Archive for the Category »photoshop «
10
Jan, 2010
If the thought of learning Photoshop through textual tutorials make you snore, you might find tutorial videos more interesting. There are lots of tutorials available on CD-ROM and DVD formats and thousands of single-lesson video clips you can view online or download to watch later. Many of these videos are taught by a human trainer and while the videos are designed to guide you step-by-step, you can always skip lessons and jump from one clip to the next.
Here are a few you might want to take home:
PhotoshopSecrets for Wacom Tablets & Photoshop
This is a great Photoshop video tutorial if you are a tablet user. Currently, this is probably the most comprehensive, allowing you to learn how to use all the tools and features available with Adobe Photoshop. This tutorial video is authored and taught by Colin Smith and Weston Maggio of Photoshopcafe and Wacom Technology, respectively. Both are experienced trainers so you’ll find the lessons well-paced and relevant.
This DVD ROM tutorial has more than 120 minutes of 800×600 video. It’s easy to navigate and you can click on any lesson you like without any trouble while still controlling the playback. If you prefer to learn on your own, just click on the lesson files and play the video clip of your choice on your own free time.
PhotoshopSecrets Special FX
This tutorial video contains 19 lessons packed in approximately 2 hours of fast-loading CD-ROM. If ‘cool!’ is the one word that you want to hear to feel validated for your Photoshop efforts, this video tutorial will teach you exactly how to use special effects like the pros. Learn about 3D lathing, liquid splashes, CS branding, pixel stretching, thermal vision, toxic waste and lots more. These are cutting-edge effects, the kind you find in more advanced Photoshop users’ works so you might want to try it out for yourself.
Photoshopsupport.com
This site features some of the best and latest Photoshop tutorials, including those in video. Use Photoshop confidently in no time with the free video tutorials. You can even click on the links provided to find out about Photoshop products for more detailed tutorials. If you’re using Photoshop to come up with a cooler, meaner website, you’ll like the short tutorials on SiteGrinder 2, an Adobe Photoshop Plugin.
Graphicsoft.about.com
If you like free online tutorials, check out this site. All tutorial video clips are taught by Deke McClelland, who is also the trainer for several Adobe Photoshop CS2 training CDs. He’s offering a free sample of his lessons on this site – you won’t have everything you need, but the tutorials are enough to teach you some very important things and get you started.
Included in the tutorial video clips are: learning about Vanishing Point, Camera Raw, Image Warp, Smart Sharpen Filter, Smart Objects, Adobe Bridge, Match Color and Shadow Highlight Filter. If you want to buy his tutorial videos, you’ll get an exclusive 20% discount if you use the promotion code.
PhotoshopSecrets – CS2 for Digital Photographers
If you want to learn how to maximize your digital photos with the use of CS2, this video tutorial is for you. Learn how professional photographers produce better-looking photographs and use their tricks to turn your photos from blah to blast. This tutorial video is a CD-ROM format, has 43 lessons and runs approximately 3.5 hours.
Lessons include: using Camera Raw, image adjustment, red eye removal, grain and color noise reduction, changing perspective, using image sharpening techniques, using vanishing point, image extraction and many more. If those lessons aren’t enough to get you interested, here are two of the most popular tools you absolutely must learn: face swapping and image retouching.
Category: photoshop
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03
Jan, 2010
When I was young I constantly doodled. I doodled a lot of things…but mainly I doodled dragons. Fast forward a number of years…well…a whole lot of years…and my twin brother is showing me pictures of his pet iguana…pretty cool looking creature…. Then it occurs to me…what a perfect dragon the iguana would make…and now I had the ultimate doodle tool…Photoshop!
With PhotoSshop pictures of an iguana become a photograph of a fire breathing dragon!
Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool of alchemy…given the right raw materials any new photographic reality can be created. Without those raw materials Photoshop can be an exercise in frustration and a road to mediocrity. To make sure that I have the raw materials to create my photographic visions it helps to begin with a sketch. Once I have the sketch I can systematically photograph those raw materials, comparing them with the sketch, until I know I have the parts to complete my stock image.
My brother brought in his iguana to my studio and we did the necessary photography. I also had a pile of cobblestones that had been dug up form the street in my San Francisco studio (I have since re-located to Sausalito). I used those to create a “perch” or “roost” for my dragon. For the background I went through my own stock files and found an image of the Teton mountain range shot near Jackson Hole, Wyoming while on a family vacation. For a final detail I found an image of a castle I shot in Spain to put in the distant background.
With all the raw materials shot and scanned (this project was before digital capture had reached it’s now exalted state) I set to work.
To create the long neck of the dragon the tail can be manipulated by creating a clipping path around it, converting the clipping path to a selection, creating a new layer from that selection, and then using the warp tool and the liquefy brush to reshape it. Free Transform can be used to position and size the new “neck”. The same tools can be used to stretch the jaws of the iguana into a more “dragonesque” look.
Once again those tools can be used to convert the spines of the iguanas back into dagger-like teeth and fangs. The flap of skin under the iguana’s jaw can be selected (again with a clipping path…I believe the most important selection tool in Photoshop), turned into a new layer, and then reshaped to become the dragon’s wings.
Each element, be it a leg, claw, tail or whatever, can be selected with an appropriately hard edge (usually a 1-pixel feather when converting the clipping path to a selection) and then “faded” into it’s new adjoining part by using large soft brushes and a layer mask.
I find it truly increases the effectiveness of an image by using adjustment layers and their accompanying masks to add shadow and lightness to enhance the dimensionality of a given part. I mostly use “curves” (usually again with an adjustment layer) to adjust the density of a part in order to match the part with its new neighboring parts and environment.
An adjustment layer using Color Balance can help with fine-tuning color variations…and sometimes Hue/Saturation for major color changes. Of course, throughout the project I use the clone tool as necessary. A wonderful new feature of PhotoShop CS4 is the “preview” that is shown through the brush as it is moved over the area to be cloned. That alone might be worth the upgrade!
Once the image is looking complete I “Merge Visible Layers” with the option (Mac) key held down thereby creating a new layer that is a composite of all the visible layers. This gives me a final image in one layer facilitating dust-spotting and other touch up work without losing the ability to go back and revisit the underlying layers if need be.
The final result is a realistic photograph of a dragon breathing fire, a professional grade high-quality stock photo. You’d swear it was real.
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14
Dec, 2009
Adobe Photoshop is an image editing software. You can edit and manipulate images in a breeze with this powerful software. Whether you are a graphic artist, web developer or a photographer, this is a tool, which can surely help you do the job with less time and effort.
Adobe Photoshop is the leading graphic application used in digital image editing, web graphics, prints and other multi media requirement. Photoshop is widely-used by millions of graphic artists, web developers, photographers, as well as ordinary people. Because of the popularity of the software, it has been accepted as a print industry standard.
Most likely, posters, magazine covers, book covers, brochures, and ads have all been created or edited with Photoshop. With the powerful tools that Photoshop offers, there are a lot of features that can be used to create, even the most complex digital art in a breeze.
One of the great features of Photoshop is that it consists of a user-friendly interface that is very easy to navigate. Tools are organized into groups of palettes, which you can customize according to your working preference. It also comes with shortcut keys that you can use to quickly apply commands or switch on or off a group of tools.
In addition, Photoshop comes with a sub program called Adobe ImageReady. This added program is basically used to create graphics and is enhanced for web design purposes that greatly reduce the file size in making a certain website faster to load. GIF files can be reduced as small as 10 to 50% with its compression abilities. The software is also capable of making animated graphics or GIF. With Adobe ImageReady, you can design interactive JavaScript rollover without the need of writing any programming code. Simply slice the image and link rollovers and create different variations of slices.
All products of Adobe Systems support layer effects. When working with Photoshop and ImageReady, you can easily apply effects to an image or text like drops shadows, inner and outer bevels and other layering effects. A great advantage of working with layers is that you can preserve the original state of an image while manipulating another version of it through another layer. You can add as many layers as you want depending on your needs. These layers are independent of each other, meaning, if you edit one layer for instance a layer of text, it does not affect any other layers.
Photo editing or photo manipulation is a difficult task without the right tool. But with the use of Photoshop, you can easily edit a photo in lesser time and little effort. Photoshop comes with powerful tools that can be utilized to perform photo-editing tasks.
You can crop or resize pictures without losing the quality of an image. Also, you can easily remove the background with an eraser tool. With Adobe Photoshop, it is easy to select precise parts of an image with the use of the magic wand and lasso tools. The software also comes with tools like: brightness and contrast, color balance, hue and saturation, levels, curves, and many more which are useful in enhancing or changing the color of an image.
Also the software comes with a variety of built in plug-ins that can be used to apply variations to your designs. Some of these plug-ins are custom brushes, filters, effects, and many more.
Adobe Photoshop is integrated with the other softwares of Adobe Systems. Photoshop shares the same user interface like in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. With the integration you can work seamlessly and produce great work results.
This software has also the capability to utilize color models such as lab, RGB, CMYK, binary bitmap, grayscale, and duotone. It also supports vector and raster formats such as: .PNG, .EPS, .GIF, Fireworks, .JPEG and lots more.
The latest version of Photoshop is the Photoshop CS3. The latest version offers additional enhanced features. Some features include the application of non-destructive filters and the new selection tools such as the Quick Selection and Refine Edge.
With all the great features that Photoshop offers, you can do any work of graphics that you can imagine. You can create outstanding graphics without limiting your boundaries.
Category: photoshop
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