to answer questions like what’s a path, how do I find it, how do I turn a path into a selection, how do I make a path from a selection, and how I can work with the new vector tools.

Photoshop CS6 has some new vector tools and we’re going to have a look at those in this video. And we’re going to work out how you can use those tools to do exactly what you want to do.

Now the Custom Shape tool is in the position it always used to be and it’s sharing a toolbar position with things like the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon and Line tool. And all of these are Path tools. But we’re going to select the Custom Shape because it’s a little bit of an interesting tool.

And here are my Custom Shapes so I can select any of these custom shapes to draw on my space. Now I’m going to choose a filled shape such as this one here and just click it so it is selected. Now I can draw it on my workspace, but the way I draw it depends on what I have chosen here.

And I can choose a shape, a path or pixels, and we’re going to look at the shape and path options. So let’s start with shape. And let’s select some colors for this shape because when you’re working with shapes color is important. Now I have a shape selected I’m just going to drag this flower shape into my workspace.

If I hold the Shift key it’s going to be constrained to the shape of a flower that was originally drawn. If I don’t hold the Shift key you can see that I can make it wide or tall. And if I draw it with the Alt key pressed it’s going to be drawn around my initial starting point. Let’s just let go of that for now and let’s click and drag here to start drawing my flower.

Now if I want it placed around the initial starting point I’m going to press the Alt key and you can see that it jumps back into position. If I add the Shift key I can get it constrained to the right shape. And only when I let go the left mouse button does anything happen.

So what’s happening is I’m getting a filled flower. And we can see up here that the fill is the current foreground color, but it can be changed. While this shape is selected we can select a different fill for it. You can see that blue is now its fill but that’s not the foreground color for our workspace. And you can see that it has no stroke but we can add a stroke if we want to.

So let’s add a pink stroke to this shape. At the moment the Stroke is 3 points but we can increase that so we can make it thicker or thinner. And we can also change the nature of the stroke. For example we could have a dashed stroke or a dotted stroke. And there are other options that we’ll look at in future videos. But this shape is a path, so we can actually make changes to it.

I’m going to grab here the Direct Selection Tool because that allows me to select points on this path. And you can see by dragging over these points I can select anyone of these points. I’m just going to turn the stroke off for the moment because I think it might be easier to see the points without the stroke in the way.

When one of these points is filled and the others are empty this is the one that we’re going to affect. So let’s just drag out on that. And you can see that my shape has now changed shape because I have altered that point. So it is a path that is able to be adjusted. But still we can change the fill. And when we change the fill the fill of the entire shape is affected.

When we add a stroke back onto this the stroke of the entire shape is being affected by our choices. Now there are some other things that we can do with shapes. I’m just going to add a new layer to this image, just put it at the top, and I’m going to fill it with the red.

Now let’s consider the situation where we may want to for example cut out a shape from inside this red selection. So let’s go back and grab our custom shape tool. And we have our same flower shape selected. And I’m going to draw the shape onto my area. And because I was working with a red fill it has a red fill. But let’s just color it green so that we can see it clearly.

Now let’s consider the situation where really what we wanted to do was to create a path from this. Well, we don’t have to undo it and start all over again, particularly if this is a complex shape because what we can do is go to the paths palette. And here is our shape path, and we can do with that anything that we could do with a path originally in Photoshop.

One of the things that we can do is click on it and load that path as a selection. Now if that path is a selection then we can do things with it. For example we could come down to this red filled layer and we could poke a hole in this layer by just pressing Delete. And that will delete the contents of the layer where this selection is made.

One of the other things that we can do, I’m just going to Ctrl Z to undo that, one of the other things that we can do with selections is we can stroke them. So we could choose Edit Stroke and we could stroke this selection with a different color. So let’s stroke it around its inside.

Let’s press Ctrl D to undo the selection, and you can see that now we have a stroked flower because we’ve been able to stroke that selection. I’m just going to undo this again. And let’s go back to our shape up here. I want to just make sure that we just have a red filled layer here and we have our shape up here.

And here it is as a shape. And it can be moved around because it is a shape. So we can move it around the workspace. Let’s go back to the Path’s tool and there’s something else that we can do with shapes. What we can do in addition to loading the path as a selection is that we can stroke it with a brush. But to do this we’re going to have to make a work path out of the shape.

So what I’m going to do is with the shape selected I’m going to choose Edit Copy so I’ve copied the shape onto the clipboard. And now I’m just going back to this layer here and I’m going to do Edit Paste. And look what happens in my Paths palette. This time I have a Work Path. And a work path not only can be turned into a selection and not only can be filled with a foreground color, but I can also stroke it with a brush.

Let’s go and get my Brush and let’s go and get a brush to use. Now I’ve got lots of brushes here, but let’s create something like this particular little leaf brush. And I’ve got it at a fairly small size. I’m hoping that this is going to work just fine here for this particular image.

We’ve got a foreground color so I’m going to click Stroke Path With Brush. And what that does is it applies that brush to the current path. But we need to of course make that into a work path before that’s going to work. Now let’s have a look at how we can turn a selection into a path. Let’s just go and get another filled layer. I’m just going to get rid of everything that I have here right now.

Let’s fill this with white, and then we’ll just get rid of the Work Path as well. So I’m going to press Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac, and I’m going to make up a selection here. So I’m going to make a rectangle, and then I’m going to go and grab the elliptical marque, and with Shift held down I’m going to add to that. So this is now my selection.

Now let’s say I want to make this into a shape that I can use over and over again. Well with the Paths palette open I can create a work path from this selection. So I’m just going to click to Make Work Path From Selection. And now this is a path. Now because it’s a path we can do all sorts of things with it.

For example we can click on it to select it and we can change its points. And we can also do things like turn it back into a selection, stroke it with a brush and fill it, and we can make it a shape. Let’s choose Edit and then Define Custom Shape. And this now becomes a custom shape in my shapes collection. I’m going to call that a Tab shape and just click Ok. Let’s get rid of our Work Path.

And now let’s go back into our shapes collection. So I’m going to click on Custom Shapes. And this time I’m going to make it a shape and I’m going to give it a fill and I’m going to give it a stroke. And let’s go into our shapes collection and let’s go and grab our new custom shape.

And now when I drag it onto the workspace it’s going to behave like any of the custom shapes inside Photoshop. It has this stroke and we can adjust the stroke size. We can adjust the type of stroke that it has. We could fill it with everything that we can fill a regular shape with.

So there’s the basic introduction to some of the new shape and path features of Photoshop CS6. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video. You’ll find more of my video training sessions on my YouTube channel.

 

 

Helen Bradley

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Categories:photoshop, video

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:00 am2 Comments links to this post

Tuesday, September 18th, 2012

Photoshop Sunburst Tutorial

Learn how to use Distort filters to create a cool sunburst in Photoshop.

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 create a quick and easy sunburst in Photoshop. To create my sunburst I’m going to start with a new image. I’m going to make mine 3,000 x 3,000 pixels in size so it’s a reasonable size. I’ve yellow selected as my foreground color. I’m just selecting the Rectangular Marquee Tool and just selecting about half of this image and filling it with the foreground column by pressing Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac. I’m going to do Select Inverse so that I have the other half of the image selected. Again, I’ll select white as my foreground color and fill it with that color and then Ctrl or Command D to deselect the selection. So all I have right now is an image where half of it is yellow and half of it is white and it’s all on one layer. To distort it I’m going to start with the Filter Distort Wave, and that’s the first part of my sunburst. I’ll select Square as the type. And now I’m going to set the Wavelength. And you’ll find that the larger you set the Wavelength you get more of these stripes. Don’t worry that they don’t extend yet. What you’re worried about at this stage is the number of them. So I want about that number of stripes. Now I’m going to increase the Amplitude until I get stripes all across my image. So all I’m doing is square, equal values or nearly equal values for Wavelength and then adjusting the Amplitude until I get what I want in this little diagram here in this little preview window. And then I’m just going to click Ok. Before I leave here I’m just going to make sure that I Crop this because what I want is the exact same starting point and ending point. So here I’m starting on an orange stripe and I’m going to end over here on a white stripe. I’m just going to make sure that I have a pretty good crop here because that will make my wraparound work well in the next step. And the next step is to use the Filters again. We’ll choose Filter, and again this Distort option, but we want Polar Coordinates. And all I do is select the Polar to Rectangular or Rectangular to Polar that gives me the effect. If you don’t remember which one to use just flick between the two because it’s going to be really obvious which one gives you your sunburst and which one doesn’t. And obviously Rectangular To Polar is what I want so I’ll just click Ok. And here is my sunburst shape. It really is as easy as that. And I have a silhouette because I love to use silhouettes with sunburst shapes. So let’s just drag and drop a silhouette layer into here and then we can size it to suit. Now you can do all sorts of things with your sunburst effects. We could grunge this. We could texturize it. We could do all sorts of things with it. But to create it is as simple as a layer that is half of one color, half of the other color. Then you’ll Filter Distort, Wave to create a series off stripes, then you’ll Crop it so that you get the beginning of a stripe on one side and the end of the corresponding stripe on the other side. So you get this seamless sort of sunburst effect and you don’t have one really large stripe and then use Filter Distort Polar Coordinates to rotate it around. So there you have a sunburst effect in Photoshop.

Helen Bradley

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posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:05 amNo Comments links to this post

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