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.

Faking Tilt Shift Photography with a Painting

Design Some­thing Every Day 31 of 365

I saw these amaz­ing images that used a faked ver­sion of tilt shift pho­tog­ra­phy on some paint­ings by Vin­cent Van Gogh. These great images were cre­ated by Math­ieu S of theswedishbed.com. I thought it was a cool idea to use a tech­nique that is typ­i­cally used on a pho­to­graph and use it on a tra­di­tional paint­ing instead. Tilt shift pho­tog­ra­phy is a style that by using a spe­cial lens, makes a pho­to­graph of  the real world look like it’s a model (see here). When it’s used on a paint­ing,  I think it looks like a pop-up book.

Above is my first attempt at this tech­nique using this paint­ing by the French Impres­sion­ist Camille Pis­sarro. I’ll post some more of my exper­i­ments, lead­ing to an actual tuto­r­ial to give my thoughts.

In the mean time these are good tuto­ri­als about how to achieve this effect. The tech­nique relys on blur­ring parts of the image and tweak­ing the sat­u­ra­tion and lev­els. My quick tip that I’d add is to  keep a non-blurred layer under­neath the blurred layer, then use a layer mask on the blurred layer to to give more con­trol over what you want the viewer to focus on, more on that later.

tiltshiftphotography.net

Visual Pho­togu­ide: how to make a fake miniature

Also here’s a cool video that com­bines tilt shift pho­tog­ra­phy and adds in stop motion for a tilt shift video of Dis­ney­world. That’s pretty cool if you ask me.