Brilliant! Fotoshop by Adobé

This is a brilliant riff on our societies obsession with beauty and lovingly makes fun of everyone’s favorite photo editing software. Don’t forget to check out all the brilliant films from the very clever Jesse Rosten.

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

As an added bonus, check out the behind the scenes video:

BTS Fotoshop from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

How They Did It (Photoshop Masking Edition)

For this installment of How They Did It, Here are the 5 best free masking tutorials for Adobe PhotoShop on the web. There are many great sources for learning and mastering PhotoShop, I highly recommend watching and reading anything you can from Deke McClelland, Scott Kelby and the wonderful folks at Lynda.com.

Deke McClelland: The Essential Approach To Masking
If you watch any video on the essentials of masking images in PhotoShop, watch THIS one!

 
Photoshop CS5 Masking Tutorial
Masking, Mask Refinement and Non-Destructive image editing are vital components when compositing with Photoshop CS5. This is a pretty good tutorial. via http://shawnkent.net

Photoshop Tutorial: Masking Techniques, part 1
A good round up of masking technique using paths, also: Part 2.


How To Remove Background Around Lots Of Hair Photoshop
A decent beginning tutorial. A handy use of the burn tool to take out fringing after a mask is created.

How to Quickly Select Images – Cut Out Detailed Images in Photoshop CS5
I like the use of the refine edge command in this tutorial.

Video 5

Photographic Truth? PhotoShop and Body Image

I found this great series from diet.com highlighting the use of PhotoShop in magazines. As designers we need to be aware of the societal effects of our work. A photograph is not reality and treating at such is a mistake. Photo editing has had a long tradition, however the we should think long and hard about what fashion editing does to the body image of young women.

How to Make Star Fields in PhotoShop

This is a great tutorial from the ever helpful Deke Mcclelland that I thought I’d pass along. His whole Deke’s Technique series is well worth a gander. This is a very useful tutorial, where you get to learn how to create a fake star field from scratch in PhotoShop.

Some Great PhotoShop & Illustrator Resources for Halloween

If you are looking for some great PhotoShop and Illustrator resources for Halloween you should stop by the superb websites www.vecteezy.com and www.brusheezy.com. These sites are a fantastic resource for any designer. They have some good stuff to get you in the Halloween Spirit including these ghostly goodies:

Need a ghost? Use this brush!

Get batty with these brushes!

Some cute Halloween vectors!

Photoshop helps the Hubble!

I saw this great video on Boing Boing and I had to share. A brief video showing how PhotoShop helps create all those great Hubble images of the universe. It reminds me of a line from the Manifesto of the Constructivist Group from 1922:

PREVIOUSLY: Engineers relaxed with art
NOW-Artists relax with technology

Photoshop (Really) Quick Tip

It’s Monday, so that means that it is time for another episode of PhotoShop (Really) Quick Tips. This week, selecting similar layers.

Say you are working on a project and you have a document with lots of layers, and you want to change the font on a text layer, say from the oft maligned Comic Sans to the respectable and fantastic font HVD Comic Serif. Instead of clicking on every layer and highlighting the text to change the font, simply select the layer and change the type in the font menu.This trick will work when you have multiple layers selected.

A further trick is,  instead of fiddling with the alt/option keys to select  multiple layers,  just click on a layer and go to “select > select similar layer” and, ta da, all the layers of  the same type are selected. From there just change the font and the font on all of these layers will will be changed across all of the layers.

Remember that the “select similar layer” command works for all types of layers, including pixel layers, smart objects, text and adjustment layers. Which can be pretty handy on occasion.

Photoshop (really) Quick Tip: Editing Actions

It’s Monday, so that mean’s that it is time for another (really) quick tip for Adobe Photoshop. This week, actions!

Actions are a great way to automate PhotoShop. If you can master actions it will save yourself a heck of a lot of time down the road. Time better spent on more important things, like you know, web surfing, the seven deadly sins or trying to find a cartoon styled font that doesn’t look too much like comic sans.

On to the tip. When you are creating an action, often times you will want to run a single step to test it, but if you click on the play button, the action will launch, running the entire action. But there is a funny little keyboard trick that will play a single step at a time.

1. Simply, click on the down facing arrow of the action you want to test, revealing the steps of the action.
2. Then  hold down the CTRL (Mac: CMD) key and double click on the step of the action you want to test. This will play only this step of the action.
3. Bonus Tip: to open a step of an action so you can change the settings, double click on the step and the dialog box for that step will open so you can edit it.

Quick plug: I learned this little tip from master of all things digital imaging, Deke McClelland in his amazing PhotoShop CS3 One-on-One: Advanced Techniques course from Lynda.com.

Click on the down facing arrow of the action you want to test, revealing the steps of the action

Hold down the CTRL (Mac: CMD) key and double click on the step of the action you want to test.

Design Something Every Day: Tilt Shift Disneyland

Design Something Every Day 33 of 365

Another little test with tilt shift fakery from a picture I took while riding the Dumbo Ride overlooking Fantasyland at Disneyland a couple of years ago.

I’ve learned from this experiment, that tilt shift techniques work much better with shots taken from a greater distance than this one. The people turned out looking much too real instead of looking like models. But the hyper-saturated buildings in the background turned out much better.

As is my way, here’s a video of the Dumbo Ride, mind you the ride just goes around in circles so if you get motion sickness I’d skip it:

Design Something Every Day: Another Tilt Shift Test

Design Something Every Day 32 of 365

More experimentation with faking tilt shift images.