Beezie Pc

UPDATE: computer build

2011-03-29T18:52:00.000+02:00

Hey
Just a small update, most of the water cooling parts have been shipped from Germany this morning, it will include fans fittings wires and the tubing.
Will paint the radiators this weekend to prepare them to the last of the part`s which are due to ship 04.04.11

Updated Build log

2011-03-24T12:50:00.002+01:00

The Computer build log have been updated with new pictures, getting more parts this week

The Virtual World vs The Reall World

2011-03-14T20:01:00.000+01:00

i Veren`t Sure what to put as the title for this one but i think its prety self explanotiry in a way.

I h ave not posted anything here for some time, Im still working on the pc project but since the parts are so hard to come by i am still waiting on most of them to arive. And with so much happening in the reall world i just havent had the motivation or strength to put as much effort and time into the blog as i would have liked to.

I've had visions and I've had dreams;

I've even held them in my hands,

But I never knew those dreams could slip right through

Like they were only grains of sand.

~Ray Boltz

-Don't be afraid to lose what was never meant to be

After the rain washes away the tears

And all the pain

Only after the rain

Can you live again

Willie Nelson, After The Rain -

Life's funny.

The constant cycle of emotions sending us on a ride that we have lost all control over, reminding us that no matter how much we want to have a commanding role in life we are powerless over our feelings.

It's rather amazing how one emotion brought on by one small event sends a ripple through our life and escalates from a tiny array of circles in a pond to a tidal wave with enough force to destroy an entire city,

It causes us to do things that we could never forgive ourselves for; things that will cause us to live in fear and regret for the rest of the short time we have left.

Without the mental capacity to control our actions, we have no choice but to succumb to the will of our emotions.

Life seems to be a constant attempt at breaking our will. It's a test of will power, and quite frankly only the strong can survive.

"It is a brave act of valor to condemn death;

but were life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live."

- Thomas Browne

and with those words im signing off

Reservoir came in the mail today

2011-01-18T16:14:00.000+01:00

The Custom Reservoir is here
T-Virus Purple
[still waiting on the chase:)

More Parts aried today

2011-01-07T17:41:00.001+01:00

Moterboard Asus Rampage III Extreme wit a i7 950CPU one Asus Xonar Essene STX soundard and tHe blueray/dVd reader

PiCture under HVe 4 3x120mm radiators te pu water blok and some oter small tings

First delivery of stuff for Mountain Pheonix

2011-01-06T19:58:00.001+01:00

here is the first pictures that is taken of the first parts

its Cable Slewing a molex pin remover and some smaller tools

Follow the build over at the "The Build" section of the blog

Picture Problems. Blogg

2011-01-03T14:55:00.000+01:00

Heya
i seem to have had problems for the past weeks with hosted images just turning into empty links, wihch again is turning the articles rather messy

I am trying to fix it and will for the time being us another host for the pictures

Getting Started with TrueCrypt (to Secure Your Data)

2010-12-27T00:08:00.000+01:00

WARNING!! BY ENCRYPTING YOUR FILES/HARDRIVE/FOLDERS YOU SHOULD KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
YOU WILL NOT GET YOUR FILES BACK IF YOU FORGET YOUR PASSWORD, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE THE LAPTOP IF YOU ENCRYPT THE WHOLE PC AND FORGET THE PASSWORD.
I CAN ---NOT--- HELP YOU IF YOU SCREW UP OR GET ANYTHING CORRUPTED!!!!!
BY FOLLOWING THIS GUIDE YOU AGREE TO.
1)YOU HAVE DONE IT ON YOUR OWN RISK
2)I WILL NOT AND CAN NOT HELP YOU IN ANY WAY
3)DO NOT POST A COMMENT SAYING YOU GOT PROBLEMS, THEY WILL GET DELETED
4)I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS

!!!YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!
if you still want to proceed lets start.
BitLocker is a hard drive encryption utility in Windows 7 and Vista, unfortunately it’s only available in Ultimate and Enterprise editions and not in XP at all. Today we take a look at TrueCrypt, which is a free utility that will enable encryption functionality to other versions.

TrueCrypt
TrueCrypt is a free Open Source disk encryption utility that works with Windows, Mac, and Linux. It allows you to encrypt an entire drive, partition or flash drive and ensure no one can access the data without the right password. It provides on-the-fly encryption and after the drive is encrypted you can continue to use everything like you normally would.
Installation is straight forward and it’s recommended to create a system restore point before installing.

In this guide I will show you how you can create an encrypted kontaier / folder which only appears as a file when it is inactive.

The program should look like this after it is started

How to create an encrypted container:
When you first press the button Create Volume and then this window will pop up:

That is where we select Create an encrypted container file and press next. then select Standard TrueCrypt volume and press next to the image:

then select a location where you want the container to stock, I select and save it on D: \ container and then it's container file will be named and stored on the D drive.

The next thing to do then, and choose which encryption method you want, I will not go into detail what each does. But even then I usually take the highest bit, so i can recommend ARES

Then you come to the part where you choose how big you want your file. You can have it so great you want, but if you plan and use the entire drive so I recommend you do not even make a container, because there are ways you can encrypt the entire disk. Here I choose and create a container of 20 GB. PS: When you create the container so the file is 20 GB big, it does not grow as you fill it. So it will take much space if you have little data in it in relation to greatness!

Then you will come to the part to create a password, and here I recommend that you use a password that no one else can imagine plus there should be one that you can remember for a long time. I've even gone the host in cases where I can find files that I've made long ago, but I do not remember your password! And when the file is useless and you do not get the data out! But in this guide so I just use that password test1234! If you have less than 20 characters in the password there as TrueCrypt will warn that it might be the insecure password. Because if you have a veldigt easy password, this is a possibility and brute force password very easily and thus has full access to your file!

When you have selected your password, you will be prompted to save large files, and it is simply the file system to keep it in. If you select NO then it is a FAT32 system and can not ineholde over 4 GB files. So I always choose YES, then the file system to NTFS and you can store large files!

The next page you will come to as you move the mouse randomly around the window and like a good time. This will allow your container to be more confident! And when you feel that you have done it long enough, then press the Format! And then start the TrueCrypt container and create! And it should look like this on the CA:

Then you are done!

Then your file created, and you will see the first window again, so now it is just and pressing the EXIT!

If you now see where you saved file, so it should be there.

m

And to open your file open up truecrypt

And there, select the select file ... Also you can find the location you saved the file and double click on the file. Also select a station name (the list above where it says E:, F:, G:, H, etc). What you do then is that you choose the station name, the file should start up in.

This is how it looks for me

then press the mount. Then the password field appear, and you enter your password etterfulkt of OK. Then your container will appear in the list above.

If you now go to my computer so you can see that your container has appeared as a separate disk, and then it just and put into the data you want.

.

When you are finished, you can just go to the TrueCrypt again and choose your container and tap Dismount.

PS: I have experienced that if you reinstall your OS, so you may have difficulty with and write to file. What this comes from I do not put me in: S But if it does, then copy out all your data, and creates only a new volume and put it in there!

you can take it one step further and create a hidden volume in your encrypted volume so you use one password to the first file then a second one to the hidden one (you need to know about the hidden volume to even know the pc have one)
but that is fairly advanced, so for the sake of a easy guide i will stop here, if you don`t know how to make one YOU DO NOT NEED ONE!

Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor

2010-12-26T23:19:00.000+01:00

Monitor profiling and calibration are serious business, often involving equipment costing hundreds of dollars. Thankfully, there are free tools for calibration both on the internet and in your operating system.
In this article, we’ll briefly cover ways that have been covered by other sources, discuss the equipment professionals use to calibrate their monitors, printers, and scanners. We’ll finish up with what is likely the method most appropriate for many users that will improve the quality of your digital photograph editing. Don’t miss it!

The Graphic Method

Lifehacker has covered the very excellent site Photo Friday, and the graphics professionals there have created to help users adjust their monitors and give themselves maximum contrast while keeping value range in subtle colors. Basically, the idea here is to use the buttons on your monitor to adjust brightness, contrast, color, etc with the graphics on-screen. This will ensure that your monitor is adjusted to show as many tones as possible.
This is an excellent tool, but only adjust part of the problem. You can adjust your monitor, but you’ll also have to adjust the color profile that the computer uses with the display.

The Professional Method

While this is not an endorsement, X-Rite is one of the major companies professional graphics people trust to ensure their prints match their screens as closely as possible. Many will not only spend the high fees for expensive screen calibration software and hardware, they’ll recalibrate again and again on a schedule to ensure the monitor and printer haven’t had their color shift too far apart.
As these tools are meant for professionals, they give some of the best results and can calibrate not only monitors, but scanners, projectors, and other graphics tools. They are however, priced for professionals, and are cost-prohibitive for many hobbyist photographers.

X-Rite Technology being demonstrated by a Graphics vendor selling the product.

This video is a good illustration on how to use this sort of technology to calibrate a monitor. Again, this is not an endorsement; many readers will find even the cheapest version of this technology is a waste of money for their needs. The following method is free for Windows users, as it is built into the operating system.

Calibrating and Profiling Your Monitor in Windows 7

Open your Start Menu and type in “Calibrate Display Color.” This tool is not available to Windows Vista users, as it is new to Windows 7. Lifehacker has covered Calibrize, which has similar features for Vista and XP.

The program you’re looking for is “Calibrate Display Color,” and it lives in your control panel. You can also go to your control panel and do a search for “calibrate.” The program is shown here, and you will need administrator privileges to calibrate.

It’s hardly an exciting looking app. Simply read the preamble about improving color on your display and click next.

The on-screen graphics do a good job of explaining the sort of look you want to achieve with the calibration tools. You’ll be given adjustment sliders and shown what you’re trying to replicate—here you want to adjust your gamma image to look like the middle “Good Gamma.”
It also does a good job explaining what gamma is—although you will not need to know that to adjust the simple slider.

You can adjust your gamma slider on this screen. Remember, you’re trying to replicate the “Good Gamma” image. When you’re satisfied, click “Next.”

This part is slightly more difficult, and Windows gives users the option to skip brightness and contrast adjustment.
You will have to adjust the monitor with the controls on the front of it, and if this is too frustrating for you, you may want to skip this step. Otherwise, carry on by pressing “Next.”

It will show you this graphic illustrating the correct value range you want to achieve. You’ll have to locate the brightness and contrast controls on the front of your monitor and adjust them. It may help to Google the product number for your monitor (likely on the back) and find your product manual online in PDF format. If you still have your printed product manual, you may find it helpful in making these adjustments.

You should have a menu on your monitor similar to this one, which is the menu for the LG company’s L227WT monitor. It is here you adjust your Brightness only using the controls physically on your monitor, not in Windows. Put down the mouse and find them!

The trick is maximizing detail while keeping the “X” in the background from disappearing completely. If you cannot see the “X” in the graphic, you need to adjust your Brightness setting. When you are satisfied, click “Next.”

Still working with the controls on the front of your monitor, this image will prepare you to adjust the Contrast setting. Your goal is to ensure that your darks are dark enough without losing details in your brightest detail areas, as in this man’s shirt.

Again, you’ll have to work with a screen similar to this one. Consult your monitor manual to find out how to adjust your contrast. On the LG L227WT it is available on the same menu, although your monitor may be completely different.

When you are happy with the solid black on your screen, and haven’t lost the details in the shirt, and can distinguish the background from the white in the shirt, you can confidently click “Next” and stop using the controls on your monitor.

Color balance will be your next step. You will return to working with your mouse, making adjustments to RGB sliders to ensure your monitor doesn’t have a dramatic shift one way or another. Your goal here is to adjust your grays to be as neutral as possible, not leaning to any color in particular, as shown above.

Adjust any of the three sliders until you are confident the gray displayed on your screen doesn’t look greenish, reddish, or bluish. When you are happy with your neutral grays, click “Next.”

You are given this screen to test your new calibration. Check the new one versus the old one, and see if you are happy with your work. If you are, congratulations! You are one step closer to perfecting your digital photography and ensuring better prints.

Project Purple Dragon and Linux Home Server!

2010-12-24T23:17:00.000+01:00

The project are now open and closing inn, Head over to "The Build" section on top and stay tuned for updates as the time goes by

Feel free to add a comment and discuss the project here

Happy Chrismas
Beezie

Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality?

2010-12-24T20:43:00.000+01:00

So you’ve shelled out the money for a fancy inkjet photo printer, only you’re not impressed with the images you’re getting out of your standard office paper. Have you ever wondered why that photo paper works so much better?
Surely, paper is paper, right? What can be so special about it? In this article, we’ll explore the differences between regular typing paper, why these differences are good for printing, and how to take advantage of them for superior photographic printing.

Isn’t Photo Paper Just a Rip Off?

Everything associated with home printing is priced at a high premium—most notably ink cartridges. Photo paper, while priced at a high retail markup, is well worth the cost to any knowledgeable photographer or print lover. A good piece of photo paper will solve problems that most users won’t even realize that they might have had.
Naturally, photo paper is too expensive to use for the everyday sort of printing, even if the quality is decidedly higher. There are different grades of ordinary printing paper that can give some of the benefits of photo paper (cleaner, clearer images; brighter color; cleaner text) but at cheaper rates. But, in order to understand what to look for in a printing paper, we’ll have to understand what sets different grades of papers apart.

What is There to Know About Paper?

Like many aspects of graphic arts, paper has its own set of complicated esoteric terms. Take a look at some of the most important terms you’ll run into, and how they can help you when buying good quality photo paper.
Weight: The amount of mass of a ream of 500 pages of the paper in question before it is cut down to whatever its current size may be. Don’t expect a ream of 32 pound typing paper to weight 32 pounds! Paper weight is simply an offhand way to measure the density of a paper. It is a very common way to distinguish amongst paper types, even for ordinary retail papers.
Point size: While this term may seem familiar to those that have studied typography, point size is a measure of the thickness of paper, unlike weight, which is a measure of density of paper material. Points are one thousandth of an inch, with heavier papers having higher point sizes. Most retail and end-user papers have no mention of point size of papers, generally using weight as the only metric to measure a paper by. Business cards are often printed on thicker stocks, for example, 14 pt stock, or 0.014 inches.
Brightness: Brightness is the amount of light that is reflected off of a blank page. The brighter a page, the better color range is achievable, allowing for brighter colors and higher contrast. More contrast in lights and darks achieves a better color gamut (or range of colors) out of printers. Naturally, the brighter the paper stock, the better. Brightness is measured in values from 0 to 100. For instance, you can likely buy fine quality reams of typing paper with a brightness of 90.
Whiteness: Easily confused with paper brightness, “whiteness” is the shift in hue of the paper, similar to the various hues of soft white and bright white lightbulbs. Some papers have a color tint that leans warmer, yellower, or bluer. Many photo papers tend to lean blue, as bluish papers tend to be perceived as brighter than more neutral white papers. Many retailers might not sell papers that make note of whiteness; readers may simply want to note the color their white paper leans for their own purposes.
Paper stock: Related to point size and weight, various densities, thicknesses, and paper qualities have various names, like “Newsprint,” “Cardstock,” or “Bristol.” Many photo papers are heavier weights, often in an attempt to recreate the feel of old style photo prints on light sensitive paper developed with photo chemistry.
Coated Paper: Most photo papers are coated with a layer of chemical bonded to the paper, intended to allow inks to be absorbed more accurately, creating better quality images. Note that some papers are simply coated on one side, with a clear front and back, while others are coated on all sides.
Gloss: One of the most common types of photo papers, Glossy papers are coated with a bright, shiny emulsion, giving inkjet prints rich depths of color and a bold, shiny sheen.
Matte: Duller and more understated, matte photo papers are often coated as well, albeit coated to appear softer. Uncoated papers are often called “matte,” although this is a bit of a misnomer. Simply keep in mind that coated papers exist with matte finishes, as well as uncoated papers exist that necessarily have matte quality surfaces.

Why is Coated Paper Better than Regular Paper?

Inkjet printers fire ink at pages in small liquid drops. Paper, having been made from wood, is porous, and accepts the liquid material with capillary action, drawing it out in multiple directions the person doing the printing might not have intended. To explain it more accurately, the wet liquid inks have a tendency to flow, and flow from areas of high concentration into the porous papers, or open areas of low concentration. Because your inks are diffusing into your paper, you’ll notice your regular typing paper gets wobbly and your images aren’t as clean and crisp. What’s the solution?
Coated papers are chemically treated to help the paper be a better printing substrate—in fact they are expertly engineered to solve this problem so you don’t have to think about it. Ink blots rest on the emulsion in a wet state, but stay neatly put and are also neatly absorbed. Images stay clean, by microscopically controlling the absorption of inks into emulsified surfaces. This means your printed image will change less over time, as inks settle and dry, leaving pigment behind, locked into the surface of your photo paper.

Why Do Brighter Papers Have Better Color?

Coming back to the concept of Color Gamut, inkjet printers use four primary colors of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black to create a spectrum of colors. When the white canvas they lie on is duller, the mixtures of these colors have less range—the darks and lights are more similar to the darks and lights on brighter papers. A good comparison is to that of HD Televisions and Contrast Ratios, although the visual aid may explain the difference better.
Because your black point and your white point are closer together on duller papers, your spectrum of available colors (or color gamut) is narrower. Fewer colors are available, and these will tend to be duller. Starting with brighter papers will allow for a richer, fuller spectrum, with black points and white points as far apart as possible.

Is High Quality Paper a Guarantee of a Great Print?

Simply said, no. There are a thousand and one different reasons your prints will not turn out the way you want them to, and photo papers are merely one part of a very complex equation. They are a very important part of that equation, however. You would be wise to think about your photo printing needs when looking into photo paper, buying according to your printing goals.
Can good quality photo paper improve the quality of prints from your injet photo printer? Without a doubt, as increased color range and better, cleaner dots on coated papers will without fail create better prints than on typing papers. Will photo papers safeguard against human error, uncalibrated monitors, or poor quality printers? Simply said, no.
Don’t be discouraged by this, though. Simply keep in mind the terms and concepts mentioned here when buying your photo paper, and you’ll learn to produce better photo prints than ever before.

How to Install, Manage, and Delete Fonts on Your PC

2010-12-24T20:40:00.000+01:00

If you have recently found some terrific fonts that you want to use on your Windows system, then getting them installed may not be something that you are familiar with. Today we show you how to manage those fonts with ease.
Installing Fonts in Windows 7 & Vista
Installing fonts in Windows 7 and Vista is extremely easy. Just right click on the font files and select Install.

A small window will appear showing the progress on adding the new fonts to your system. Your new fonts will be ready to use as soon as this window auto-closes.

Viewing, Deleting, & Managing Fonts in Windows 7 & Vista
If you want to view, delete, or perform other actions with the fonts on your system then the Control Panel is the place to start. While similar there are small differences between 7 and Vista. For Windows 7 open your Control Panel, go to Appearance and Personalization, then click on Preview, delete, or show and hide fonts.

In Windows 7 the Fonts Folder will open in the same Control Panel window. Once there you can view what the font will look like, delete it, or even hide it if desired.

The easiest way in Windows Vista is to open the Control Panel and type fonts in the search blank. Once the Fonts listing appears click on View installed fonts. The Fonts Folder will open in a new window.

One difference between Windows Vista and 7 is that you cannot hide fonts in Vista, otherwise both are the same for managing your fonts.

Font viewing for Windows 7 and Vista is exactly the same right down to the font information located at the top of the window.

Installing Fonts in Windows XP
Working with fonts in Windows XP is a bit different when it comes to adding new fonts. To get started go to the Control Panel, then Appearance and Themes and look for the Fonts Link on the left side. Click on the Fonts Links to access the Fonts Folder on your system.

You will do all of the installing, viewing, deleting, or other font functions from this window. To install a new font in XP go to the File Menu and select Install New Font.

A new window will appear where you will browse to the location of the fonts that you want to install. Select one or multiple font files and click OK.

As with 7 and Vista a small progress window will appear while your new fonts are being installed.

Viewing, Deleting, & Managing Fonts in Windows
This part of managing fonts in XP is the same as in 7 and Vista, just right click on the chosen font to view, delete, or print it.

Viewing fonts is very similar to 7 and Vista except for the top portion of the window. Notice that there is an extra line of information provided for the font (i.e. “font brand” & e-mail address).

Managing the fonts on your system is quick and easy to do once you get started. After you have those new fonts installed then you can really have fun creating unique documents for yourself, your family, and friends.

Happy News

2010-12-23T17:36:00.000+01:00

I have finally been able to make all the features on the blogg work as they are intended to do, Been a frustrating few days with a lot of fiddling around trying to get things to work with different theme plates #^_^#

I will be updating the above section
The Build
Contacts
About
Guides <--- already have a decent amount of links in it

Have fun

Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters

2010-12-23T13:45:00.001+01:00

One of everyone’s favorite parts of Photoshop is the filters menu—it’s a big box of weird, fun effects. Read on and learn what filters are,and what they can’t do, and effective ways to use them.

The Big Box of Crayons

It’s an easy thing to fall into running dozens of filters on images without rhyme or reason. Playing with filters can be fun, but rarely will give a result that doesn’t look like a heavily filtered photograph—the unmistakable “made in Photoshop” look. The filters menu is like the giant box of crayons many of us used as children: bright and colorful and full of potential. However, simply having the big box of crayons can be temptation to use as many of them as possible, simply because we can.
Experiment with filters frequently, but don’t fall into the trap! Use filters creatively and sparingly; try to focus on your photographs, rather than trying to use every crayon in the box.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

If you put the wrong number into your calculator, do you get the right answer? That, in a nutshell, is the concept of “Garbage in, Garbage out.” Photoshop filters work pretty much the same way. You can perhaps get a different looking pile of garbage if you start with a terrible image, but you’ll never get anything that isn’t garbage. At best, you can use filters to distract from the worst bits of rubbish.
Filters are simply programs that process existing images in different ways. If you have an image that is damaged, torn, or worn away, no amount of Photoshopping or filters will ever bring it back. If images are restored, it’s never a result of a clever Photoshop user recreating what she thinks belongs there, not what filters put there.

Beginning with an image like the HTG logo, the image is clearly low quality as it’s an internet graphic pulled it straight off the frontpage. The image is lossy and looks poor, full of low resolution smeared pixels and JPG artefacts–all fine for webpages, but not for art files.
Even running a Threshold filter (Image > Adjust > Threshold) merely distracts from the fact that my original image was a low-resolution JPG. Similarly, Photoshop will not add detail the way the FBI computers do in movies. If the detail doesn’t exist, no amount of filtering will make it exist. Until we learn to make computers that can create new information, we’ll have to create good images in the first place, or rely on artists to do it for us.

What Can Filters do?

Starting with this base image for comparison, let’s take a brief look through some of the many filters and see what they look like. No description necessary, the images here describe the filter far better than words.

Filter > Artistic > Colored Pencil

Filter > Artistic > Cutout

Filter > Artistic > Watercolor

Filter > Blur > Gassian Blur

Filter > Blur > Motion Blur

Filter > Blur > Radial Blur

Filter > Blur > Smart Blur

Filter > Brush Strokes > Accented Edges

Filter > Distort > Pinch

Filter > Distort > Shear

Filter > Distort > Spherize

Filter > Noise > Add Noise

Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise

Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone

Filter > Pixelate > Crystalize

Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic

Filter > Pixelate > Pointilize

Filter > Render > Clouds

Filter > Render > Difference Clouds

Filter > Render > Lens Flare

Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask

Filter > Sketch > Bas Relief

Filter > Sketch > Reticulation

Filter > Sketch > Graphic Pen

Filter > Stylize > Extrude

Filter > Stylize > Find Edges

Filter > Texture > Patchwork

Filter > Texture > Stained Glass

Filter > Texture > Texturizer

Filter > Other > Maximum

Filter > Other > Minimum

Combining Filters for Better Results

As we’ve seen in older articles using Filters, combined artfully, they can create excellent effects. Their combinations will only “filter” information—necessarily giving you less than what you started with. But, with clever application, filtering images can give you something that looks better (or at least different) than what you started with. Keep in mind, that it is not the filters themselves that are improving the image in this case, it is you, and your clever combination of Photoshop commands and filters. While Photoshop can only make garbage from garbage, a skilled Photoshop user can turn even a terrible image into a something worthwhile.
Photoshop tips left you confused? Start at the Beginning! Check out the previous installments

Quick and Dirty Vintage Photo Effect in Photoshop

2010-12-23T13:39:00.000+01:00

Looking for a quick way to transform your photos into handsome, convincing vintage art? Lots of programs offer vintage photograph filters, but these are often rough, and give unexciting, unconvincing results. With a few moments in practically any version of Photoshop, you can make realistic-looking vintage photos from nearly any picture you might have on your hard drive. Here’s how to do it.

I came across this pic of the King of Bhutan and thought it had some nice possibilities. You will, of course, be using whatever photo you want. I recommend one with high resolution, and good contrast between lights and darks. You can, of course, use any photo, but some will give you stronger results that others.

Press to do a quick desaturate and turn the image to grayscale.

Then, press to bring up the Hue/Saturation palette and set it to “Colorize” with these Hue/Saturation/Lightness values.

Go to FIlters > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the “Radius” to 1.0, or more if you want.

Our image is looking nicely sepia toned already, with softened edges from the Gaussian blur.

Press to create a new layer.

Fill your new layer with black by going to Edit > Fill and tell the Fill window to “Use” Black. From there, you’ll want to open Filters > Render > Clouds to fill that layer with the texture below.

The layer of clouds should look about like this. If you used Filters > Render > Difference Clouds, it won’t look very different.

Set your Layer Effect to “Screen” in your Layers Palette. And bump the “Opacity” down to 50%.

Make of copy of the layer by right clicking and pressing “Duplicate.”

While on your new duplicated layer, Go to Filters > Noise > Add Noise and use settings similar to this. It’s important to use the “Monochromatic” setting.

This layer of noise will add a reticulation effect to your photo. It’s a little harsh, so let’s look into softening it.

Use Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur again. The same settings as last time will be fine.

At this point, you should have a pretty good look going on in your image. I decide I want some harsher values, so I want to play with my levels a bit.

Click the at the bottom of your layers palette to bring up “Adjustment Layers.” Choose “Levels.”

Set your levels as shown. The black arrow moves to the right, making your darks darker. Your white arrow moves left, increasing the whites in your image. You can also just copy my values if you don’t want to play with the tool (those values are 31, 1.00, 239).

Press to make a complete copy of your image and put it on top of all your layers.

On this new layer, go to Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and use values similar to these. This will harshen a lot of your darks and lights even further.

Set this layer effect to “Darken.” From there, adjust your “Opacity” to 25%. This will add some harsh, dark values to your image.

Duplicate your layer by right clicking and picking duplicate.

Set this duplicated layer’s effect to “Lighten” with the same opacity.

Our image looks pretty good, but the color is off when you compare it to a real vintage photograph.

Go to your Layers Palette and press the to bring up your adjustment layers again. Create a “Hue/Saturation” layer effect on top. Use values similar to these.

You may need to change around some of the values in the filters to suit your own photo. But the basic steps can remain the same and will give you a similar look.
Image of King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck by Royal Family of Bhutan via Wikipedia. My derivative image free under CC license.

Changes

2010-12-23T13:37:00.000+01:00

As you probably have seen by now thesite have taken a dramatic change to the better, I will update and tweak the blog during the next few day`s

The previous site layout had to many limitations and bugs which i could not get fixed, so i changed it to a new one instead

What’s the Difference Between Pixels and Vectors?

2010-12-22T23:04:00.000+01:00

As the basis of nearly every image format worth using, Pixels and Vectors are the broad categories of modern 2D image files. But what are they exactly, and how are they different?
While the differences in these two formats may appear obvious on the surface, the explanation is subtle and complicated. Stick around for a little bit of computing history and graphic geekery.

Pixels and Raster Images

Pixel is a contraction of the words Picture and Element. They’re not very different than the ones Russell Kirsch invented for the first digital image more than 50 years ago. Pixels (at least the pixels in digital art files) were made to recreate photography.
The idea was to recreate a photograph using a grid-based system of colors and tones. These “picture elements” are the indivisible building blocks of all digital artwork, complex or simple. Kirsch’s first image was a paltry 176 pixels in width (shown actual size), and in grayscale. Shown below, his infant son was his subject.
Raster is a term for all images that fit inside this model, and rasterization is the process of turning any sort of non-pixel based image into a digital pixel-based image.

Pixels and Monitors

It’s important to understand that when we talk about pixels in graphic files, we are not necessarily talking about the same pixels your monitor is rendering images in. Pixels existed before Kirsch and the computer scientists that worked with him created digital imaging.
Pixels on monitors are collections of Red Green and Blue points of light, combining in various brightnesses to create the RGB color model. Because screens necessarily predate the images we view them on, monitor pixels existed before digital imaging.

However, because monitors are based on the original models, including color models based on RGB, it can be confusing. Simply keep in mind we use the same word for the points of light on your monitor as well as the most basic piece of raster imaging. When we compare pixels to vector graphics, we are talking exclusively about raster graphic pixels, and not the pixels your monitor displays.

Vectors and Scalable Graphics

The first vector drawing program was called Sketchpad, created in 1960 by Ivan Sutherland, only a few short years after Kirsch created digital imaging. Sketchpad allowed users to draw points and lines directly on a screen with a stylus. Although Sketchpad is a pale comparison to modern vector software, it is considered a direct influence on the CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) programs that would come later.

While pixels are literal “blocks” of an image simulating the points on your screen, vectors are points, lines, curves and polygons on an algebraic grid. These points, lines, curves, and basic polygons are called “primitives,” and are the basic building blocks of vector art.

The important distinction between pixels and vectors is that vectors exist in a mathematical space, as opposed to the more literal space that pixels exist in. Pixels are all equal size and have a clearly defined position; once you zoom into a pixel, you are unlikely to find any quarks or tau particles inside. Vector primitives, existing only as points on a grid in this mathematical space have no such limitation. As you zoom closer and closer to a point primitive in your vector image, you realize you can never really get any “closer” to it than you originally were.

The helpful consequence of this is that vector images operate independent of image resolution. Raster images often look poor when they are low resolution, or describe an image with very few pixels. Vector art, on the other hand, can be blown up and stretched with no loss in quality whatsoever.

What are they good for?

Typography, in particular, is perfectly suited to vector graphics. Abstract geometric shapes are easily defined with clean-edges and curves of vector primitives. And because they are scalable to infinitely small and large sizes, entire alphabets can be contained in very small files and used at nearly any size.

Line art is well suited to modern vector programs like Flash. Many artists prefer to create their artwork in vectors as it allows immaculately clean lines, as in this image from John Krisfalusi’s blog on animation.

Vector is also a very popular format for many auto advertisements. Vector cars are actually the rule, rather than the exception for modern advertisements, as the clean lines and sharp clarity possible in vector art hold up even at enormous billboard sizes. Super-high megapixel photography for billboard art would create files too large to effectively use.

However, pixels were created for photography, and are still the best model for photographs and photo-like images, such as digital painting. Deep space photography from satellites like the Hubble Telescope or spacecraft like Voyager 1 would be impossible with film photography.

Quite possibly the most epic pixel ever photographed.
Image credits: All images assumed fair use. From Wired.com article: http://goo.gl/j5jw Monitor derivative from wikipedia: http://goo.gl/qOdg Sketchpad image: http://goo.gl/FvY6 RGB Lights from Wikipedia: http://goo.gl/BzEX John K inked image: http://goo.gl/Nj4U Vector car: http://goo.gl/LN2D

Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 7: Design and Typography

2010-12-22T23:00:00.000+01:00

Programs like Photoshop have allowed new generations of would-be designers jump in and create with greater ease than ever before. See just how easy it is by learning the Type Character Panel, and applying it to some basic design work.

Fonts and the Character Panel

While vector programs like Adobe Illustrator are superior choices for handling abstract shapes like fonts, Photoshop is no slouch in the Typography department. It is capable of nearly any typographic treatment Illustrator is capable of, and some that it isn’t.

The character panel can be found by going to Window > Character, if it is not already in your right side panel. It is rich with options for your text, which we’ll go over now. Be warned, that this section contains complicated typographic terms that you may or may not know. Brush up on your typography terms with the How-To article, “Understand Typography Like a Professional Designer,” or simply keep reading.
Font Family: Where you chose the font your text object is set in, for example, Helvetica, Arial, Times New Roman, etc.
Font Style: If you have font families installed, your “font style” may be active, this is where you can choose alternate versions of the same face. For instance, Arial Bold, Arial Narrow, Arial Condensed, Arial Rounded MT, Arial Black, etc.
Font Size: Where you can numerically alter the size of your font. Type in numbers here or use the pulldown menu for suggested common point sizes.
Leading: Typographic term for the space between lines of paragraph text, set in points.
Kerning: Horizontal spacing between pairs of letters. Negative numerical values here will close spaces between characters while positive values will add space between letters.
Tracking: Similar to the concept of Kerning, Tracking adjusts the general kerning over an entire text object or over several selected letters. You can adjust tracking on a text object, and then kern between individual letters, if you wish.
Vertical Scale: A controlled way to stretch and squash typography up and down. Input numerical values here in percent of the original character height.
Horizontal Scale: A controlled way to stretch and squash typography to the left and right. Input numerical values here in percent of the original character width.
Baseline Shift: The baseline is the line the text “rests” on. Move certain selected characters off the baseline to make them appear higher or lower than the rest of the set text.
Text Color: An area where text object color can be adjusted.
Language: Adjusts the language the text is set in, in case non-English characters are needed.
Anti-Aliasing: Options for rendering text in pixels by adjusting the amount of pixel blurring used to describe the edges of type. “None” renders letters in hard-edged pixels, while all others use various forms of anti-aliasing.

Faux Bold and Other Character Panel Options

	Faux Bold: The size of your current font is artificially thickened to create an artificial bold font. Using an actual bold font in the “Font Family” or “Font Style” is generally preferable.
	Faux Italic: Your current font is artificially slanted to the right, creating a false italic look. Again, using an actual italic font in the “Font Family” or “Font Style” is preferable.
	Uppercase: Transforms your type into all uppercase. Very useful in those cases where it is time consuming to retype large sections of upper and lower case text.
	Small Caps: Creates a false small caps by shrinking the point size of your uppercase letters. All lowercase letters will be replaced with these smaller capitals in your text object.
	Superscript: Changes selected text or text object to superscript, as in the case of 2⁸.
	Subscript: Changes selected text or text object to subscript, as in the case of C₆H₁₂O₆.
	Underline: Adds a simple underscore underneath your selected text or text object.
	Strikethrough: Adds a simple strike through all of your selected text or text object.

The Options Panel and the Type Tool

Some options not available in the Character Panel are waiting at the top of your screen, in the Options Panel, when you use the Type tool. These three are:

	Text Orientation: Toggles the direction the text in your text object runs, either horizontally or vertically.
	Alignment: Sets the alignment of your text object either to Left-Aligned, Center-Aligned, or Right Aligned.
	Warp Text: Warps text objects into one of several pre-defined, adjustable shapes, like banners or other objects.

Designing a Simple Book Cover

Because design is about real world application, we will look through the creation of a basic book cover design for one of the most important (not to say controversial) scientific books of all time, On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, by Charles Darwin.

brings up the levels tool to adjust the image of Darwin. While design is not necessarily simply about arrangement of elements, this simplistic approach will suffice for demonstration purposes.

As the image is blacked, Ctrl click on the Gray channel in your channels panel. This creates a selection of all the white in the image.
Edit: If your file is not already in Grayscale, but RGB or CMYK, you should go to Image > Mode > Grayscale before Ctrl + Clicking on your grayscale channel. Thanks to HTG reader l3utterfish for bringing this to my attention.

Press to create new layer.

Edit > Fill to fill the selection in your new layer with white.

The icon photograph of Darwin is now removed from the black background and ready to be used as an element.

Press to create a new document at your preferred size. The size illustrated is the same size of another important book, Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style.

And here is our very tall workspace for the book cover.

Pick a foreground color in the in your toolbox. Any color will suffice, although in this demonstration, a dark color is preferable.

Edit > Fill and be certain to set “Use” to “Foreground Color.”

The background is filled with the wine color chosen earlier.

Press shortcut key . Navigate to your original file, and drag your layer into your new file using the selected Move Tool.

The layer should appear something like this inside the new file.

Press or select the type tool, Illustrated above to start setting type.

Not all fonts are appropriate to the content. This pixelated font is very bad for this concept.

A more conservative font may honor the content and create a more appropriate look.

With even a few limited font options installed, it can seem overwhelming. However, picking the right font is difficult and time consuming, but altogether very important to a piece of design.

When the right font is found, adjusting it with the Character Panel is a simple matter.

The font size is changed,and the type broken into two lines.

When the point size is adjusted, we may run into issues with leading.

When letters collide, readers will be left with legibility and readability issues. Adjusting leading is the only response.

Increasing the point size of the leading improves the readability of the title.

Additional information will have to be added, and oftentimes, Photoshop assumes you want to use the same font as point size as your last used text object. This may or may not be the case.

New text objects added and adjusted, we can start to access our design as a whole.

We may find we wish to move elements around.

We may also add more elements or subtlety shift text, to keep a consistent line on the page. The Text tool will also allow you to adjust typos, like the letters “Means” “Natural” and “Selection” that need capitalizing in a title.

Additional elements can also help a design, like this skeleton of Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis. Again, design is not necessarily a simple combination of elements, as it can involve process Photoshop is completely incapable of. However, it is often an excellent tool for this sort of graphics work.

How to Understand Typography Like a Professional Designer

2010-12-22T22:56:00.000+01:00

Typography is so overwhelmingly ever-present we hardly notice it there anymore. As elemental as it is to our culture, it’s actually bizarre to think it has a history at all. This article will serve as a condensed education on the basics of typography, including typographic terms, proper usage of fonts, unusual characters, and history.
We’ve become so accustomed to communicating with type that most of us do not notice what it is doing, let alone any of the agonizing design decisions that were a part of their creation. Practically any major typeface has a long history and richness important to how the font communicates about the content it bears. At least, any font that wasn’t created by somebody named “Pizzadude.”

A Brief History of Type

The tradition of Western-style type began with scribes and hand-written copies of books. All written material was done by hand, tediously and slowly, often taking years to produce a single copy of a book. The idea of a “typeface” or “font” was unknown, although most scribes throughout the Western world had their own stylistic hallmarks.
When German printer Johannes Gutenberg invented the first western movable type printing press, he and his apprentices hand-carved wooden type in the style of the handwritten Blackletter fonts. By doing this, Gutenberg not only created the engine behind a massive explosion of literacy, but also the first honest-to-goodness “font” in the reusable form we understand them in today.
Even more so than the history of literature, the history of typography is synonymous with the history of literacy. Type designers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods took inspiration from Gutenberg and the other first movable type printers, but also looked to Classical (Roman) typography. Combining the Roman Majuscules with the naturalistic Minuscules found in ancient texts that inspired the Blackletter fonts, these typographers eventually crafted fonts and alphabets like the ones we use today. Handcarving the individual and lovingly designed pieces of type, the early typographers were effectively creating a critical piece of the language in which we all communicate.

For years, “fonts” were these simple, movable pieces of wood (or metal, in later, more industrialized years), placed backwards, inked and run over a substrate, e.g., paper. Because this kind of relief-style printing leaves a mirror image, typesetters had to learn to read characters backwards and place them backwards on their presses. Learning to place Glyphs by reading them backwards, typesetters were often warned to “Mind their p’s and q’s” as the lowercase p and lowercase q look nearly identical.
These fonts were agonizingly designed around the core principle of legibility. The designer had the challenge to create each letter unique enough to be distinguished from the rest of the alphabet, while keeping a marked style throughout the set. Legibility is a separate concept entirely from the concept of readability, which is the ability to be read when copy is set in large blocks. The design decisions in a font as common today as Helvetica or Garamond reflect a long tradition completely unknown to most modern computer users, and likely many designers.
In one of the most important modern books on type, The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst briefly discusses on the life of Jean Jannon, the so-called “greatest type designer of the French Baroque.” He describes Jannon as a Protestant that was Religiously persecuted for the majority of his life, and that his experiences caused him to create typefaces that were “elegant but nonconformist.” Jannon’s fonts are often lumped together with Garamond, even to this day. This is the sort of history to be found behind every major typeface and Bringhurst lets us know it. It is with this sort of understanding a great designer can marry subtle, invisible style to simple body copy.

“Typography exists to honor content.” Bringhurst says. And all art is, in part, about the artist. The art of typography says something about the typographer’s personal style. Jannon was a nonconformist Frenchman who designed immaculate typefaces. When you set your body copy in Jannon faces, what are you saying about the content of those words? Are you speaking of the French flair of the author? Of his iconoclasm? Of his suffering and persecution? It is this level of richness, history and craftsmanship knowledgeable designers like Bringhurst use when approaching a design problem. Every face says something, even if it is not obvious.

Digital fonts were, more or less, an inevitable consequence of this history as design steps into the computer age. In order to appeal to designers and typographers, companies like Apple and Adobe researched the fonts printed years ago by master type craftsmen, bringing the painstaking work of a lifetime of design down to a file size of a few miniscule KB. While digital fonts have had a huge impact on making design more accessible to the world, there has been a reaction to this treatment of beloved handcrafted fonts. Many designers have decided to incorporate these “obsolete” methods into their designs, intentionally ignoring the sleekness of design for tools and machines even Gutenberg might recognize.
Not to say that this is the quote-unquote “proper” way to design. Many fields of design, including web page design, are ill suited to printing with blocks of wood. But it is with this understanding of typographic history that a good designer must start with before he decides to take that carefully crafted Futura, Gill Sans, or Jean Jannon-designed font and do unspeakable, downright rude things to it that a design may call for.

Typographic Terms You Should Know

Body Copy: Large blocks of type set to be read with the greatest of possible ease. Body copy should all be set in the same font, with shared point sizes for the face and leading.
Majuscule: Otherwise known as Uppercase letters. Most of our alphabet borrows its Majuscules from the Latin, or Classical letterforms.
Minuscule: Counterpart to Majuscule, Minuscules are our lower-case, copied and modified throughout the years to better fit their Classical letterform counterparts.
X-Height: In a miniscule set of a font, the so called “height” is the space between the baseline and the mid-point, which is often the height of the lowercase letter x.
Baseline: The invisible line where the fonts “rest.” Descenders can dip below this line, but have a resting point that sits on it.
Ascender: In the set of Minuscules, the Ascender is the part of the font that goes beyond the X-height, approaching the Capital letter height. Letters with ascenders are those like l, b, f, or k.
Descender: Also in the Minscules, the Descender is the part that dips below the Baseline. Letters that have descenders are p, q, y and, in some faces, f.
Ligatures: Sometimes lowercase letters collide within words and create tangent points and bizarre shapes that can cause a reader to stumble without realizing why. Typographers artfully combine letters like “fi”, “ti”, “ffi” in ways that are easy on the eye and are often undetectable as separate characters. Many quality fonts include these Ligatures among their Glyphs.
Bowl: Enclosed round space within letters like the “o” and “p” or “B”.
Counter or Counterform: Open rounded space within letters like the “c”, “G” or “U.” The lowercase “e” has a bowl and a counterform.
Letterspace: The most literal typographic term, Letterspacing is adding blank space between individual letters. It is only adding space and is not to be confused with Kerning. Some fonts are easer to read Letterspaced, while some are harder.
Kerning: Letters are Kerned when the spaces between letters are closed up, bringing them closer together. Some letter combinations like “AV” often need Kerning to not look awkward and filled with excess space. Most kerning in modern computerized type is done automatically by the software, but may need personalized attention depending on the font or the situation.
Lead or Leading: Lead is the space between baselines of text in body copy. For instance, “double-spacing” your research paper in Word is increasing the Leading. Leading is set in points and is normally set at the same point as the font or slightly higher. This is pronounced “Lead” as in the heavy metal substance in the case of “Lead” and “Leading.”
Serif: Serifs are traditional flourishes, points, and shapes on the ends of the strokes of letters. These are hallmarks of older style fonts with roots in Roman, Italian, and German scripts. These were originally part of naturalistic pen strokes and became part of the first sets of fonts. It took longer than you might think for the first fonts without Serifs to be created and and widely used.
Type Nerd: Exactly what it sounds like, Type Nerds relish pointing out when somebody uses Faux Bold or a Double Prime instead of true quotes. Typography is an art form created by sticklers, and so creates a lot of Type Nerds.

Basic Types of Fonts

Serif: What has become the standard of standards, Serif fonts have those flourishes, points, and shapes on the ends of their strokes. Serif fonts are often considered “Traditional,” and are often used for more to say something about this tradition in more conservative, old-fashioned designs. Body copy set in Serif fonts is often very readable. Common Serifs are Times, Georgia, Garamond, Minion, and Baskerville.

Sans Serif: When the first Sans Serif fonts were created, people called them “Grotesque.” This name still exists today as one of the first generation of Sans Serif fonts. Sans are the more modern hipster cousins to Serif fonts. Much of typographic design today uses Sans fonts. Common Sans are Helvetica, Impact, Futura, Frutiger, Myriad, or Tahoma.

Slab Serif: A Serif font popularized in the 19th century when the Western world was developing a keen interest in the history of Egypt. Slab Serifs have blocky slabs of serifs as opposed to the pointed or flourished ones that hallmark the Serif fonts based on humanistic, handwritten letterforms. Common Slab serifs are Rockwell and Courier, the typewriter font.

Blackletter: Unfortunately, these are often called “Old English” fonts. Blackletters were the first fonts to be printed by movable type, and were therefore the first font in the repeatable, modern sense. They are based on a caligraphic tradition and were first used by Gutenberg to print the famous Gutenberg Bible. A common Blackletter is Fraktur.

Dingbat: Decorative, non letterform Glyphs used for various decorative purposes. Common Dingbat fonts are Zapf Dingbats and Wingdings.

Display font: Fonts designed specifically for short, eye-catching text. Posters, advertisements, and web design headers are best done in Display fonts.

Body Font: Fonts designed to set large sections of body copy. Books, newspapers, and the content of blog posts should all be set in appropriate body fonts.

Calligraphic or Script Font: Fonts designed based on a person’s handwriting or designed to look like handwriting. These can be as elaborate as Edwardian Script or as simple as the humble yet loathed Comic Sans MS.

Novelty Font: Digital typography has allowed designers to create all manner of bizarre, but oddly good-looking fonts. These can range from useful to useless, from copying a movie title font, to borrowing the style of Graffiti artists. Novelty is sort of my own umbrella term. I use it to illustrate the difference between the modern trend of font design versus the long, established history and undisputed types of fonts.

Tips for Better Typography

Whenever applicable, respect the history of your typeface.
Understand it might not have been designed to stretch, bend, or be distorted.
Design for readability and legibility. Type is supposed to be read.
Consider what your font was designed for when choosing it. Don’t write your memos in Impact. Sending emails sent in Funstuff makes you look goofy.
Many fonts are designed to be set in Upper and Lower case. Script fonts are an example of this and are nigh-illegible in all caps.
Blackletter fonts are another example. There is an aesthetic associated with all-caps Blackletter fonts, but they aren’t necessarily designed for reading that way.
When your primary purpose is communicating the content, simpler is often better.
Use as few fonts and point sizes in those fonts as possible on a single design.
If you use a different font or point size in that font in a design, make sure you have a reason.
Make sure they are different enough that the difference is noticed.
If you ignore any of the so called “rules of design,” have a good reason, and do it extremely well.

Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 6: Digital Art

2010-12-21T20:36:00.000+01:00

For artistic readers, Photoshop offers digital painting options few other painting or photomanipulation programs can equal. Whether you want to draw for a living, or simply want to paint for fun, learning the painterly side of Photoshop is very rewarding.
If you’ve always wanted to make digital art, but haven’t ever taken the time to learn Photoshop, this primer will help you get started laying down digital paint quickly and easily.

Getting Started With the Brush Tool

The Brush tool, shortcut key , is the Holy Grail of Photoshop tools. It is likely the most complex of all the tools in the program, at least in regard to its useage. There are a host of options on the Brush panel, all of which new digital artists should make effort to familiarize themselves with. If you cannot find the Brush Panel, go to Window > Brush to open the panel.

CS5 has yet more options for the Brush tool at the top of the screen, in the options panel. Here you can adjust your opacity and other options—however we’ll return to this in a moment to better illustrate how they work.

You’ll find that right clicking in your workspace opens yet ANOTHER options panel for the Brush tool. For our demonstration purposes, we’ll avoid using the arcane looking brush panel in the first screenshot, and mostly use the options panel and the right-click contextual menu from the last two screenshots. Again, readers are advised to experiment with the complex Brush Panel on their own, and check back for more thorough guides on the brush tool at a later date.

Do I Need a Graphics Tablet?

While they are not absolutely needed for any sort of digital painting, USB Graphics Tablets enhance your Photoshop experience greatly. They are not cheap, although there are some alternate brands or introductory products that cost $100—$200, while the most expensive ones run as high as $2,000.

Many of Photoshop’s best brush features are not usable without a pressure sensitive tablet. The benefit is not simply being able to draw with the pen-like stylus, but being able to draw with pressure sensitivity a mouse does not allow.

WACOM is the most common name in Graphics tablets, but is not the only company that creates them. The tablet illustrated above is the Waltop Venus, from the Taiwanese company Waltop.
Buy (or don’t buy) a tablet according to your needs. If you think you will get a lot of use out of it, then a $100 to $300 investment may be worthwhile to you. There are surprisingly excellent options available, even at the lower costs. In the end, you will know if you will get enough use out of it to justify it; simply don’t be afraid to buy the entry level unit if the more expensive ones are too much of an investment.

Learning the Brush Tool

to create a blank new file. Walk through this experiment to get a better understanding of the brush tools available to you.

This is a decent setting for your experimental brushwork. Right-click to bring up the contextual brush menu and select the first standard brush, “Soft Round.” You can adjust your size here with the top slider, if desired.

A black color stroke with this setting should look like this.

Look to your options panel and set your “Opacity” down to 50%, as shown above.

The same clicking and mouse dragging will now produce this color stroke, as it is painting a more translucent, see-through black with this opacity setting.

Right-click to bring up your brush contextual menu again, and this time pick the second option, “Hard Round.”

Keep your same opacity setting as before.

Notice the smooth line you’ve drawn. “Hardness,” which scales from 0% to 100% affects the “fuzziness” or blurriness of the lines you draw.

Similar to Opacity, is the setting for “Flow.” Return your opacity to 100% and set your “Flow” to 50%.

You can see immediately the line drawn is different.

Zooming in shows us how this same brush is drawn differently, in this repeating pattern. This is the major difference between the Opacity and Flow, and something that confuses even professional Photoshop painters.

“Airbrush Mode” is another fairly confusing option. Nearly every version of CS Photoshop will have this airbrush icon in the options panel. Click it on and we’ll learn the difference.

This is the correct brush setting to use for this demonstration. You’ll need a “soft” brush with a wide tip at whatever size you care to use.

Click in your image and hold your mouse button down. You’ll notice that with “Airbrush mode” on, your dark pigment will continue to paint as long as your mouse is held down. It will also spill out from inside your cursor area.

With airbrush mode off, however, you’ll find clicking and holding the mouse button only gives you a single blot of pigment, not the continuous stream that the Airbrush mode gives. It can be helpful to know the difference, and to experiment with what works better for you.

Drawing with Pressure Sensitivity

Continuing to use the same brush, we break out the graphics tablet and select this far right option on the top panel, “Tablet pressure controls size.”

A brush stroke with increasing pressure creates this mark that starts small and grows. It is uniformly dark through out.

There is another option, “Tablet pressure controls opacity,” which will change opacity with less pressure, allowing for lighter tones for lighter pressure.

This looks like so, with the grayer tones on the left, and the heavier, harder pressure tones on the right.

Below the first row of “basic” brushes are sets that use pressure sensitivity in more interesting ways.

Some of them are strange and unusual, and react to your paintbrush strokes in weird ways. This one reacted to the tilt of the stylus in relation to the tablet.

Others can create nice, naturalistic marks. You can see the opacity setting layering nicely in these brush marks.

In addition to pressure sensitivity, some brushes can be set to follow the direction of the brush stroke.

Others come set standard with the “Scatter” options. A single brush stroke created all of this effortlessly.

Similar to the stars, this leaf pattern scatters, rotates, and even creates leaves of different opacities based on pressure sensitivity.

Digital Inking and Painting with Photoshop

Rather than scanning, it can be quicker to take digital photographs of drawings for digital inking. Here’s a quick look at how to use these brush techniques to create a quick image.

You should work at good print resolutions whenever possible. Once you have your final sketch image, you can go to Image > Image Size to adjust the dimensions.

300 pixels per inch is a fairly standard print resolution. Enlarging this image to 10 inches in width will create a 3,000 pixel wide image, resulting in something over 12 megapixels. Work at whatever size suits you.

Create a solid color adjustment layer on top of your photograph. Any color will do, although light ones work the best.

Selecting a light pink color, change your “Blending Mode,” highlighted blue above, to “Screen.”

Your image is now toned down and ready to be digitally inked.

Create a new layer on top to draw your ink lines in. Select the Brush tool or the Pencil tool to ink your image.

Pressure sensitivity makes inking quick and easy.

A single brush size easily draws all the various line thicknesses.

To add color to the image, it can be helpful to create new layer with , then creating a new group for it. Be sure to create it underneath your digital ink layer.

The bucket fill combined with the brush tool quickly fill areas of the image with colors or solid blacks.

If you use the bucket fill with multiple layers, you’ll want to check “All Layers” on the right side of the options.

Add new layers for each new color or work in a single layer, depending on your preference.

Sloppy painting while working in layers is easy to work around.

Moving sloppy painting below other, tighter layers can quickly clean them up and save you the effort of being neat.

With flat tones complete, we can move along to painting in shading and a value range to the image.

Reducing the flow and setting the pressure setting to “Opacity,” we can brush on some colors onto each of our layers.

While similar painting can be done with a mouse, the time savings of quick, pressure sensitive brush movements are immense. The entirety of this painting and inking was done in shortly over 20 minutes.

At this point, simply work as you see fit, adding shadows, then highlights.

Some quick brushwork can make the foreground and background feel more complete together.

While she’s hardly perfect, this quick study is a fair showcase of the kind of painting Photoshop is capable of—except this is hardly the extent of what can be done. Experiment with the brush tool for yourself, and find what works best for you.

Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 5: Beginner Photo Editing

2010-12-21T20:33:00.000+01:00

Photoshop is named “Photoshop” for a reason; it’s for editing photographs. Take a look through some basic photo-editing techniques and learn how you can improve your own family photographs.
This is part 5 of a multi-part series. If you need a primer on the tools and skills covered in part 5, you can start at part 1, and learn about the toolbox. But, if you’re ready, we can cover four techniques that can help you create better memories.

Cropping Images for Better Composition

Oftentimes, when you take a digital photograph, you’ll end up with a lot of information that you may not want. One of the first things you’re going to want to do is learn how to crop your images, and the most convenient way to do this is using the Crop Tool.

Press the key to select your crop tool. Use your mouse to click and drag, creating a box inside your photograph.

You’ll notice a tick-box in the corners of your crop-box. You can move and resize your crop area to select the precise area you wish to crop.

You can press the key to release your crop. You can undo with and redo your crop at any time, if you feel so inclined. Cropping can eliminate areas of your image that you don’t want to see, or can also create a more interesting composition for prints or the web.

Adjusting Contrast with the Levels Tool

Shooting images on overcast days can give you gloomy images that are either too dark or devoid of detail. While the Brightness and Contrast tool is an acceptable way to adjust your images, the best tool to use is usually the Levels tool.

With your photograph open, simply press to open your levels dialog box. By default, this is what it looks like.

The three sliders (the arrows illustrated above) represent Shadows (your photograph’s darkest areas), Mid-tones (the middle darkest areas), and Highlights (the brightest areas of your photo). By adjusting them as illustrated above, brighter whites are created, mildly darker shadows, and the Mid-Tone point is moved closer to the shadows, allowing for more space between the Mid-Tones and the Highlights.

Clicking OK will close the Levels and render them. Immediately, we see more detail in the bird, and our sky is less overcast and gloomy. With little effort at all, you can give your photographs a more naturalistic look and bring out detail you might not have known that you even had!

Adjusting Color-Shifted Lighting

One of the biggest problems with taking pictures indoors is that a lot of indoor lighting will be tinted with a yellow, red, or blue cast. Your eyes may not pick up the difference, but your camera “sees” light very differently than our eyes do. Here’s a simple way to remove reduce the color of an overwhelmingly yellow image.

You’ll want to navigate to Image > Adjustments > Selective Color.

Selective Color is a tool that allows you to adjust your image through various primary colors. These are: Red, Green and Blue, the primary colors of light; Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, the primary colors of printing; and also by Whites and Neutrals.

Since our image has a yellow cast to it, I select “Yellows” from the “Color” menu box. You can use the adjustments illustrated above, or find the ones that work for your image. The basic premise is to reduce the color(s) you wish to remove (in this case, Yellow) and, in some cases, add color to the opposing primary colors (in this case, Cyan, Magenta, and Black.) That’s basically a complicated way of saying “less yellow, more red, blue, and black.”

Compared to the original image, the lighting on this now appears as clear and white as natural sunlight and the original looks aged and yellowed. If you notice this yellow cast on your images and want to remove it, this can often be your best bet.

Sharpen Blurry Photographs without Damaging Color

Sometimes dim indoor lighting can give a warm and fuzzy effect to your photography. Unfortunately, the “fuzzy” bit is a problem, as dim indoor lighting tends to make images come out blurry. There are many Photoshop filters that can sharpen an image, but many can damage color or heavily distort an image. This surprisingly easy trick can help sharpen shots and keep color intact.

Lab color is an alternate color space, like RGB and CMYK. It is unusual and most digital art files outside of the professional photography world will not use it.
In order to switch your photograph to Lab color, to go Image > Mode > Lab Color, as illustrated above.

Changing images to CMYK will give you a color shift—not so with Lab color. Your RGB image remains identical without any sort of color shift. On to the next step.

Flip to your Channels Panel. If you cannot find it, you can always retrieve it by going to your menu Window > Channels.

Pick the “Lightness” channel, which will look like a grayscale version of your image.

If your image doesn’t change to grayscale, try again. We need to work exclusively in this grayscale channel for this tip to work.

Navigate to Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. Unsharp Mask can increase contrast and tighten edges Photoshop perceives in images. The illustrated values are overdoing it somewhat—find values that work well with your own image.

Still in our Lightness channel, renders our filter. Oftentimes the Unsharp Mask filter can create to many harsh darks, so for this particular soft image, a round of Level adjustment can help counter the harshness of the filter.

brings up the levels tool. Adjusting the Midtones and Highlights (as in the example earlier) can create a softer look without sacrificing the faux-sharpness added to the image.

Our final result is a fair improvement over the soft-edged original. You can return your image to RGB color by navigating to Image > Mode > RGB and save it as a PSD or JPG file. It’s also a good habit to save multiple versions of your Photographs in order to return to the original, effectively undoing your edits if needed.

Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 4: Basic Menus

2010-12-21T20:31:00.000+01:00

Photoshop has a huge menu system with options even advanced users may ignore. For today’s lesson we’ll take a quick tour through them and learn which of them will help you increase your mastery of photo editing.
This is Part 4 of a multipart series on learning Photoshop. Part 1, the Toolbox and Part 2, Photoshop Panels, and Part 3, Layers, are also still available.

The Top Menu

Your menus are laid out as illustrated above. Let’s take a quick look through these and explain the less obvious menu items.

The File Menu

While this is home to obvious things like “Open” and “Close,” there are less obvious items here to look over. Here are some highlights.

Browse in Bridge: Bridge is a program that comes bundled with Photoshop for visual browsing. It allows users to look through their library of pictures rather than looking at empty filenames, similar to Google Picasa. Bridge is a decent program, but it can be annoying to accidentally open it, as it takes longer than you might want to load.
Browse in Mini Bridge: Mini Bridge is a version of Bridge that lives in Photoshop. Easy to use, but loads slowly. Part 2, Panels touched briefly on Mini Bridge.

Open As: A problematic menu item, Open As seems broken and glitchy. The idea is to be able to open one filetype as another, i.e., to open a layered PSD file as a flattened JPG. Any readers that care to comment on this, let me know of your successes or failures. I think it is broken in CS5 as of yet.
Open as Smart Object: Create a smart object from any file simply by opening it. Smart Objects resize and warp from the original file, so if you plan to resize a JPG or other image multiple times, you may want to open it as a smart object. You may want to learn a bit about Smart Objects first, however.
Share my Screen and Create New Review: Adobe CS Live features only available to Photoshop users that choose to register their copy of Photoshop and create an account on Adobe.com.

Device Central: Launches a separate program for developing applications for mobile smartphones and other similar devices. Not terribly useful for beginner users.

Save for Web and Devices: A wizard-type program launches that helps you compress your files into web-ready JPG, GIF, PNG, or WBMP file formats. In this case, “Devices” refers to the same mobile smartphones, etc, that “Device Central” refers to.
Revert: Reloads your file from the point it was last saved. You’ll lose all changes and your history. However, this is still often useful.
Place: Insert a separate file into the one currently open. Allows you to resize temporarily as a smart object.
Automate and Scripts: Helpful options for advanced users that have to do lots of repetitive graphic work. Scripts, in particular are quite exciting, and are worth a look, even for basic users. They are both deserve articles of their own, on another day.

The Edit Menu

Another fairly obvious menu, the Edit menu is home to some of PS’s most useful features.

Undo, Step Forward, Step Backward: Undo is a single level of revert you are likely familiar with. is a common shortcut, and you’ll find it will undo your last action as well as redo it. Step Forward and Backward move through your history palette, also covered in Part 2, Panels. This is an another simple way to use the history besides the History Panel.
Cut, Copy, and Copy Merged: You are likely also familiar with Cut, Copy, and Paste, which exist in the edit menu of nearly every program going back to MS Word for DOS. “Copy Merged” is extremely helpful, in that it can copy a multi-layer document as if it those layers were merged.
Fill: Often ignored, Fill is an excellent tool. “Fill” will fill a selection, layer, or channel with your foreground or background color, black, white, or texture, regardless of its content, unlike the bucket or flood fill. CS5 also has Content aware fill, which, given the right file, can attempt to recreate part of your image covered by foreground objects.

Stroke: Creates a linear stroke (read: a line) around your selection with whatever color you care to use. You can adjust line thickness or where in or around your selection you want to draw it. Like fill, it ignores existing content and simply strokes around your selection.

Content Aware Scale: Uses the same technology in “Content Aware Fill” to scale part of an image. Photoshop will make it’s best guess how you want your image to look when you resize with this.
Puppet Warp: New CS5 feature is a very complicated warp that allows users to distort images in complex ways.

Transform and Free Transform: Very useful tools for resizing an image, correcting and creating perspective, and distorting images.
Keyboard shortcuts: A menu for editing and assigning a custom keyboard shortcut for every menu item in Photoshop. Absolutely invaluable for any user.
Menus: Allows users to edit existing menus, hiding features they hate or never use, and highlighting the ones they have trouble seeing, but use frequently. Also incredibly helpful.

Preferences: Many of the quirky problems you have with Photoshop have their controllable settings here. More on the preferences menu and making PS behave better in a later article.

The Image Menu

The image menu allows you to change your color depth and do various other things. What are the most useful options here?

Mode: The color mode is where you set your image to RGB or CMYK, as well as various other types like Lab color or Indexed color, an 8-bit color table based file format. You should never use anything but RGB, unless you care to learn more about image formats and digital imaging.
Adjustments: A sub-menu with areas to adjust Brightness and Contrast, Levels, Curves, as well as Hue/Saturation. There are a host of other options here, all worth exploring. Here are a few of the most important:

Brightness/Contrast: A basic way to adjust lights, darks, and contrast in photographs. Good for beginners and easy to understand.

Levels: A more sophisticated way to adjust your value range in photos.

Curves: An even more complex way to adjust values and channels, allowing users to adjust targeted values with greater accuracy. For experts.

Exposure: Yet another menu for adjusting lights, darks and contrast, this one largely for digital photographers. Hue/Saturation: Adjust the colors of your image, as well as how bright and vibrant they are.
Invert: Black is white, white is black. All of your colors are now their opposite value.
Posterize: A filter that reduces your image to a limited number of colors.
Threshold: Another filter that reduces your image to black and white, completely without gray.

Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, Auto Color: Photoshop will attempt to improve your image automatically by adjusting Tones, Contrast or Color. They are likely inspired by Photoshop Elements (and similar basic photo editors); good tools for beginners.
Image Size: Not to be confused with Canvas Size, Image size will enlarge or shrink your entire image file.

Canvas Size: Will increase the size of the file’s “space” without changing any of your image information.

Image Rotation: Turn your image at 90° or 180° angles, or on “Arbitrary” ones like 21° or -5°.
Duplicate: Create a second open file identical to your file’s current state. Your new file does not retain its history.

The Layer Menu

The homebase for editing your layers, the Layer menu has lots of sub-menus and complex options. Beginner users may wish to look over Part 3 of the How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, and get a basic primer on using Layers.

New: The sub menu here allows creation of new layers, as well as options for turning your existing layers into your “Background” layer, if you need or want one. You can also “group” layers—similar to putting files in a folder in your OS. This option creates the “folder” for layers to be stored in.
Duplicate Layer: Allows users to make a copy of an existing layer, either in the current document, to a new one, or to another open file.
New Fill Layer/New Adjustment Layer: Two alternate types of layers that are dynamic, and can be edited with numerical values over and over again. See Part 3 of the How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop to learn more about Adjustment layers.
Layer Mask/Vector Mask: Tools for “masking” or hiding part or all of active layers. Do you know the difference between Vectors and Pixels? They are the basic difference between these two types of masks.
Clipping Masks: This “clips” a layer or layers to the layer transparency below it. Difficult to understand without experimentation. Expect later articles on Clipping Masks, Layer Masks, and Vector Masks here at How-To Geek.
Group Layers/Hide Layers: Multiple layers can be selected in the layers panel, and grouped or hidden here. This instance of “Group” bundles selected layers, rather than creating an empty group.\

Align/Distribute: Tools for arranging layers within your working space, i.e., centering an layer to your entire image, or spacing seven buttonlike objects out evenly on a page.
Merge Down: Combine the current layer or group with the layer below it.
Merge Visible/Flatten Image: Combine all layers in your document. “Merge Visible” will ignore all layers hidden in your Layers Panel, while “Flatten Image” will throw them away entirely. Merge Visible will also leave any transparency you have, while Flatten Image will create a non-transparent “Background Layer” out of all your layered information. See the illustration below for an example.

Above: Original file with Layers Panel, showing the existing layers.

Above: File after “Merge Visible.” Note the the layer transparency.

Above: File after “Flatten Image.” Note the white background added where the image was transparent.

Other Important Menus

The remainder of the menus in Photoshop are nowhere near as complex as these first ones.

The Select Menu: Menus that work with the Marquee, Lasso, and Wand tools, as well as the layers panel. Select All, Deselect, and Reselect work directly with these. When you have an active selection, Invert will select the part of your image you do not currently have selected. You can also select layers in your layers panel here, as well as adjust your selections with the “Modify” sub-menu. You can also enter the “Quick Mask” mode here, described briefly in Part 1 of the How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop.

The Filters Menu: The toybox for Photoshop users, Filters allow for all kinds of strange and wonderful distortions of images. Some are useful, many are not. Filters are a big topic, and will require at least an entire article to themselves. Until then, experiment with filters to find some that you enjoy.

The View Menu: The View menu is home to a lot of the more unusual parts of Photoshop, like the ability to change the size and shape of your pixels, as well as basic things like “Zoom In.” Here, you can preview your Print Size (roughly) or quickly zoom to 100% zoom with “Actual Pixels.” You can also turn off annoying things like Snap, Rulers (if you dislike them) as well as clearing your Guides or Slices.

The Window Menu: This is where nearly all of your panels disappear to when they are deleted, including the options panel at the top of your screen and your toolbox, by default on your left. You can also cycle through your open images at the bottom of the Window menu.

The Help Menu: Last but not least, the Help menu is the basic informational menu every good application should have. Check through it to learn about the tools that elude you, or

Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 3: Layers

2010-12-21T20:27:00.000+01:00

As one of the hallmark features of Photoshop, Layers are the foundation of learning good photo editing techniques. In this article, we’ll go through their basic usage, as well as cover some basic types of layers.

Your layer panel is one of the most important within Photoshop. Whenever you use Photoshop, you’ll work spend a lot of time working in it.
If you’ve lost your layers panel, you can retrieve it by going to Window > Layers.

The lasso tool creates a selection in any shape: in this case, the word “Layer” is drawn in. But the lasso does not create a new layer, even though we can use the lasso tool to move our selection around.

New layers can be created by clicking the button in the Layers panel. You can also press for a blank layer.
You can think of these layers as entirely new image files stacked on top of each other in your layers panel. By default, a new layer is transparent.

A simple Edit > Fill fills our selection with black. We’ve put it in a new layer, which will help us understand what a new layer is.

Our black fill exists in a new layer. We no longer need our selection, so pressing deselects it.

While this may look like a ruined image of the Apollo 11 rocket taking off, the drawn “Layer” text exists in its own separate layer, and is editable.

The Move Tool, shortcut key , illustrated above, is used for moving the layers selected in your layers panel.

The image of the shuttle still exists beneath the new filled layer. It can be moved to any position without destroying any part of the layer below it.

Individual layers can be moved, rotated, and transformed at your whim.

And again, since layers exist independent of each other, they do not have to affect each other.

Returning to a few older How-Tos, we can very simply add objects that have had their backgrounds removed to our image.

Simply use the Move Tool (shortcut key) to drag images from any open file to the one you’re working with. Photoshop will create a new layer in your target file with the dragged layer information in it.

This image has quickly become ridiculous. Clicking the in the side of the layers panel will hide any layer you don’t care to see.

Shortcut key will give you the Type tool, which can create a different type of layer. Live type is editable, and can be changed at any time without disturbing other layers.

Layers also have “Blending Options,” as illustrated in the contextual menu here. Right click on any of the layers in your layers panel to open this menu.

Blending Options takes us to the Layer Style dialog box. Here, we can add shadows and glows, all editable at any time through this same menu.

After adding a stroke to the text layer, other effects can also be added. A soft, white glow can make the text more legible against the complicated background.

Even with these layer effects, these layers are still editable.

The text can easily be set in a different font, with all layer effects staying active.

The layer effects look something like this in your layers panel.

In your layers panel, you can click the to create a different type of layer, called an Adjustment Layer.

CS5 brings up this “Adjustments” panel. I create a “Photo Filter” adjustment layer to give my image a sepia tone effect.

Adjustment layers also have a position in your layers panel and only affect the layers below. In other words, you can move your adjustment layers to affect the layers below it. I have my text above my Sepia Adjustment Layer, keeping it from turning sepia toned.

There are many options for Adjustment Layers, including the “Gradient” adjustment layer.

Gradients are great as adjustment layers, as they can easily be re-edited and adjusted. You’ll have numerous options for types of gradients, colors, angles, etc.

Adjustment layers can be hidden or edited by double clicking them in the layers panel.

Simple mastery of layers and the layers panel will greatly increase your ability to use Photoshop and get the effects you want to see in your photography.

Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 2: Panels

2010-12-21T20:24:00.000+01:00

One of the best features of Photoshop is one of the worst, as well: you are overwhelmed with options. Have a quick look through the default panels and learn more of what Photoshop can do in your hands.

Adjusting Panels

The default panels are snapped to the right side of your PS window. They are a fine set to begin with in Photoshop, and you can always adjust them, hide them, show them, or whatever makes the most sense to you. Photoshop workspaces are largely about personal comfort and have little to do with the so-called “correct” way to use Photoshop.

Your default set of panels from “Essentials” will look like this. If you lose any of them, you can get them back by going to the in the workspace area of your menu bar. You should see an option in the contextual menu that says “Reset” which will reset your workspace to the default panels.

The panels can be condensed by clicking the on the right of the panel. They can further be condensed or expanded by clicking and dragging on the left side of the panels.

It’s also simple to create “Free Floating” panels by clicking and dragging them away from the snapped areas on the left and right.

It can be simpler to edit panels this way, and later return them to the snapped area, grayed out here by Photoshop as they are dragged to become free-floating.

Panels can be added back to the snap area by dragging them to the far right of your PS window. Release your mouse button when your cursor is nearly on the farthest right part of the screen, just within the dark gray window. You should see the blue line illustrated above, telling you you’re setting your new panel set to snap on the side of your screen.

Exploring Default Panels

The “Essentials” workspace is also the default set of panels. These will be what we’ll go over first.
Mini Bridge: Adobe Bridge is an image file browsing program similar to Faststone, XnView, or Google Picasa. CS5 has integrated a smaller version of Bridge to allow more visual browsing of your images within your panels. This can be extremely helpful, although any of the aforementioned programs work just as well, if not better. Bridge tends to be a bit on the pokey side, and uses more resources than you might expect.

Visual browsing within Photoshop, however, is helpful. Bridge loads when you open the panel and ask to “Start Browsing.” Intuitive tools help navigate to folders on your machine; important and frequently used files or folders can be added to Favorites for quick recall later.

When you find an image you wish to load, either double-click it in Mini Bridge, or right click and pick “Open” from the contextual menu.
History: One of the most important features of Photoshop, History allows users multiple levels of undo, allowing you to reverse a long series of mistakes. This can allow you to edit photographs or images more naturalistically, experimenting with effects that may or may not come out correctly.

As you can see, the above image has some random nonsense done to it I’d like to undo entirely.

Opening the History Panel, you can walk backwards through all of the steps you’ve done on your image, or even revert the file by clicking the topmost area, directly below “History.”

You have a great deal more control over your editing with these multiple levels of undo.
Color: A simple panel, color allows you to pick and edit your foreground and background colors without opening the color contextual menu.

You can adjust your Red, Green, and Blue values from 0 to 255. Higher values will give you brighter colors, as you are adding brighter and brighter light to your current color. You can also pick color straight from the rainbow at the bottom of the panel, if that seems more naturalistic.
You can also click the to adjust options, and pick sliders from different color modes. If you are a beginner, you won’t be interested in this until you learn about color modes first.
Swatches: A good resource for beginners and professionals alike, swatches are a panel of saved colors.

By default, CS5 has a saved palette of 122 colors for you to use.

You can create new swatches from your foreground color by simply clicking the and selecting “New Swatch.”

Whatever color you have selected will become available as a swatch.
Styles: As a panel of saved “Layer Effects,” styles can be an interesting way for beginners to start experimenting or veterans to save their most common layer effects for reuse.

Simply clicking any of the default styles will apply them quickly to your active layer. You can manually edit them, or click the to remove all layer effects.

Many of the defaults may appear strange.

Others may have some limited use.

Many may leave you scratching your head. They are not all useful. However, clicking the will allow you to save whatever effects you have on your current layer, which can prove useful.
Adjustments: The adjustment panel creates layers that change and filter your image dynamically. While you can apply Hue/Saturation, Contrast, or Levels to your photograph, it would be permanent. Adjustments creates new layers on top of your image, that can be adjusted inside this panel.

Clicking “Levels” automatically creates a new adjustment layer.

You are given the option to adjust the Levels sliders and change the contrast of my image.

These changes can be undone without using the history or the undo functions.

Multiple adjustment layers can be stacked, each one dynamically editable at any time, even when the image is saved and reopened. Notice how they appear as separate layers in the layers panel.

The example from earlier, now with the Hue/Saturation and Levels adjustments.
Masks: The masks palette is a method for blocking out parts of layers, reducing them to transparency. This is an elegant, non-beginner way to remove a background from a layer without using effective but destructive editing techniques.

The mask panel has features unique to CS5, and can help even beginner users cut out backgrounds from images with little to no effort.

Layers: Layers are the hallmark feature of Photoshop, allowing users to create 2d images in multiple editable parts.

New art can be created in layers without disturbing separate layers above or below.

Layers can be copied and masked, among other things. Adjustment layers are also created and managed in this panel.

Layers can be stacked on top of one another, giving weird, fun, or unexpected combinations of effects.

Opacity and Blending Modes are also controlled here. Image editing with layers can quickly create rich images, and makes editing easy.
Channels: Digital images display colors in combinations of primary colors, each with values.

These primary colors are viewable separately your color channels. Beginners can safely ignore the channels panel, as there are few uses for beginner or even intermediate users to use channels.

If you care to play with channels, save your image and experiment. You can find a beginner’s primer on channels here, if you care to learn more before diving in. However, you can do worlds of photo editing without using or even understanding them, so use your own judgment if you prefer to ignore them or learn to use them.
Paths: Another difficult area of Photoshop, paths are vector based primitives operating similar to the ones in Illustrator. Vectors themselves are not difficult to understand, but the Pen Tool is difficult and frustrating for new users to dive into.

While the path panel is very straightforward, and paths and vectors fairly easy to understand, the Pen Tool and Paths in Photoshop are better left for a more in-depth article.

Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 1: The Toolbox

2010-12-21T20:18:00.000+01:00

Photoshop is one of the most intimidating programs for any beginner, but has powerful image editing ability for any skill level. Look through a fresh install of CS5, and learn the basic tools and info to help you get started.

Out of the box, this is what your default CS5 installation will look like. It looks even more intimidating than older versions, so let’s spend a few minutes taking a basic look around the program, demystify it, and get you editing your photographs, painting, or whatever you might want to do with your fresh install.

Starting your Custom Workspace

You’re going to want to move your panels and palettes around in an effort to get comfortable with your new install. In this area of your screen, you’ll see various “Workspaces,” which are the various arrangements of said palettes and panels. This can be helpful, because you might want a different arrangement for editing photos than you’ll use if you are also a painter or designer.
CS5 autosaves your changes to your workspaces, so create a new, custom one to play around in. You can always edit your stock Workspaces to fit your liking later.

Click the to bring up the contextual menu. Create a “New Workspace” and name it anything you like. Use your own name, or anything that suits you. Make certain to pick “Keyboard Shortcuts” and “Menus” as you can edit both of them and tie them to your workspace.

Click your new workspace and feel free to play around in it.

Customizing the Toolbox

The toolbox is where you get all your mouse or cursor-based tools. By default, it is locked to the side of the screen in a panel area. By clicking the arrow, you can bring up a condensed version in your panel. The is a toggle, that will switch between the two versions.You can also click and drag the to create a “free floating” version of the toolbox.

The aforementioned double column format of the toolbox. Now that we’ve identified that we can change the shape of the toolbox, let’s briefly look at what’s available in it.

The Options Palette

At the top of your screen, directly under your menus, you’ll see the options palette. When you select different tools, you’ll have the various options you can edit here. Each tool is complex without these options, and can become extremely powerful with knowledge of its options.

What’s in the Toolbox?

Rectangular Marquee Tool: Shortcut key . The basic selection tool, marquee, AKA “Marching Ants” allows you to select areas of layers or flattened photographs. Shift + M will cycle through to the various other selection tools, including the ellipse tool. You can hold Shift while drawing marquees to create squares.

Move Tool: Shortcut key . The basic move tool. Once you select an area, choose the move tool to move it around. You can also move whole layers without selecting them.

Lasso Tool: Shortcut key . Another selection tool, allows you to draw quick, shaped selections around parts of your image. Shift + L will cycle through the alternate lasso tools, including Polygonal Lasso and Magnetic Lasso tools.

Quick Selection Tool: Shortcut key . A rough selection tool that works like a paintbrush. Brush around in an area, and Photoshop will read your image and try and guess what you’re trying to select. Press Shift + W to get the indispensible magic wand tool, which is a Bucket Fill or Flood style tool for selections.

Crop Tool: Shortcut key . Draws rectangular selections, then cuts your image down to the rectangle you draw. Very useful for straightening crooked images. Press Shift + C to pick the Slice Tool and Slice Select tools, useful for creating multiple images from a single one, usually for web content.

Eyedropper Tool: Shortcut key . Picks a color from any document you have open. Shift + I will cycle through the tools: Color Sampler, Ruler, and Note Tool.

Spot Healing Brush Tool: Shortcut key . Useful for erasing blemishes, scratches or unwanted noise from images automatically by painting over them. Press Shift + J to find the Healing Brush, Patch Tool, and Red Eye tools.

Brush Tool: Shortcut key . The single most complex tool in the toolbox. Many articles on the brush tool to come, but for now, paint with left mouse clicks, and select different brush styles with right mouse clicks. Shift + B cycles through to the Pencil, Color Replacement Tool, and Mixer Brushes, all worth experimentation.

Clone Stamp Tool: Shortcut key . Another photo-editing brush, Alt and Click to set a “Source” and then paint with the Left mouse button to copy from your source. Shift + S also gives you the pattern stamp tool.

History Brush Tool: Shortcut key . Working in tandem with your History Palette, you can paint “back in time,” so to speak. Use a filter, then selectively undo parts of it with the History Brush. The Art History Brush is buried underneath here, accessible with a Shift + Y.

Eraser Tool: Shortcut key . Erases layers to transparency, and locked or Background Layers down to the Background Color. Shift + E will cycle through the Magic Eraser and the Background Eraser tool.

Gradient Tool: Shortcut key . Clicking and dragging will fill your layer with a basic gradient using your foreground and background tools. The options palette has a lot of different gradients to use. Hidden under the Gradient Tool is the Paint Bucket Tool. Shift + G will cycle through to it. Use the Paint Bucket to fill areas of similar color in your image.

Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge Tools: By default, no shortcut key. These are three photo editing tools that do exactly what they say. Smudge, in particular, can create excellent painterly effects in your images. Left click and hold to bring up the contextual menu and pick the “buried” Sharpen and Smudge tools.

Dodge and Burn Tools: Shortcut key . Dodge and Burn are photo editing tools that lighten and darken images, respectively. This tool is not the zoom tool, as confusing as it may look. Shift + O cycles between the two of them.

Pen Tool: Shortcut key . A nightmarish frustration for beginner users, the Pen Tool is tough to get used to, but a favorite of Photoshop Pros. Similar to the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator, works in tandem with the Paths Palette. Shift + P will give you alternate Pen tools related to working with paths.

Type Tool: Shortcut key . Allows you to set typography, by default horizonally. Shift + T will give you the Vertical Type Tool, as well as the Type Mask Tools.

Path Selection and Direct Selection Tools: Shortcut key . More tools made for editing paths in the path palette. Ignore unless you’re trying to learn the Pen Tool. Path selection picks whole paths, while Direct Selection picks line segments or points within paths. Cycle with Shift + A.

Custom Shape Tool: Shortcut key . Bizarre tool for creating clipart type vector shapes from a library in the options palette. Shift + U will also give you the more helpful tools for rectangles, polygons, and lines, all helpful for learning paths in Photoshop without suffering through the pen tool.

Zoom Tool: Shortcut key . Yes, this is the real zoom tool and not the Dodge tool. Zoom in with left clicks, zoom out with ALT plus Left Clicks. This is likely the most basic tool in the toolbox.

Hand Tool: Shortcut key . Scrolls your document without using the scrollwheel or scroll arrows. Press and hold the Space Bar at any time to use the quick Hand Tool, release Space to return to your previous tool.

Background/Foreground: The active colors you are painting with. The top color is Foreground, the back Background. swaps the two colors. reverts them to the default colors, black and white.

Quick Mask Mode: Shortcut key . An alternate mode for creating complex selections with the Brush, Eraser, and Paint Bucket tools. The Q key toggles to and from Quick Mask Mode.