Using Photoshop

Quick CS4 tip

2009-04-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

So you have a layered file with different types of layers, some 3D, some text, some just raster. Well, in CS4, if you select a layer and want to select all the layers of a similar type, you can go to the Select menu and choose Similar Layers. Pretty cool!

So, for example, if you want to select all of your type layers, select just one of the type layers, then go to Select > Similar Layers and all of your type layers are selected.

Photoshop: Over The Top Editing

2008-07-07T08:46:00.000-07:00

My buddy Tim Lynch, from the Center for Digital Imaging Arts, is features in this video interview by diet.com where the interviewer is shot by Tim and then retouched via Photoshops Liquify command and other tools.

Great job Tim!

Cool Photoshop Contest

2007-12-31T12:48:00.000-08:00

Here's a cool Photoshop contest: http://www.photoshopcafe.com/contests/contest-8.htm The prizes are amazing and since there's no entry fee...

Speed Performance for Photoshop

2007-10-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

We've all been there, waiting while the beach ball of death spins endlessly on a Photoshop process that shouldn't take that long. What can you do to make Photoshop faster? This interesting article from Scott Byer, an engineer with Adobe, features some of the ways you can monitor Photoshop's performance.

80 Photoshop Text Effects

2007-08-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Some of these are great and others are, well, I'll let you decide. Link

CS3 30-Day Trial Available!

2007-05-10T09:39:00.001-07:00

http://www.adobe.com/special/try_buy/trial_availability.html

Photoshop World 2007

2007-04-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

I made it to Photoshop World today and was expecting a lot of wowing. I did get some of that from Jack Davis. He demonstrated the new Black & White filter in Photoshop CS3. John Nack was demonstrating the new features of the extended version of Photoshop. Including all of the wild things you can do with an image stack. Very impressive! I saw a lot of Terry White. He was talking about the Bridge over in the Peachpit booth and he was talking about the new integration with Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

I spent some time over at the Wacom booth and man, those Cintiq systems are really something else. Sure, you'll have to take out a small loan to purchase one, but I can totally see the value now.

I also talked with the guys at the Corel booth who were demonstrating Painter X. There's a really impressive auto clone feature and the brushes have never been better. They are so dynamic and expressive now. Combine that with a Wacom and you have a full art studio again.

I got a chance to talk with Corey Barker from Planet Photoshop. Then I talked to Dave Cross, who was filming a short segment with his daughter Stephanie for Photoshop TV.

All in all, I left feeling inspired, but frustrated at the same time. It's great that CS3 is coming out, but because it's not totally here yet, I can't really play with it yet.

Photoshop CS3

2007-03-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

49Sparks has posted a video interview with John Nack about the new features to Photoshop CS3.

Photoshop CS3 Extended?

2007-03-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

We all know that Creative Suite 3 will be out some time at the end of March, but Adobe is announcing the release of 2 versions of Photoshop CS3. A regular version and a version called Photoshop CS3 Extended, which has additional capabilities for those who are in 3-D animation, medical imagery, and image analysis.

Maybe they caught the idea from the company they bought [Macromedia], which produced Flash 8 and Flash 8 Professional. Catering to different markets is great but like Microsoft trying to sell five different versions of Vista, I don't like it at all.

Web Standards Mockups with ImageReady (Photoshop)

2007-01-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

A List Apart has a great article on turning Photoshop comps into useable client mockups with ImageReady. Ironically, Adobe is planning on canning ImageReady, probably in favor of FireWorks. I've protested vehemently and started a post that's now 4 pages long at the Photoshop CS3 Adobe labs forum.

The article is a testament again to it's powerful output capabilities as you can export slices as absolutely positioned DIVs and then control them via CSS.

ImageReady: Dead

2006-12-28T07:50:00.000-08:00

I posted a question on the new Photoshop CS3 Beta forum about the status of ImageReady, Photoshop's long-time web companion. I was told by Jeff Schewe that ImageReady is dead!?! I couldn't believe it, as others couldn't either.

I noticed that the Jump To menu in Photoshop CS3 didn't have anything to jump to and the bottom of the toolbox did not contain a Jump to button. I was surprised but not so surprised seeing that Fireworks is a really capable, lightweight web imaging program that can do almost everything that ImageReady can do.

This is also a testament to the direction Photoshop is heading, which in my humble opinion, is for Photographers and digital imaging in general. What I'm going to miss most is the ability to quickly cut up a navigation system and then output rollOvers. There are some ImageReady features built into Photoshop CS2 and CS3, but this isn't one of them.

For those of you who are going to be forced to migrate to Fireworks, take a look at this tutorial, which gave me a little hint of what was to come.

PS CS3 Videos from Russell Brown

2006-12-20T05:42:00.000-08:00

The wacky Russell Brown has produced some video tutorials on the new Photoshop CS3 Beta. You can find them here.

Photoshop CS3 Public Beta

2006-12-18T07:25:00.000-08:00

Adobe has released Photoshop CS3 Beta for intel-based Macs (there's also a release for XP). I discounted this Beta as something for that purpose alone, but after checking things out, I'm incredibly impressed at the direction Photoshop is going in.

The entire interface has been modified. It's a flexible interface with docking capabilities. It feels more like a Macromedia product now. The Palette Well is gone and there are collapsible docking areas for placing palettes wherever you wish. Palettes, when collapsed, look like buttons and afford you a lot more room when working with high-res images. If you hide the palettes (Shift + Tab) they come back when you hover over the area that displayed them.

There is a new tool that will turn heads. The Quick Selection tool. Finally, Adobe has caught up on the science of selections. All you have to do with this tool is click and drag over an area with a brush and it's selected! The results are remarkable. The Refine Edges button can help you re-define the edges of the selection and preview it on different backgrounds. You might never use the Extract Command again!

There are too many other features to mention so check out the NAPP Photoshop CS3 Beta Preview movies by the Photoshop Guys and Deke McLelland's preview at Lynda.com.

Photoshop CS3

2006-12-14T13:48:00.000-08:00

Adobe is set to release Photoshop CS3 as a Beta, according to many Adobe blogs. Martin Evening has a great preview here. There are some interesting enhancements to the interface and some cool new features and tools. PS CS3 is set to be released some time in the first quarter next year. This release is targeted to Intel based Mac's, but Adobe is obviously taking the opportunity to beef up the king of image editing apps.

CBS Article Questions Photo Manipulation (with Photoshop)

2006-10-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

In an article on CBS News website, the author highlights the recent tumult in image manipulation. The question is what is real and what is fake? To a good Photoshop operator, we can pretty much tell. But to the average Joe, it's a different story.

There are so many methods and techniques that I've read and have actually used, in the corporate and private sectors, that enabled me to creatively improve the look of an image. Is that activity alone deceiving? Possibly, but it's aim and how the image is intended to be looked at, the audience that will be viewing it, is really the important part to consider. Some images are so extremely perfect, it's plain obvious.

Walk through any cosmetics section of a department store. Look at all the ads on display. Yes, that may be Halle Berry or Scarlett Johanson, but even they can't be that perfect. Movie posters, photos of athletes on cereal boxes, politicians on the cover of magazines, they are real people, just not that perfect.

To the marketing world, perfection results in sales. Mediocrity is sub-standard. As long as the American public buys into this theory and expects it, then this type of imagery will continue to haunt us.

Quick Type Tip

2006-09-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

When you are working with the Type tool, Photoshop won't let you work with another type layer until you commit the changes to the one you're currently working with. Instead of clicking on the checkmark in the Options bar to commit, just hit Command (Control) + Enter.

Photoshop 9.0.2 Update (Windows Only)

2006-08-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

Adobe has posted an update for Photoshop that fixes certain ongoing issues including:

Menus now respond correctly after a single click.

Undo/Redo work properly when multiple documents are open.

Photoshop no longer produces a program error when encountering unsupported file types through the Acrobat Touchup workflow.

Supported files that incorrectly produced an "unsupported color space" message now open as expected.

TIFF files with layer data greater than 2GB now open correctly.

The Mac update will be coming soon.

12 Tips for Photoshop Text

2006-07-03T07:11:00.000-07:00

John Nack over at Adobe has a few tips (12 to be exact) for working with type in Photoshop.

Also, see my article on type tool tricks in Photoshop.

Free Plug-Ins

2006-06-28T10:50:00.000-07:00

If you're like me you like free. How about 10 free plug-ins? There is a wide range of plug-ins mentioned here and some are PC only, some are offered on both platforms. OK, I gotta go play with them now. Have fun!

Automate: PDF Presentations

2006-06-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

You can create beautiful, full-screen PDF presentations complete with transitions right inside Photoshop or the Bridge. In Photoshop, go to the File menu > Automate > PDF Presentation.

You can use any of the files that you have open already by checking the Add Open Files checkbox or you can browse to find the images or content you want to display. Then, set the Output Options to Presentation. Under Presentation Options you can set the slide to advance however many seconds between each image, to loop after the last page, and choose a transition. The Dissolve transition works very well, but for kicks, choose Random to get a sense of the types of transitions you have to choose from.

Once you click the Save button, Photoshop will ask you to save your PDF. Then the Save Adobe PDF dialog will appear, giving you the standard PDF output options. Click Save PDF and go cook some popcorn. Depending on how many images you chose, it may take a while for Photoshop to build the PDF.

When Photoshop is done and you've woofed down that whole bowl of popcorn, with your greasy fingers, open up the resulting PDF document from the location you saved it in. Each image will appear full-screen on a black background and transition nicely from one to the other. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate between slides. Hit the ESC key to get out of the presentation mode.

Speaking of PDFs, be sure to check out the latest version of Proxy from Adobe. Years ago, Adobe published a magazine called Adobe Magazine. I was really bummed when it got scrubbed, but this new Proxy is a mag worth reading. There's great information about downloads from the exchange, good feature columns, and a tutorial section called 'schoolin. Some of the issues even have embedded movie tutorials and Adobe is really just pushing the envelope on what can be done with an interactive PDF.

Photoshop Help After 9.0.1 Update

2006-06-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

After installing the recent update to Photoshop, my Help menu stopped working, giving a memory error. I ran across this post in the Adobe forums, which explains the fix for it:

Assuming ahc.exe is located in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help Center,
delete the following folders

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help Center\AdobeHelpData\Cache
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help Center\AdobeHelpData\Database
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help Center\AdobeHelpData\Preferences
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help Center\AdobeHelpData\Search

The only folder under C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help
Center\AdobeHelpData you should have left is one called packages.
Run ahc.exe
What should happen is that your help center database should get rebuilt
(you will see progress messages as it process each help package) and
everything should work.

One note here, not only do you delete the folders, but any files that are in the AdobeHelpData folder. If you don't see the progress bar updating the database, then you did something wrong. Go back and make sure the only thing that is left is the Packages folder.

The Ahc.exe file is one level up. Simply double click to run it and the database update will begin.

Type Tool Tricks

2006-06-01T06:50:00.000-07:00

Photoshop's Type tool can be hazardous, but there are a few shortcuts and tips that can help you use the tool effectively.

Headlines or Body Text

You can use the Type tool in two ways (actually there's a third, but we'll talk about that later). You can simply click in the image window and get an I-beam waiting for you to type your text on a single line. Click and drag with the Type tool in order to create a text box for type with paragraphs.
Once you click or click and drag, Photoshop enters the Type tool mode. You'll notice that certain features of Photoshop become disabled when you are in this mode. Go to any menu when you are in this mode and you'll see that you can't do anything while Photoshop is focused on working with type.

After you type in your text, depending on the size and placement, you may want to move it. You may be tempted to switch over to the Move tool and move your type, but that would get you out of the Type tool. Rather than switching back and forth between these tools, just hold down the Command key (Control on PC) and click and drag in the middle of the type to set the location. While you hold down the modifier key, a bounding box will appear around your type that will allow you to scale and skew it.

Once the type is in place, you'll want to format it:
Command (Control) + A will select all of the type.
Hitting Command (Control) + Shift + (.) period will increase the size of the text and
Command (Control) + Shift + (,) comma will decrease the size of the text.
Command (Control) + Shift + B will toggle between bold and regular text.
Command (Control) + Shift + K will change the case of the text.
Command (Control) + Shift + ? will make strikethrough text.
Command (Control) + Shift + L, C, R, J will set the alignment to left, center, right, and justified.
Command (Control) + Shift + U will make the text underlined.
Command (Control) + Shift + I will set the type in italics.
Command (Control) + Shift + H will make the text small caps.

If you have some paragraph text and you want to select the text, insert your cursor into the text box then use these shortcuts to make your selection:

Use the arrow keys to move through the text up, down, left, and right.
Hold down the Command (Control) key and use the arrow keys to move from word to word.
Hold down the Shift key and use the End key and Home keys to extend your selection.
Hold down Command (Control) + Shift and the left and right arrows to select one word at a time.
Hold down Command (Control) + Shift and the up and down arrows to select sentences.

For leading, kerning, and tracking, use these shortcuts:

To increase or decrease the leading, hold down the Option (Alt) key and hit the Up and Down arrow keys.
To increase kerning or tracking, hold down the Option (Alt) key and hit the Left and Right arrow keys.

To control baseline shift use Option (Alt) and the Up and Down arrow Keys.

There's a few other things about type in CS2 that weren't available in previous versions. You can individually format letters or words to be a different size and color.

When you're done formatting your text, you can Commit the type in several ways. Notice the Checkmark icon in the far right corner of the Options bar. That's one way. A typical way to Commit transformations and options in other tools is by hitting the Enter key. But when you hit the Enter key while you are in the Type tool, you just set a paragraph return. Hold down the Command (Control) key and hit the Enter key and you can Commit your type. A quick and simple way to Commit your type is by selecting any other tool in the Toolbox.

For whatever reason, if you want to cancel your formatting or typing, just hit the Escape key. You can also click the Cancel button next to the Checkmark in the Options bar, but why move your mouse all the way over there? It's just easier to hit the Escape key.

Shortcuts are great for maximizing your workflow and decreasing the time you spend on a project so you have time for other things, like reading blogs and listening to podcasts. Learn your shortcuts!

Adobe Drops GoLive & Freehand

2006-05-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

Well, it's finally official. Adobe, after purchasing Macromedia, is dropping one of it's own products - GoLive and one of Macromedia's former products - Freehand.

Looking back on GoLive, which started out as a promising web development tool for designers who didn't want to get stuck in code, the program was feature rich and growing in leaps and bounds, but faced much criticism because it started producing code that was non-compliant. Still, it was so ridiculously easy to layout a page on a grid and drag and drop elements into GoLive. What GoLive lacked was ease of use. It usually took me 3 clicks to set up something in GoLive whereas it would only take me 1 click in Dreamweaver. This decision by Adobe seems like a no brainer. Dreamweaver is the top-selling WYSIWYG application out there, even taking a bite out of FrontPage's market share.

The battle between Freehand and Illustrator has been raging on and on for a few decades. Each release made one edge out the other in cycles. Having used and taught both applications, the bottom line is if you started with Freehand, then you loved it and stayed with it, if you started with Illustrator and stayed with it, you loved that. Using or switching to the other app felt like using someone else's toothbrush. It just felt awkward. Even though you could do almost exactly the same thing with both programs. Again, this is a no brainer for Adobe, since Illustrator fits tightly within their Creative Suite and has taken the lead on vector Illustration.

This is one user who's not avertly affected by Adobe's decisions, but I'm sure there are others out there who won't feel the same way. It will be interesting to see what happens to other important products in Macromedia's former product line and Adobe's current products.

Photoshop Obscure Features: Copy Texture To Other Tools

2006-05-26T05:24:00.000-07:00

This is the first edition of Photoshop Obscure Features, lesser known features of Photoshop that you've probably seen, most likely, never used, and always wondered about. Today's feature can be found in the Brushes palette's flyout menu: Copy Texture To Other Tools.

The first thing you'll need is a texture. A texture can be added to your brush by turning on the Texture checkbox on the Brushes palette, then click on the word Texture to see the options and parameters appear in the Brushes palette.

You can choose from a list of preset texture (which are also patterns, go figure) by clicking on the options arrow in the top-right corner of the Brushes palette. There are artistic surfaces, color paper, rock patterns, and others. Of course, if you need your own texture (pattern), you can select a portion of an image and go to the Edit Menu > Define Pattern. Give your pattern a name and click OK. Your pattern will be the last one in the list.

There are several parameters to the Texture, the first of which is scale. At 100%, the pattern fits within the current brush tip width. Increase the scale and you'll see a split in the brush stroke. Decrease the scale and you'll see a bunch of texture squares within your brush. You can turn on the Texture Each Tip checkbox that will apply the texture evenly to each tip within the stroke.

You can also set the mode of the texture, which offers some of the blending modes available elsewhere in Photoshop, like Multiply, Overlay, and others. The last 3 parameters all have to do with the depth of the texture, the last setting of which, the Depth Jitter, can be controlled by Stylus pressure or tilt.

Once you have the Texture set up, you can then choose Copy Texture To Other Tools from the top of the Brushes palette. This makes the same texture and its settings available to other painting and editing tools such as the Pencil, Eraser, Clone Stamp, Pattern Stamp, History Brush, Art History Brush, Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tools. The texture isn't immediately turned on though, so when you do switch to another tool, you'll have to go back to the Brushes palette and turn on the Texture checkbox to use it.

So, when would you use this little feature? A good example is when you're trying to match the grain in an image and you are using different tools to retouch an area that has the same grain in it. Rather than having to select the same texture and settings for each tool, you can set up the texture once, and then Copy it to the other tools.

That's all for this edition of Photoshop Obscure Features. If you have a feature that you're interested in knowing more about, send your comments to this article.

Adobe Photoshop Delicious

2006-05-25T09:30:00.000-07:00

del.icio.us has a nice compendium of Photoshop tags. There's a bunch to go through that I already knew, but there's so much out there that I wasn't aware of.