Newer Options of Photoshop

Here are some newer options in Photoshop that help make things much faster and easier than in previous versions. Vanishing Point - Lets you effortlessly clone, paint and transform with tools that automatically adjust to the visual perspective of your images. Cutting hours off precision design and photo retouching tasks, one use and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Image Warp - Fold, stretch, pull, twist and wrap any image into shape, as easily as selecting an on-demand preset or dragging custom control points. Quickly and precisely create products and packages that exist only in your mind’s eye.

Advanced Noise Reduction - High ISO digital camera shots can be breeding grounds for ugly color noise. Reduce Noise gives you advanced enhancement of problem images, including special handling for JPEG artifact reduction, and even discrete correction of individual color channels, all while preserving edge details.

32-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) - Ideal for 3D rendering, advanced compositing and professional photography. With advanced technology that adapts to the full spectrum and range of visible light in the same way as the human eye, HDR ensures your final images will display your creative vision to the last detail, with the most richly detailed shadows and highlights at your command. Let the new Merge to HDR take you beyond the state-of-the-art, by automatically combining bracketed digital exposures into a single 32-bit HDR image, creating breathtaking images that are otherwise impossible to capture with traditional cameras.

Spot Healing Brush - Effortless, one-click retouching is yours with Spot Healing Brush. Click or paint flaws away, remove entire objects, and heal across all layers with your choice of blending and sample modes—even in 16-bit, CMYK images.

One-Click Red-Eye Correction - With advanced controls for pupil size and darkening when you need them, the new Red Eye tool eradicates this common flash-created photo flaw with a single click.

Optical Lens Correction - Fine tune your photos for truer images from edge to edge. Easily counteract barrel, pincushion and perspective distortion, and quickly correct chromatic aberration and vignetting, in any photo.

Graphics in Motion - Easily create and edit animated Web graphics with the Animation palette and Layers palette.

A Basic Tool

The Measure tool is a feature of Photoshop that even the basic designer needs to be able to understand and use to allow their creativity to flow. Spacing is an important function of any design. The Measure tool helps position images accurately. It calculates the distance between any two points in the work area. When you measure from one point to another, a nonprinting line is drawn, and the options bar and Info palette show the following information:

1. The starting location (X and Y)
2. The horizontal (W) and vertical (H) distances traveled from the x and y axes
3. The angle measured relative to the axis (A)
4. The total distance traveled (D1)
5. The two distances traveled (D1 and D2), when you use a protractor
   

All measurements except the angle are calculated in the unit of measure currently set in the Units & Rulers preference dialog box. If you want to see existing measuring lines, select the Measure tool and they will appear.

Photos on the web

While there is no easy way to prevent your photo's from being "right-clicked" when you post them on the web there are a few tricks to make it difficult for someone to "steal" your work:

• Display your photos with a maximum dimension of 600 pixels and with the jpeg quality set slow. 600 will look fine on the web but if someone tries to print it out the quality will be poor. An added bonus of this is that your page will load faster.
  
• Reduce the image size to 264x396. This will make it more of a thumbnail instead of a regular image size and will also help with the page loading speed.
• For large images put a watermark with your name on the image
  

Getting Started With Photoshop - Volume 2 (Free PDF Download)

Okay here's Volume 2 of "Getting Started With Photoshop"

I hope you enjoy it as much as you enjoyed Volume 1.

Incase you missed Volume 1 you'll find it at the following url:
http://www.learnphotoshopnow.com/gettingstarted-v1


Here's Volume 2

Right click here and select "Save Target As" to download this excellent guide.








Feel free to pass this document around, there are 16 pages, packed full of awesome information to help a Photoshop newbie get started on the right foot.

This is just a thanks from me for being on my update list and reading my blog.

Enjoy!

Photoshop Tools

These tools are great for adding that little extra special touch to your photographs.

The Dodge Tool

Use this tool to lighten dark areas, choose Shadows, Mid tones or Highlights and apply an exposure value. Choose an appropriate size brush and paint over the areas to be lightened - be careful not to over apply the strokes otherwise the brushed image area will start to wash out. The default setting is 50%, try a lower value with a soft edged brush for a subtle effect.

The Burn Tool

Similar in operation as the Dodge tool, but this time the image areas are darkened. Apply short strokes rather than scrubbing, this way you can apply an undo. Here's a darkroom trick, darken the edges and corners of an image, this makes the central part stand out and it works on digital pictures too.

The Sponge Tool

This has two options, Saturate and desaturated. Brush over an area to intensify the colors or reduce them. The strength of both is determined by the flow value.

Creating Collages

Choosing the Right Pictures

When creating collages, you need to start off with the right images. Go through your options and choose images that focus on your subject. These are the pictures that will make up the foreground of your collage. Then look through and find images not necessarily of your subject but that compliment it well. An example would be if you were doing a collage of your daughter’s first birthday, you would want several close-ups of just her and a couple that show the cake table, the gift table and maybe even balloons.

Cropping the Images

The next step is cropping the images. This takes practice. Photoshop has some amazing tools to pick object right out of photos such as the Magnetic Lasso tool. Experiment with that and with masking. You should be able to grab a couple of good objects to combine with your background images.

Blending Techniques

To make an eye-catching collage using Photoshop, you need to be able to use blending techniques. Layer the objects you have chosen in the Layers palette. After all the images are in position, you need to start blending them to give a complete and blended image. You can use opacity, the Brush tool, the Eraser tool, and drop shadows to get the effect you wish. Remember that dimension can add a new look to reused images.

Bordering Your Collage

Next you will want to add something special to your collage relating to the subject matter. Create a border or photo frame to add the perfect touch.

Adding Watermarks to your Images

Protect you online images from theft. Adding a watermark to your image may not stop theft but it is a definate deterrant.

There are many creative ways of adding a watermark. Add style to your design by using your imagination. Add your name to the subject shirt, write your name in the clouds, put your company on the side of a vehicle. Use your imagination when placing the watermark.

Open the image you wish to watermark and select the TEXT tool. Click where you want to place the test and select whichever font, color and size you deem appropiate.

After entering the text, click the arrow on the top of your screen or hit enter and the text will appear on your image.

The text may be blocking part of your picture and ruining the effect your were going for so we need to soften the text to blend it in to the image. Highlight the text again and go to LAYER – LAYER STYLE – BLENDING OPTIONS and click.

A new option menu will appear. Get creative but you need to at least change the opacity bars to the left. As you do so, you will see the text start to fade into the background.

This isn’t a foolproof option but every little bit helps!

Video on Making Your Own Valentine's Card with Photoshop

This is a great video from You Tube for learning a few techniques to make the perfect Valentine's Day card.

Make your Portraits POP!

Photoshop offers some amazing options to make your portraits stand out from all the rest. This simple option can make it seem like your subject is trying to jump off the screen at you. You'll be amazed!

BLUR/OVERLAY

Duplicate your picture layer by dragging the layer to the ‘new’ icon in the layers palette.

Apply a gaussian blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur). Blur it enough that the detail disappears but the shapes keep their form.

In the layers palette, change the blending mode from NORMAL to OVERLAY.

You can see that this method makes the light tones lighter, and the dark tones darker if you do a before and after comparison. It is actually boosting the contract of colors. If you want an even more dramatic effect, change the blending mode to VIVID LIGHT instead of OVERLAY.

Although you can do this with any kind of picture, the difference on portraits is quite EYE-POPPING!

Getting Started With Photoshop - Volume 1 (Free PDF Download)

Here's a very useful free pdf download for you.... "Getting Started With Photoshop - Volume 1"

Right click here and select "Save Target As" to download this excellent guide.


Feel free to pass this document around, there are 20 pages, packed full of awesome information to help a Photoshop newbie get started on the right foot.

In fact it's better than many beginner guides you'd pay for on Amazon!

This is just a thanks from me for being on my update list and reading my blog.

Enjoy!

Gradient Fill using Layers Palette

If you want to create some awesome effects in your images using gradient fill, consider using the Layers palette to change the fill layer's opacity or blending modes. It's quick, easy, and highly effective. To create a fill layer:
1. Choose Layer > New Fill Layer or click the black-and-white circle at the bottom of the Layers palette. This opens a menu from which you can choose the type of fill you want.

2. Choose Gradient from the menu to open the Gradient Fill dialog box.

3. Choose the gradient from the Gradient drop-down menu; then choose the style of gradient you want from the Style drop-down menu. Your choices include Linear, Radial, and more. Now choose the angle and the scale for the gradient with the remaining choices. Play around with these settings to get a sense of how they operate and to see how the sliders and drop-down menus can immediately affect your image.

4. Click OK. A fill-layer area appears on your Layers palette. If you want to change the position, the color, the scale, or the type of gradient (Pattern or Color) at any time, double-click the layer's icon on the Layers palette.

Web Pages with Photoshop

Photoshop is a wonderful tool for creating web sites. It allows even a novice the ability to create a fully functional web site without much knowledge of HTML or JavaScript. You can create an entire web page template with Photoshop, and then use Image Ready to slice up the image and create the HTML for you. Or you can use Photoshop to create just the navigation for your web site, or to optimize images on your web site. No matter how you use Photoshop, it will definitely make your web site look much nicer, and also help it to run faster.

Photoshop can help you to create an entire web site without coding much HTML by hand. You can draw a complete web site in Photoshop, and then transfer your image into Image Ready so that you can slice up the image into smaller elements, and then save the images and the corresponding HTML to render the page very easily. Then all you have to do is use you’re newly created web site and entire content into the blank spaces that you have left in the template. After you have added the content to your pages, you will be ready to post your new web site to the web.

When I am creating web sites I use Photoshop to create the navigation for the web site and also to optimize all of the images, so that my web site will load faster. I usually create buttons for the navigation, and then create rollover effects from within Image Ready. This saves me quite a bit of time, because all of the JavaScript for the mouse over effects are done for me, which allows me to work on the more advanced coding of the pages. Even if you want to create all of the navigation and layout of your web site without Photoshop, then you should at least use Photoshop to optimize your images so that you web site loads within a reasonable amount of time.

Photoshop can give you 3 different optimized views of a particular image, and tell you how fast it will load on a particular connection speed. Then you can choose which optimized image you would like to use based on the ratio between how good the picture looks and how fast it loads. Without optimizing your images your web site will perform very slowly and visitors will be less likely to wait. You can create a web site on your own by hand coding the entire site, but using Photoshop will make creating your web site much easier and more appealing.