Curves And Contrast
After you're comfortable working with Levels, Curves is the next tool to add to your Photoshop repertoire. The advantage of Curves is that it can give you 16 points to influence the tonal values of an image, whereas Levels allows you just three highlight, midtone, and shadow points . The Curves dialog box enables you to work with either 0-100 ink percentages or 0-255 tonal values. Click the small triangles circled in figure 2.34 to toggle between the two. From my experience, people with...
Basic technique 3
1 In the Layers palette, duplicate the original image layer by dragging the background layer onto the Create a new layer icon, or 2 Using the pull-down blending mode menu in the Layers palette or the shortcut Alt Opt-Shift-L, change the duplicate layer's blending mode to Hard and rename it Hard Mix 3 Co to Image gt Adjustments gt Desaturate or use Ctrl Cmd-Shift-U to desaturate the Hard Mix layer it Invert the Hard Mix layer using Ctrl Cmd-I 5 Use Ctrl Cmd-J to duplicate the original image...
Hard Mix Highlights
Hidden away in Photoshop's Layer Styles are a pair of Blend If sliders. These control how much of the image comes from the current layer and how much from below. Simply by dragging the slider, you can exclude some tones from the composite image. Here's a recipe that has a blurred Hard Mix layer to transform the picture, and then takes advantage of Blend If to restore the original image's shadow tones. Notice how the Hard Mix layer's halo emphasizes the shape of the bridge 1 In the Layers...
Hard Shadows
Lock J lt i lt a Fill 100 gt l In the Layers palette, duplicate the original image layer by dragging the background layer onto the Create a new layer icon, or use Ctrl Cmd-J 2 Select Image gt Adjustments gt Desaturate to desaturate the new layer, or use Ctrl Cmd-Shift-U Name the layer Desturated 3 In the Layers palette, duplicate the Desaturated layer using Ctrl Cmd-J 4 Using the pull-down blending mode menu in the Layers palette or the shortcut Alt Opt-Shift-L, change the new layer's blending...
Ice Cold
've called this recipe Ice Cold after the effect it has on the picture of the architecture, right. The effect works especially well when the picture has lots of blues and greens. The first ingredient is a blurred, inverted Luminosity layer that inverts the highlights and shadows, but tends to leave midtones unaffected. A Hard Mix layer at 10-50 fill opacity restores the image's shape and a Screen layer chills the final result. Experiment with inverting or desaturating any or all of the layers,...
Some Exotic Blending Modes
Photoshop's blending modes combine layers or channels in sophisticated ways, as you learned This documentiscreated withtrial version of CHM2PDFPilot2.16.100 uce a weathered, old-timey look to the photograph, taking advantage of the way Exclusion combines pixels. Exclusion mode is closely related to Difference mode. The latter examines the brightness information of each channel, and subtracts one from the other, depending on whichever is brighter. That sounds confusing, but it's not difficult to...
Orthochromatic Film
It hasn't been so long ago that black-and-white films incorporated the term pan in their nomenclature. Tri-X Pan, Verichrome Pan, Plus-X Pan, or even Panchromatic-X were the names of films I used early in my career. The term pan stood for panchromatic all colors and was important because it meant that these black-and-white films were roughly sensitive to red, blue, and green light in equal amounts. As odd as it might seem, that wasn't always the case. In the 40s and 50s, black-and-white films...
Customizing contrast
This photograph was taken in bright mid-morning light, and This building detail was shot on an overcast morning This the Hard Mix layer's opacity had to be set to under 50 recipe helps to bring out the cold light before any detail became apparent in the walls In this example, the Hard Mix layer's fill opacity worked best at around 50 At 100 it bleached the image Q Q Q F Layers feanneis Hj'ailu Q Q Q F Layers feanneis Hj'ailu
Aligned/Unaligned
When the Aligned box is marked, Photoshop copies pixels from the point that you first marked as the source by pressing Alt Option when you clicked to the point in the image where you begin cloning. Then, as you move away from that point, Photoshop uses the distance and direction the cursor moves from the cloning point to determine which pixels to copy. For example, if you move 1 4 inch up and to the left of the first point where you start painting, the Clone tool will copy pixels that are 1 4...
Faster Access When Switching Applications_
When you switch from Photoshop to another application, if there is data on the clipboard, Photoshop can export it to the system clipboard for pasting into the other application. However, because Photoshop files can be extremely large, it can cause a delay while it exports the data on the clipboard. What happens, in fact, is that the data is converted to WMF or PICT format, depending on the OS, and that's what can cause the delay. If you find yourself waiting more often than you actually use the...
UV Unwrapping and Mapping
This next phase in character development involves preparing your model to be textured. As I briefly explained earlier, a model consists of a large number of points called vertices, and these points are connected via edges to make up a mesh object. Every vertex in 3D space has an X, Y, and Z Table 1.2 3D Modeling File Types Used by Popular Modeling Software Table 1.2 3D Modeling File Types Used by Popular Modeling Software coordinate that defines its location in that space. When a mesh is...
Lighten 2
The next four blending modes Lighten, Screen, Color Dodge, and Linear Dodge all lighten the underlying image, and for this reason they are often referred to as the Lighten group. Just as the Darken modes have white as their neutral color, the Lighten group of modes have black as their neutral color, which is why they are also sometimes known as the neutral black group. The Lighten blending mode is the exact opposite of the Darken mode. Both create a new output color by comparing the base and...
Styles in Motion: Neon Text
This project will familiarize you with different layer style options and animating a sequence in ImageReady by only making changes to the layer style settings. Creating neon effects involves two elements the tubing and the light glow. When the light is off, the tubing still has a 3-D surface and casts a shadow if any ambient light is present. When the light is on, it casts a glow but no shadows. Note Intermediate or advanced Photoshop users may want to open the file NeonText.psd on the DVD and...
Organizing an efficient sequence of tasks
Most retouching follows these six general steps Checking the scan quality and making sure that the resolution is appropriate for the way you will use the image. Cropping the image to final size and orientation. Adjusting the overall contrast or tonal range of the image. Adjusting the color and tone in specific parts of the image to bring out highlights, midtones, shadows, and desaturated colors. Sharpening the overall focus of the image. Usually, you should complete these processes in the order...
Changing Workspaces and views
Photographers can be picky I guess it's the nature of an artist who demands perfection down to the slightest detail. Bridge workspaces and views offer enough options to reasonably satisfy the most discerning taste. Okay, maybe most digital photographers don't really get that finicky about Bridge workspaces, but having options sure is nice Metadata Keywords Assigned Keywords Llangolen Metadata Keywords Assigned Keywords Llangolen This list highlights some of the ways you can change the way...
Building your own seamless pattern
The following steps describe how to change a scanned image into a seamless, repeating pattern. To illustrate how this process works, Figures 7-22 through 7-25 show various stages in a project I completed. You need only two tools to carry out these steps the rectangular marquee tool and the rubber stamp tool. Those of you reading sequentially may notice that these steps involve a few selection and layering techniques I haven't yet discussed. If you become confused, you can find out more about...
Creating layer-specific masks
In addition to the transparency mask that accompanies every layer except the background , you can add a mask to a layer to make certain pixels in the layer transparent. Now, you might ask, Won't simply erasing portions of a layer make those portions transparent The answer, of course, is yes. And I hasten to add, that was a keen insight on your part. But when you erase, you delete pixels permanently. By creating a layer mask, you instead make pixels temporarily transparent. You can return...
Cloning around with the Clone Stamp tool
The Clone Stamp tool is the equivalent of a rubber stamp you know press a stamp on an ink pad and then on paper , only it's digital You sample part of an image color, texture, whatever and apply that sample elsewhere in the image. All Brush tips work with the Clone Stamp tool, so it's a great retouching alternative. One of its special versions, the Pattern Stamp tool, re-creates patterns from the cloned selection and applies to another part of the image. Figure 11-9 shows the Clone Stamp tool's...
Screen 2
Screen, the second of the Lighten group of blend modes, is often likened to projecting multiple transparencies onto the same screen. As Screen's neutral color is black, this blending mode will leave black unchanged. Dark colors marginally brighten the picture, but as the blend color lightens, the image becomes increasingly lighter. This can make certain images look bleached or overexposed. Self-blends and changing the opacity A self-blend simply lightens the image, especially in brighter areas,...
Figure 4.41
Copy the diffuse map to the opacity Map. Right now you have an identical copy of the diffuse map in the Opacity channel. You still must change the output of the opacity map to read the alpha channel of the image otherwise, it reads the RGB values by default to determine opacity. 6. Click the M button next to the Opacity channel to enter a deeper level of the material hierarchy. The Bitmap controls appear in the Material Editor. Scroll down and locate the Bitmap Parameters rollout. Click the...
Creating noise gradients
Adobe describes a noise gradient as a gradient that contains random components along with the deterministic ones that create the gradient. Allow me to translate Photoshop adds random colors between the defined colors of the selected gradient. Did that help No Then take a look at Figure 6-18, which shows examples of three noise gradients based on a simple black-to-white gradient. You could create these same gradients using the regular Solid gradient controls, of course, but it would take you...
Game Styles
The style of game dictates nearly all the components of a character model. One of the most common game styles that use the type of character that we are creating is FPS, meaning that the player views and controls the game-play through the eyes of the player's character. If you have difficulty discerning between the terms first, second, and third in terms of game-play, here's how it works. In first person, you, the player, are actually in the game as if you have taken over the main character's...
Contact Sheet II
A common practice is to send several photos to a client for review. Earlier we explored a dynamic photo gallery let's take a look at a more static option called a contact sheet. Traditionally, it has been a common practice to create a contact sheet from rolls of film. This is done so the photographer or client could select images for printing at full size. This step was done for both convenience and costsavings. A video pro can harness the practice of contact sheets to save time and money. By...
STEPS: Brushing to a Parallel Time Line
1. Open the image you want to warp into the fourth dimension. I begin with a map of Japan Figure 7-34 . Japan is a wacky combination of 17th-century cultural uniformity, 1950's innocence, and 21st-century corporate imperialism, so it strikes me as a perfect subject for my compound-time experiment. 2. Apply a couple of filters. I choose Filter Pixelate Mosaic and set the Cell Size value to 20 pixels. Then I apply Filter Stylize Emboss with a Height of 5 pixels and an Amount of 200 percent....
Why Two Grain Filters?
is document is created with trial version of CHM2PDF Pilot 2.16.100. Why does Photoshop include two filters called Film Grain and Grain, rather than one In practice, each operates a little differently than the other, producing different effects, but we can thank the free enterprise system for their existence. Photoshop's current Film Grain filter was originally part of a third-party set of 16 compatible plug-ins called Aldus Gallery Effects, which sold for 199. These filters proved so...
Equalize
If an image appears too dark or washed out, Equalize is the sledgehammer way to pound it into a usable state. The command attempts to redistribute pixels so that they are equally balanced across the entire range of brightness values. You can tell Photoshop to look at the entire image when equalizing, or sample a smaller area that will drive the overall adjustment. The command will take the lightest area and map it to pure white 255 and the darkest area to pure black 0 . Since the equalize...
Physical memory usage
Windows 95, NT 4, and later offer dynamic memory allocation, which means that each application gets the memory it needs as it needs it. But Photoshop is something of a memory pig and has a habit of using every spare bit of RAM it can get its hands on. Left to its own devices, it might gobble up all the RAM and bleed over into Windows' virtual memory space, which is less efficient than Photoshop's own scratch disk scheme. The Physical Memory Usage option helps you place some limits on...
The Brushes palette
Unless you were completely asleep at the wheel when you launched Photoshop 6 for the first time, you no doubt noticed the Options bar stretching across the top of the program window. In computer lingo, the Options bar is known as a context-sensitive toolbar, meaning that the options on the bar change depending on what tool you're using. When you work with the paint and edit tools, the Options bar gives you access to a choice of brush shapes. To browse through the available brushes, open the...
The Bold New Layer Styles
Photoshop 5 introduced a series of layer effects that automate the application of shad ows, glows, and beveled edges. Now, Version 6 takes the metaphor several steps fur ther. In addition to dramatically improving the quality of the existing effects now you won't find yourself cursing at them half the time the new Photoshop adds effects that overlay colors, stroke outlines, and create textures and contours. Plus, you can define exactly how effects are blended with background layers. And you can...
Overlay and Hard Light
Having looked at groups of modes that either lighten or darken, let's move on to a group of blending modes that both lighten and darken at the same time known as the Contrast group. The first two in the group, Overlay and Hard Light, are so similar that it makes sense to look at them together, but you should also bear in mind that much of what applies to Overlay and Hard Light applies to Soft Light too. All three belong to the contrast-increasing group of blending modes. These darken shadows,...
Kern characters
Click the World Atlas type layer on the Layers palette if it is not already selected . Click the Horizontal Type Tool T, on the Click the Toggle the Character and Paragraph palettes button Q on the options bar to open the Character palette. TIP You can close the Character palette by clicking the Close button in the upper-right corner of its title bar or by clicking the Toggle the Character and Paragraph palettes button. Click between o and r in the word World. TIP You can drag the Character...
Rearranging Brushes in the Brushes Palette
Unfortunately, you cannot rearrange the brush tip shapes or the brush presets in the Brushes palette or in the pop-up Brushes palette. Although it would be nice to be able to do so directly in the Brushes palette, all is not lost. Select the Preset Manager from the Brush palette menu or call it from the Edit menu. If you select it from the palette menu, it will open showing the brush presets window Figure 3-3 . You can move the presets one by one or by selecting them in multiples.To rearrange,...
Creating a metallic coating
The edge-tracing filters are especially fun to use in combination with Edit Fade. I became interested in playing with these filters after trying out the Chrome filter included with the first Gallery Effects collection. Now included with Photoshop as Filter Sketch Chrome, this filter turns an image into a melted pile of metallic goo. No matter how you apply Chrome, it completely wipes out your image and leaves a ton of jagged color transitions in its wake. It's really only useful with color...
Gamut Warning
If Photoshop can display a color on screen but can't accurately print the color, the color is said to be out of gamut. You can choose View Gamut Warning to coat all out-of-gamut colors with gray. I'm not a big fan of this command View Proof Colors Ctrl Y is much more useful but if you use View Gamut Warning, you don't have to accept gray as the out-of-gamut coating. Change the color by clicking the Gamut Warning Color swatch, and lower the Opacity value to request a translucent coating.
Softening selection outlines
You can soften a selection in two ways. The first method is antialiasing, introduced in Chapter 5. Antialiasing is an intelligent and automatic softening algorithm that mimics the appearance of edges you'd expect to see in a sharply focused photograph. Note Where did the term antialias originate Anytime you try to fit the digital equivalent of a square peg into a round hole say, by printing a high resolution image to a low resolution printer the data gets revised during the process. This...
CHAPTER l: PHOTOSHOP 7 FUNDAMENTALS l
Step 2 Choose screen resolution and color quality settings 4 Step 3 Check for and install updates 5 Step 4 Restore preferences to their default settings 5 Step 5 Set preferences 6 Step 6 Reset tools and palettes 10 Step 7 Organize and control your palettes 10 Step 8 Personalize your workspace 12 Step 9 Select status bar type 14 Step 2 Size Photoshop application window 16 Step 5 Organize document windows 17 Step 6 Viewing just want you want to view 18 Step 7 Displaying multiple views of the same...
Adjustment Layer
In this lesson, you'll create an adjustment layer, choose Brightness Contrast as the type of adjustment layer, adjust brightness and contrast settings for the layer, and then use the Layers palette to change the blending mode of the adjustment layer. An adjustment layer is a special layer that acts as a color filter for a single layer or for all the layers beneath it. Just as you can use a layer mask to edit the layer content without permanently deleting pixels on the image, you can create an...
Transferring Layers with Style Effects
After Effects doesn't utilize layer styles the way Photoshop does, so it's important to know how to transfer layers and keep the applied effects in place. In most cases, merely merging the layer with the style effect applied to a new blank layer will do the trick. Although they are not editable in After Effects, there are only four layer styles that will transfer correctly visually Drop Shadow, Bevel And Emboss, Color Overlay, and Inner Shadow Figure 2.4 . When the layers are transferred to...
Introducing the Digital Negative (DNG)
Up to this point in the digital-photography era, raw file formats haven't been uniform. Each digital camera manufacturer that offers raw in its digital cameras maintains a proprietary format. Imagine what it would have been like if all camera makers designed their cameras only to work with their own proprietary film. Or how about driving cars that only run on one brand of fuel You get the idea. Unfortunately, due to a lack of industry standards, camera manufacturers are forced to offer their...
Free-form outlines
In comparison to the rectangular and elliptical marquee tools, the lasso tool provides a rather limited range of options. Generally speaking, you drag in a free-form path around the image you want to select. The few special considerations are as follows Feathering and antialiasing Just as you can feather rectangular and elliptical marquees, you can feather selections drawn with the lasso tool by selecting the Feather check box on the Options bar. To soften the edges of a lasso outline, select...
Defining Image-Editing Software
Photoshop is an image-editing program. An image-editing program allows you to manipulate graphic images so that they can be reproduced by professional printers using full-color processes. Using windows, various tools, menus, and a variety of techniques, you can modify a Photoshop image by rotating it, resizing it, changing its colors, or adding text to it. You can also use Photoshop to create and open different kinds of file formats, which enables you to create your own images, import them from...
3. Turn on Gamut Warning.
Pressing Shift Ctrl Y Shift Y on a Mac turns on Gamut Warning, allowing you to preview areas of your image that are considered out of gamut for the device selected in the Customize Proof Condition window. Areas out of gamut will be highlighted in gray, as shown in the photo in Figure 10-5. Figure 10-5 Gamut Warning shows the out-of-gamut areas in an image. Figure 10-5 Gamut Warning shows the out-of-gamut areas in an image. When areas of your image are out of gamut, it means they're beyond the...
Fuzziness
The problem with hiding and forcing colors with the slider bars is that you achieve some pretty harsh color transitions. Both Figures 13-19 and 13-20 bear witness to this fact. Talk about your jagged edges Luckily, you can soften the color transitions by abandoning and forcing pixels gradually over a fuzziness range, which works much like the Fuzziness value in the Color range dialog box, leaving some pixels opaque and tapering others off into transparency. To taper the opacity of pixels in...
Step 4: Apply Unsharp Mask
Now we get to this seemingly misnamed filter the Unsharp mask. If you are one who has not ever used the Unsharp Mask because you always want to sharpen an image when you select the Sharpen menu, not un-sharpen your image you are not the first to not use the most valuable tool for sharpening images The name comes from a pre-digital darkroom technique where a blurry version of the contact negative was layered with the original contact negative. The result of combining these two layers was a...
Selecting with the magnetic lasso
You can use the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop to make freehand selections of areas with high-contrast edges. When you draw with the magnetic lasso, the border automatically snaps to the edge you are tracing. You can also control the direction of the tool's path by clicking the mouse to place occasional fastening points in the selection border. There is no magnetic lasso tool in ImageReady. You'll now move the padlock to the center of the black oval you placed on the book cover earlier in...
Step 2: Unwrap the Legs
Next we'll move onto the legs and the pelvis region. The legs are symmetrical, but the items around Hick's utility belt are different on each side, so we'll need to create a separate mapping for the pelvis region. Let's start by getting the legs unfolded and stashed away. Here we have the option of symmetrically stacking the legs for texturing or texturing each one separately. For this character and Hicks' utility belt, we'll keep the legs separate. This uses up some of the precious texture...
Coloring A Digital
Olive Oil Bottles Canon D30 digital camera, 28-70mm f 2.8, ISO 100, Extrafine RAW setting, f 16 1 40 original 2160 x 1440 pixel image edited, cropped, and up-sampled 2x to a 2400 x 1920 pixel 8-bit, 13.8MB .tif As a line drawing is generally the first of a progression of steps taken to create most artwork, it seems reasonable to spend a few pages of this book on several different techniques for creating line drawings. A line drawing created from a digital photograph can be used for many...
Step 4: Use Clone Stamp Tool To Fix Beard And Fold In Coat
Using the Clone Stamp tool and a smaller brush size, clone the beard without ink over the beard where there are ink lines until all of the ink lines are gone. While you have the Clone Stamp tool selected, carefully select your clone source and clone out the rest of the vertical fold in the right shoulder. If you set your clone source carefully, you can perfectly match the shadow lines caused by the fold in the man's coat. You will get the best results by clicking often and rarely dragging the...
Smoothing the edges of a stroke
Now you'll use the blur tool to soften the edges of your paint strokes, smoothing out the color transitions between the brown shadows, the underlying bark, and the bright highlights. 1 In the toolbox, select the blur tool . Then, in the Brushes palette, select a small brush, such as the Soft Round 21 brush you used earlier. Make sure that tool options bar is set with Mode at Normal and Strength at 50 . Mode Normal t Strength 50M I gt I Use All Layers 2 Make sure that the Highlight layer is...
Sharpening and Blurring
Sharpen and blur at the end of your digital darkroom work flow because they can significantly alter image data. Correct the tone, balance the color, and retouch before sharpening and blurring to minimize banding and data loss due to overmanipulation. Sharpening and blurring are opposites one clarifies, and the other obscures. You use both tools to your advantage in Photoshop. You sharpen images to make the edges more visually defined. We prefer images with distinct edges because they resonate...