The Sharpen Tool

Now, you may know all about sharpening within Photoshop, with 'Unsharp Mask' for example. But did you know about the 'Sharpen' Tool? In Photoshop CS5 Extended, you can now use the Sharpen tool kind of like how you would use a brush. If you look in your toolbar, where the 'Blur' and the 'Smudge' tools are, you'll see the 'Sharpen' tool. When you click on that, you'll see in your info bar a little icon that says 'Protect Detail'. By default it's already on. Using a pressure sensitive pen, you can apply whatever amount of sharpness to a specific area without bringing in all kinds of horrible artifacts.
So go ahead and play around with it, it could be one of those hidden little gems that saves you an incredible amount of time.
Cheers

Photoshop 'Tip of the Day'.

Hey all, sorry I've been away for a little bit. I wanted to share with you one of the little tips that makes my life much, much easier when using Adobe Photoshop. When using brushes, or the eraser for that matter, you can change the size of the brush, and the softness, simply by using the bracket keys [ and ].
Simply press the left bracket key to reduce the size of the brush, right key to enlarge it. To change the softness, all you have to do is hold down the 'shift' key while tapping the bracket keys.
That's it, hope it helps.
Peace

Photoshop Meetup Tonight

I'll be attending the Chicago Photoshop Meetup Group, at the Hubbard Street Digital Bootcamp, for an Artists Showcase tonight,  where I'll be presenting 10 pieces and talking about them with the group. Wish me luck!

Turning off layers.

Just a quick 'Did you know?' for you. If you have to send .psd's to a client and are concerned about the size of the .psd, then there's good news.
By simply turning off the layers in your .psd's you can greatly reduce the file size you have to send. So, if you have all of your working layers on your file, simply click on the 'eye' icon in the layers palette and save. The recipient can turn back on all relevant layers when they receive it. An email about which layers to turn on might be a good idea at this point.
As an example, I had a 31mb file that I had to send to a client, and by simply turning off the layers, reduced it to 17mb.
Pretty cool huh? Hope this helps.

Firebrush from a photo of a cloud

I just wanted to share this with you, the amazing Corey Barker on planetphotoshop.com gives a tutorial on how to create a firebrush from a photo of some clouds he took on his iphone. This is seriously good stuff.

 http://www.planetphotoshop.com/creating-exploding-brushes.html

Photo-Restoration

If you've ever tried your hand at some photo-restoration, you'll know it can be a very long, sometimes frustrating ordeal. There are times when it's not so much the difficulty of the work, but the sheer tediousness of it. I'm currently working on a restoration which I can't show here yet as I don't have the necessary permission. It's for photorescuejapan.org, and they reached out via linkedin.com to ask for volunteer retouchers to restore photos that were badly damaged in the massive earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. After I'd filled in the appropriate paperwork and releases, they sent me a photo that, to be honest, was a bit of a nightmare. As soon as I get permission, I'll post that image and tell you all about it.
For now, I"ll tell you a little about the image above. In the big scheme of things, this one really wasn't all that bad to work on. I only used 2 tools for this, the Clone Stamp Tool and the Healing Brush Tool.
Going back and forth between the 2 worked very well for me. As you can see, most of the work involved repairing the cracks that ran through the photo and some rebuilding of the right side of the face, especially the eye. With a lot of blending and cloning, I eventually got things looking they way that I wanted them to. And when I say eventually, I mean after about 3 hours. This kind of work is not for everyone, but if you've got a good amount of patience and can look forward to the end result, you should give this a try.
And don't forget to put your retouching on a separate layer above the original. Also, set the layer to 'Current and Below' in the information bar across the top of Photoshop. This way, you're doing no damage whatsoever to the original layer. And save, save, save as you go.
One last thing, if photo-restoration is your thing, or you want to give it a go, contact photorescuejapan.org and see if you can help out with letting people get back photos of loved ones.
Peace

Changing eye color in Photoshop

So here is a real easy and effective way to change eye color on a shot, from brown to blue.
1. Switch to 'Quick Mask' mode - press the 'Q' button
2. With a soft bush, paint the area you'd like to select
3. Hit the 'Q' button to escape quick mask mode
4. From your adjustment layers panel, open 'Selective Color' and choose Neutral from the drop down window
5. Lower the sliders on magenta and yellow
6. Make a selection from the previous adjustment layer
7. Go to Hue/Saturation and select 'Cyans' from the drop down window and adjust to your liking
8. You are done

There are other ways to do this, as with everything in PS. This is just one way. If this doesn't work for you, try using curves to lower the reds and yellows, or try channel mixer, or color balance. There's a dozen different methods for this. Try to work out which one is best for you.