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.

Making 'Actions'

For those of you just starting out in Photoshop, a couple of tips before you get going. When you first open an image, please please please try working in a non-destructive manner. By that, I mean making a duplicate of your original 'background' layer. Command 'J' does this. And use your adjustment layers, they let you go back and tweak them individually rather than continually adding new layers. And don't forget to group your work in 'Folders', command 'G' will put a set of layers in to a particular folder that you can then re-name however you see fit. It's just a good way to keep organized if you go back to an image after a couple of weeks, or months.
One of the first things I did with PS was to learn all the keyboard shortcuts and how to make actions. If you work in a way that you are consistently using the same menu items over and over, simply make an action for it. For example, if you always convert an image to CMYK, follow these steps:
1. Go to the 'Actions' palette, click on 'Button Mode'
2. Return to that same drop down window and click on 'New Action'
3. Enter the name of the action ie: CMYK
4. You have the option of entering a function key and a color for this action
5. Hit 'Record'
6. Go back to the drop down window in the 'Actions' palette and click on 'Insert Menu Item'
7. A dialog box will come up that says 'menu item' and 'none selected'. Ignore this!
8. Go to 'Image', 'Mode', 'CMYK Color', Then click OK in that dialog box
9. Return to drop down window in 'Actions' palette and click on 'Stop Recording'.
10. In drop down window, click on 'Button Mode', and your action will be there, probably at the bottom.

I know this may seem like a lot of steps, but it will probably only take a minute or 2 to do this, and it will save you so much time.
Let me know if this helped at all and happy Photoshopping.
David

Portrait retouching

How to do portrait retouching
Most of this was done with curves. You can check your color info palette and it will tell you exactly what kind numbers you have going on. Initially, this shot had a lot of yellow, and a lot of Red. By playing with those channels in curves, you can lower the amounts of those colors so that you get a more even ration. I also added a 'Photo Filter' to this. It's right there in the Adjustment layers palette. You should play around with it some and see what kind of effects you can achieve. While I don't think it's for everyday use, it's still a useful tool.
What took the longest on this shot was cleaning up the straggly hairs that were all over the top of her face. This was done by creating a new layer when all of my color-correction was done, and using a combination of the clone tool and the healing brush. Don't forget, across the top of the information bar, at the top of your workspace, there will be a little drop-down menu that will give you the option of 'Current & Below', 'Current Layer' or 'All Layers'. Personally, since this is one of the last things that I do, I set it to 'Current & Below', that's what works for me.
And also, save save save your work as you go. There's been too many times where I've been almost finished with a piece, and PS has unexpectedly quit. Try to avoid that, cause it really sucks when you have to go back and re-do what you've already done.
I'll try to back to this in more detail soon, let me know if you have any questions, comments or anything at all.
Peace and have a great weekend.

Content Aware Fill

Has anyone been using this? You may not even be aware of it, cause they've been kinda sneaky and hidden it. Well, not really. But anyway, who uses this tool? I've messed about with it a couple of times and it looks like it could be really useful in some situations. Not all, certainly. But for when you need another option and don't want to clone, or heal brush or whatever else you use, give the content aware fill tool a go.
After you make your selection, go to 'Edit', 'Fill', and in the dialog box that comes up where it normally say 'foreground color' or 'background' color, hit the drop-down menu and click on 'content-aware', and away you go.
Happy Photoshopping :)

Extracting Hair!!!!!!

So I have a few methods for extracting hair from a background. Of course, it all depends on the shot as to what method I use, but I was wondering how many other ways are there for extracting hair? Do you use channels, calculations, color range or any of the other many ways to do this?
Personally, I'm a fan of using calculations on a channel. You have a lot of room to play with in this, you can choose which channel, which blending mode to use on it, adjust with curves or levels or whatever you want.
If you haven't used 'calculations' to make a layer mask, give it a shot, maybe it'll work for you. And really, what's the worst that can happen?!

Photoshop Seminar

So, I went to an Adobe 'What's new in Photoshop' seminar yesterday at the Fine Arts Building in downtown Chicago. First of all, that building is just amazing! The architecture is so beautiful, you've really got to see it to believe it. Check it out here:http://www.fineartsbuilding.tv/
Anyway, the seminar had about 10 people there of varying knowledge of Photoshop, some of us were very experienced with it, some not so much. I won't say that it was a waste of time, I did learn something new, the 'content fill' tool. Might just give that a shot.
But, I didn't care for how the instructor was working directly on the original background layer by just renaming it 'layer 0'. What if you need to go back to the original? I guess I've just learned to do as little destructive work as possible.
So let me know if you've been to any workshops, seminars, classes etc on Photoshop. What did you get out of it? What would like to see improved? How would you teach the class?

2Face

2 Face: An experiment with 2 images of the same model. This turned out to be easier than I thought. It was a matter of flipping and turning and blending.
Thoughts?

No Regrets

So here is the first image I'd like to share with you. It was made with Adobe Photoshop CS4 and a combination of 2 separate photos and a wonderful texture image I found on deviantart.com
With some careful positioning of the 2 shots, and some fun with the Warp Tool, and an addition of a shadow underneath the models chin, the images married up pretty well. The addition of a texture over the top was just an added bonus and really made this image pop.
Total time was probably about 2 hours, but I never really rush to get through work like this. If you rush, you'll make mistakes.
Leave your thoughts, critiques, praise(this one!), or other comments and I'll make sure I respond.
Peace