Learn how to create smooth curves using the Pen Tool. It is recommended that you follow along on Photoshop while reading this article. This will make the learning experience much more enjoyable

We will create a simple curved line using a pen path. I recommend that you follow along on Photoshop to learn about pen paths. Start by creating a new Photoshop Document (File > New).  

Path Basics

Anchor Points

1. Choose the Pen Tool
2. Choose “Paths” from the tool options from the top.
3. Click and release your mouse multiple times, on random locations, on the new document.
4. The tiny squares at the corners are called Anchor Points. Anchor Points exist to connect different path segments and to modify the way they look.
5. Create another anchor point but instead of just clicking, press and then hold the button down and then drag your mouse cursor any way you want. Drag in multiple directions and you’ll notice that the path segment curves and bends depending on how you drag your mouse cursor. If you drag away from the anchor point then the line gets a greater curve. The curve travels with the straight line no matter which way you rotate it.
   Click on the Play Button to Play
   
6. There are many ways of editing anchor points. If you place your pen tool on an existing anchor point then you will see a Minus sign next to it. That will delete the anchor point. You can place your pen tool on a path segment and you will see a Plus sign next to it. This will add an anchor point on the path segment. You can press ALT and then click on an anchor point to edit your control lines. More details will be posted about editing Anchor Points in a future post because that would be beyond the scope of this short introduction.

1. Choose a brush setting. Set the size and color of the brush. I chose size 15 and color black (#000000).
2. Choose the pen tool.  
3. Click once to create an Anchor Point. Next, Create another anchor point but instead of just clicking, press and then hold the button down and then drag your mouse cursor until the curve looks the way you want it to look. Repeat at other locations for more curves until you are happy with your single smooth curve. 
4. Right click on the curve and choose Stroke Path.
5. Choose Brush from the drop down menu. If you want a constant straight line with constant opacity then uncheck “Simulate Pressure”. Otherwise, leave it checked.

Finally, you can right click and delete the path. If you wish to preserve the path, you can click on View > Uncheck Show Extras. This will preserve the path but you won’t see it on your image. You can bring it back by going to View >> Show Extras. You can access the Paths Palette by going to Windows > Paths. 

The holiday season is fast approaching and people will soon be using Photoshop to create Christmas greeting cards, banners, and flyers. Most of them will probably want to create some pictures of Christmas decorations on those cards. This is a quick and dirty tutorial to get started with creating ornaments

The Magical Color Changing Christmas Ornament

I don’t enjoy doing something over and over. Repetitive tasks get boring so most of the time we should be reusing our work. The following tutorial shows how to make a Christmas Ornament graphic that you can quickly modify in a few seconds.

This is what the end product will look like:

Best of all, if you want to change the color you will just edit one layer and you’ll end up with a brand new Christmas ornament with out losing any of the cool effects.

There.. that literally took 4 seconds.

Let’s Begin

1) Creating the base layer 

Create a new image ( File > New ). Choose what ever settings you like. I chose the 1024×768 preset.

Create a New Layer. Rename this layer and call it “BASE”.

Choose the Layer called BASE by clicking on it in the Layers Palette.

Grab the Elliptical Marquee Selection Tool

If you hold down the SHIFT key and then drag then you will get a perfect circle. Do that now. Shift+click and then drag on your image. Make a nice round selection.

In your color picker,  Choose WHITE as your foreground color. And choose RED as your background color.

Now grab the Gradient Tool ( G ) . When you choose the gradient tool you should notice that the top tool bar changes. You will see a Gradient Picker.

Click on that gradient picker area (in the screen shot above it’s the area with the red to black gradient. After you click on it you should see the Gradient Picker window. Choose Foreground to background. Then inside the circle selection make a diagonal line going from upper left to lower right. Keep trying until your circle looks like the following:

Next, go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise. I chose 6% noise, Uniform and Monochromatic.

2) Making it 3D-ish.

Create a new layer. Call it “3D effect”.

Choose the layer called “3D Effect”

CTRL+Click on the layer called “Base”. This will select the circle. Make sure that 3D effect layer is selected. Then go to Edit > Fill > Choose Color in the Use menu > and choose 100% Black as the color.

Now click on the Add Layer Mask button on the bottom of the Layers Palette.

Click on the black colored layer mask next to the 3d effect layer. Choose the gradient tool. Use a Foreground to Transparent gradient. Make another diagonal line inside the selected circle. Keep trying until you get something like this:

You may have to click on delete and try again until you get it looking like the image above.

3) Making the Ring

Create a new layer. Call it “Ring”.

Make a small narrow oval selection on top of the orb and fill it with a color. I chose yellow. It should look like this:

Choose the move tool.

Now press ALT and the up arrow. This will duplicate the selection and nudge it upwards.

Press up until the little ring is high enough.

And the end choose Select > Modify > Contract. Enter in a number like 3 pixels and then fill it with black.

You can also apply a reflected gradient on this ring.

You should end up with something that looks like the following:

4) Making the final Glow

Make a new layer. Call it “Glow”.

Control click on Base. This will select the circle.

Go to Select > Save selection. Name should be Circle 1.

Grab the marquee tool and click and drag the selection slightly to the left.

Now click on Select > Save Selection.

This time in the Channel drop down menu choose Circle 1.

Operation should be Subtract from selection.

Go to the channels palette and click on Circle 1.

You should see something like the following:

Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. I blurred mine 34 pixels. This may be different for you depending on what size you are working with.

Control Click on Circle 1 channel and then go back to the Glow Layer.

Click on Edit > Fill and fill it with WHITE. Finally change the blending mode for this layer to Overlay. Move this layer until it looks good.

5) Changing Colors.

If you want to change the colors of this ornament just click on the BASE layer. Then go to Image > Adjustment > Hue Saturation. Move the Hue slider and the color of the orb will change. All the glow effects will remain.

If you want to download my PSD to check out all the layers then just click the following link:

Ornament.zip ( Unzip it first )

[tags] Photoshop, Christmas, ornament, tutorial, tips, howto, channels, layers, masks [/tags]

Scenario: Imagine that you are working on a Photoshop project where you had to carefully select something. You took about 10 minutes to successfully select something. Then you worked in the selection for another 10 minutes and then you deselected only to realize that you forgot to apply a stroke (Edit > Stroke) to the image. What now? You’ll have to spend another 10 minutes re-selecting.

The whole re-selecting process could have been avoided if you had used Alpha Channels to save your selection.

Selecting an Alien Flower

1) Here I have selected what appears to be an alien flower. It took me about five minutes (I selected in Quick Mask mode). I wouldn’t want to spend another 5 minutes re-selecting it in the future.

Saving the Selection For Ever

2) So now I want to save this selection. With a stroke of genius, I glide my mouse pointer with extraordinary skill all the way to the Select menu. While in this menu I click on Save Selection. Tada! I have successfully saved the selection. I’ll never have to re-select that alien flower ever again.

If you did the same then you should see something like the following window appear:

Enter a name and click ok.

Wait? What Happened?

3) Nothing appeared to happen but if you go to your Channels Palette ( Window > Channels ) then you will see an Alpha Channel. This is the saved selection.

Moment of Truth.

4) De-select the current selection ( Press CTRL/CMD+D). Now if you want the selection to come back then just CTRL/CMD+ Click on the new Alpha Channel (called Alien Flower in this example) and your selection will return. Whew!

Not only will this selection re-use allow you to save time but now you have access to a whole new list of channel features.

Some Facts

5) If you click on the Alpha Channel, the entire image will  turn black and white.

• The areas that are not selected will be black
• The areas that were with in the selection will be white.
• The areas that are translucent or partially transparent will appear as shades of gray.

This view is helpful because you can check if you have errors in your selection. If your selection is fuzzy then you can adjust the levels ( Image > Adjustments > Levels ) or sharpen the selection ( Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen ).

You are allowed to use most of the filters and image adjustment tools in this view. You can use this for your advantage and create lots of fun and useful effects. I’ll try to cover some of these in the days ahead.

You can also use the paint brush, paint bucket, or pencil tool to reshape the selection. If you paint black then that area will get deselected. If you paint white then those areas will get selected. Gray areas will be semi-transparent.

What’s Next?

• Line Art - How to separate the Lines from the Paper
• Spot Colors
• Channel Effects
• and more.

[tags]Channels, Alpha, Tutorial, Tips, Photoshop, Alpha Channels, Howto[/tags]

Please leave a comment

The basics of Layer masks are incredibly simple but very powerful.

As always we’ll go over a simple tutorial that will quickly teach you how to use Layer Mask Basics. I think that actually doing something is the best way to learn. At least doing some thing is much, much better than just reading about it

First, a tiny intro:

What happens when someone wears a mask?

Dumb Question, yeah? It’s obvious that everything behind the mask is not visible and everything else is visible. That’s basically how Layer masks work except that you choose where the mask is and how opaque it is. Simple huh? So let’s follow a quick tutorial.

The Final Result of the tutorial is:

Yeah, so it’s a glass that is behind some rocks but in front of the ocean. Notice that the glass is partially transparent and you can see the ocean from inside it but the straw, slice of lemon and the stem of the glass are opaque. And yeah… I know the image isn’t going to win any awards but it’s great for explaining Layer masks

Step 1: Find two images that you want to combine. Here are the images I used:

Step 2: Open both the images in Photoshop. Then, choose the Arrow / Move Tool. Click on the glass image and drag it over to the image with the guy fishing. You can resize the glass so that it’s not too big or you can leave it the way it is. Your choice. Click here for a short flash video of this step if you are having trouble moving the glass image on top of the ocean image.

Step 3: Choose the layer with the glass and then click on the Layer Mask button. It’s the rectangle with the circle in it.

After clicking you’ll see something like this:

There it is! The layer mask. Currently it is set to reveal all of the image, meaning that the mask is off and nothing is hidden (since it is revealing everything!)

Now we actually use the mask. First let’s think of what we’re trying to do.

• We want just the glass visible so we need to get rid of the background of the glass image.
• We also don’t want all of the stem of the glass visible because we want to give the illusion that the glass is sitting behind the rocks.
• We also want part of the top of the glass transparent because we want the viewer to see through it.

If we used just layers and opacity of layers to accomplish this then we’d end up cutting up glass in lots of portions and messing with the opacity and it would be tedious and really, really annoying and would take a long time. That is why we’ll use the layer mask!

Hmm, you’ll also notice that when you click on the layer mask your colors in the color picker turn to black and white. So here it is… the secret of Layer masks: Depending on what the settings are, the color WHITE shows or reveals the image AND the color BLACK hides or masks the image (We’re talking about the image on which the layer mask is applied, not the layer below it). So on to step 4…

Step 4: Grab your PAINTBRUSH. Choose BLACK and start wildly painting. Paint over the stem so it looks like the rocks are infront. Paint over the background of the glass image. Keep on painting until you only have the glass. Now what if you make a mistake and hide part of the glass? No problem. Layer masks are not destructive so just change the color to WHITE and paint over the glass and it’ll magically reappear. You can basically adjust the brush size, or the shade of
gray and you get way more control than using destructive methods. If you use an eraser you can’t easily undo something you did 20 steps before etc etc.

So here is my version of this step:

I’m not worried about being perfect because nothing is being deleted. It’s all there. Just hit the “X” key on your keyboard and you’ll quickly switch between black and white and you can fix your mistakes. Now after you have quickly erased everything that is not needed just zoom waaay in and with a small brush just fix up the edges so they look good. Be sure to get that area in between that lemon slice .

So now I have something like this:

Step 5: Finally, we need to make the glass a bit transparent. You can do two things. You can a) Set the opacity of the brush to 50% and then paint right over the glass or b) You can change the color of your brush to gray and then paint over the areas you want to make transparent. Using the current settings (i.e White reveals) then if you make your brush dark gray then your glass will be less opaque and more transparent. If you choose light gray then your glass will appear less transparent. Just
paint it gray in the areas where you want it to appear slightly transparent but not in the areas with the lemon slice and straws. If you can’t make the transparent area look smooth (ie. you can see the brush strokes) then just grab the smudge tool and lightly smudge the gray area until it looks good and smooth. You can use any filter or tool on the layer mask and it’ll give you a new sort of effect .

That is all. You have the final image:

I hope I was able to show you how layer masks can make your life easier. This is obviously not the only thing you can do with layer masks so keep playing with this and learn more. If you have any questions then leave me comments below and I’ll try my best to get back to you in a timely fashion.

Notes:

• Layer Masks are one of the easiest features of Photoshop to understand. A Layer mask is just what it sounds like: a mask that goes on a layer. Think of what happens when a person wears a mask. You can see through the holes but not through the mask itself. It’s a great way to non-destructively hide parts of a layer. You will not lose any data and to go back to the original state you’ll just delete the mask.
• You can go to Layer > Layer Masks > Reveal All or Hide All to apply the mask (also you can just choose the rectangle with the circle from the Layers window.)
• Use the “X” key to quickly switch between Black and White (to show and hide)
• Shades of Gray in a layer mask change the opacity of the layer.
• A link icon appears in the middle of the layer and the layer mask. If it is linked then both the mask and layer can be moved together. If it is unlinked then you can independently move the layer and its mask.
• Be sure to click the Layer mask rectangle in the layer window when working with layer masks.
• Commonly, layer masks are used with Text and Gradients so experiment with those.
• I’ll continue updating this page with more tutorials and examples if I can think of any
• Comments, Critiques and suggestions are always welcome.

A new feature of Photoshop CS2 is the Smart Sharpen tool. This tool provides photographers with even more control over their photographs. Unfortunately, this tool is not available in previous versions of Adobe Photoshop, therefore, only users who have upgraded to Photoshop CS2 will be able to benefit from this tutorial. This is the first change in the Filter>Sharpen menu in 14 years! ( Learn about Sharpening Basics by clicking here for part 1 of this series )

NOTE: You can click on all the images to increase their size!

The Smart Sharpen tool can be found by going to the Filter Menu Item and then going in to the Sharpen Menu.

Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen.

You will now see a window called “Smart Sharpen”. This window has an option to choose from Basic and Advanced modes. Below that you will see a Settings drop down menu. This settings drop down menu allows you to save the current settings so you can easily get to them later.Below that you will see Amount and Radius.

So far everything is very similar to the Unsharp Mask tool. The difference will now be apparent because of the Remove options. The Remove Drop down menu has three options. These allow you to remove Gaussian Blur, Lens Blur and Motion Blur. Each option triggers a different algorithm that Photoshop uses to remove these specific types of blurs. Finally, if you choose the Advanced Radio button you will be able to see three tabs: Sharpen, Highlights and Shadows. These allow the user to set the sharpness of the midtones, highlights and shadows. This is useful because sometimes you don’t want the shadows to be as sharp as the highlights (or vice versa) .

Let’s go over each option available to us:

The Remove Options

These options allow us to remove blurs caused by the three common types of blurs: Gaussian, Lens and Motion blurs.

Removing Gaussian Blur

The Gaussian Blur is very similar to viewing an image from an out-of-focus lens. If your image has a consistent soft blur with no areas of sharpness then this is the option to use. If the image you are working on is slightly out of focus then applying the Gaussian Blur Removal option will fix that problem. This is very similar to our regular unsharp masking technique. Nothing new here.

(gaussian blur)
(after smart sharpen: remove gaussian blur)

Removing Lens Blur

A lens blur is similar to Gaussian blur but a little different because it is not as soft. The Lens Blur Removal option removes the lens blur while finding edges and not creating obvious halos. This is also useful for images with finer details.

(lens blur)

(after smart sharpen: remove lens blur)

Removing Motion Blur

A motion blur happen when the camera or the subject moves or the camera shutter is open for too long. A faint trail of the subject is formed and there is little sharpness to the image. After choosing the Motion Blur removal option you will see that you are given the option to choose the angle. Just choose the angle that is as close as possible to the direction of the motion blur. The more accurate you are with the angle the better the motion blur will be fixed.

The Motion Blur Removal option works best if the motion blur happens only in one direction. Sometimes the camera may move in many directions and if that happens then the result of this tool is not very great but you can try applying two remove-motion-blur smart sharpens one after the other for each angle in which the motion blur exists.

(motion blur)
(after smart sharpen: remove motion blur)

Advanced Mode

There are times when you might want only some parts of an image sharpened while leaving the rest untouched. There may be times when you want to sharpen parts of an image more than other parts. Put your selection tools back because you probably won’t need them because the smart sharpen tool will take care of everything.

Clicking on the Advanced radio button will bring up three tabs called Sharpen, Shadow and Highlight. The Shadow and Highlight tabs have three sliders called Fade Amount, Tonal Width and Radius.

The main advantage of the Advanced mode of the Sharpen tool is that it allows us to set the sharpness of Midtones, Shadows and Highlights individually. Mainly we’ll be controlling what gets sharpened LESS.

• The Fade Amount controls the strength of the sharpening in either areas that are considered shadows or highlights (depending on which tab you are currently in). If you increase the fade amount of shadows then the dark areas of your image will not be as sharp. If you increase the fade amount of highlights then the light areas will not be as sharp. The higher this setting, the more the sharpness decreases. The lower this setting, the more the sharpness increases.

Here is a demonstration of Fade Amount:

1. Let’s take a look at this Arch thingamajig:

2. I’m going to zoom in to one of the shadows and INCREASE the fade amount to 100%

3. Next, I’m going to DECREASE the fade amount to 0%

4. Did you notice the sharpness of the shadows? When the fade amount of the shadows is 100% then the shadows don’t get sharpened. When you decrease the fade amount to 0% then all the shadows get the full sharpness treatment! Pretty neat!

• The Tonal Width controls which tonal values will be affected by the reduction in sharpness. The tonal width is defined as the difference between the lightest part of the image and the darkest part of the image. The Tonal Width slider determines which tonal values will be sharpened (or not sharpened). If the value of the Tonal Width slider is small then only lightest highlights or darkest shadows (depending on whether you are in the highlights or shadows tab) will be affected by the sharpening reduction. If the value of the Tonal width slider is great then a greater range or highlights or shadows will be affected by the sharpening reduction.

Here is an example:

1. We’ll take the same image again. First I’m going to set the fade amount to 100% (Recall that increasing the fade amount decreases the sharpness). Then I’m going to change the tonal width to 0%. You’ll notice that everything is sharpened despite the fact that the fade amount is 100%. The reason for that is that the Tonal width controls where the sharpness DECREASES. So when you change the tonal width to 0% then the sharpness does not decrease anywhere.

2. Now I will increase the Tonal width to 100% and the sharpeness gets reduced all over the image.

The Radius slider determines which areas are to be considered shadows or highlights. This basically controls the size of the area around each pixel that is used to determine whether a pixel is a shadow or a highlight. A small radius means that small patches of darks and lights will be considered shadows or highlights. A large radius means that large patches of darks and lights will be considered to be shadows or highlights.

Let’s Smart Sharpen an image (Click the images to enlarge) :

1. I’m going to choose the first image I get from http://www.sxc.hu

2. Open up the Smart Sharpen Tool (Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen). Choose the advanced radio button and make sure all the settings in Shadows and Highlights tab are set to zero.

3. Go back to the sharpen tab and adjust the settings mainly to get a good sharp edge. I used the following settings:

4. Now go to the shadows tab. Now we will increase these settings so we can remove as much noise from the shadows as possible. I zoomed into an area with lots of shadow. I used the following settings and it seemed to rid the noise quite well with out loosing sharpness.

5. Finally I went to the highlights tab and removed as much noise as I could from highlights. I also made sure that the image did retain some softness (your preference).

6. The final image and the initial image has subtle differences and most of the time these subtle differences are what really matter.

Here is another example of sharpness correction:

(before)

(after)

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. There are even more sharpness techniques that I will cover in the near future. At this time I feel like creating my next tutorial about something other than sharpness Thanks for readings. Comments are encouraged.

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The goal of this tutorial series is to provide the reader will all the information I have about sharpening photographs in Photoshop.

What is Sharpening exactly?

All digital photographs lose a certain amount of sharpness. That means that most photographs will look a bit blurred and their details won’t be as prominent. Basically, sharpening makes the edges of a photographed object appear more distinct.

Why do we need to sharpen?

When a digital photograph is taken the camera converts all the visual data that it receives into lots of 1s and 0s. Basically, what that means is that the camera doesn’t really know what it’s actually “seeing”. It takes all the data available to it and just dumps all the information on to disk with out differentiating between the important stuff and the not so important stuff. For example, if you take a picture of a fly sitting on white marble, the camera will pay as much attention to the white marble as it does to the object of the photograph, the fly.

Sharpening is a way in which the photographer says “hey… this fly needs to have more emphasis and show more detail than the white marble!” The photographer then does some mumbo jumbo until the level of detail and emphasis that he wants on the subject is reached.

What is this mumbo jumbo you speak of?

This is what the remainder of this tutorial will focus on. How does one effectively sharpen an image with out completely ruining it? I will attempt to give you, at least, an over view of all the sharpening tools available to a Photoshop user. I will probably pay more attention to the more important tools.

You might be wondering something along the lines of: “well… there is a sharpen tool and I click on it and I drag it around and it sharpens… what’s so complicated about that?” The answer to that is that there needs to be a fine balance when you sharpen because it’s very easy to kill your images. You might end up sharpening the noise in the photograph and hence end up emphasizing the wrong stuff. So, just bear with me and I’ll try to make this as easy and quick as possible

What does sharpening do exactly?

Ok, now for some technical stuff (well… not really). When the human eye looks at an object it will be looking for edges. Sharpening defines those edges better. Here is an example (click on the images to enlarge them):

If we zoom in and view the edges of this lady bug we see the following:

After sharpening you will see that all the edges have a halo around them with the color of either side:

Notice the white around the edge of the lady bug. And notice the blackish red on the inside of the edge. That is what sharpening does… it creates a halo around high contrast area to emphasize edges. Before and after:

The edges are all sharp.

The Sharpening Tools

The most obvious sharpening tool is called, umm… the sharpen tool. You can find it on the Tools window and is sometimes hidden behind the smudge or blur tool. It looks like:

This tool increases the contrast between the pixels where ever you click and drag. The only options that you have for this tool are brush selection, strength and blending mode.

The blending mode options are:

Normal – This sharpens what ever you drag your mouse over

Darken – This sharpens pixels darker than your foreground color

Lighten – This sharpens pixels lighter than your foreground color

Hue – Causes complementary colors to appear

Color – Same as Hue

Saturation – This increases the saturation

Luminosity – This increases the Luminosity

This tool is handy after you’ve already done all the other sharpening work and need some extra touch ups here and there.

The rest of the sharpening tools are in the Filter menu:

Unsharp Mask

Unsharp Mask is the heavy weight of all the sharpening tools. This guy offers you a lot of power and control over the sharpening process.

The amount changes the amount of contrast between pixels. The more the amount the more you will notice a change in the picture. If you set this too high then the halos around edges will be too noticeable and the picture will look terrible. The amount that you need is determined by the subject matter and the resolution of the image. If the subject matter contains something like trees or people then I’ve noticed that a lower amount is fine. For buildings and objects with sharp edges, a higher amount works. For high resolution images you’ll need to increase the amount more. You’ll need to experiment with it.

The Radius is the size of the halo around the edges. One side of the edge will have a lighter color and the other side of the edge will have a darker color. The number that you are changing is the number of pixels surrounding the high contrasting areas. High resolution images will need a higher radius. Low resolution images will need a lower radius. Also I’ve noticed that the radius and amount can be inversely proportional, meaning that higher radius can have a lower amount and a lower amount can have a higher radius. Once again, you’ll have to experiment.

Finally, the Threshold determines what exactly you want an edge to be. Photoshop thinks that colors that are touching and are very different from each other are edges. If your threshold is set to 0 then everything will get sharpened (including noise). This option allows you to choose what should get sharpened. A threshold of over zero will only sharpen areas with high contrast and won’t touch areas with low contrast. This is helpful because you don’t want stuff like noise getting sharpened along with real edges. The higher the setting the less areas the sharpening will be applied to.

Let’s sharpen an image using the unsharp mask filter!

First lets choose an image:

When I sharpen I like to sharpen everything as much as possible and then decrease the effect till it looks just right.

So, first decrease the threshold to zero so that everything in the image is sharpened. Increase the radius and amount to its maximum setting. Everything will look terrible.

Next decrease the radius to about 1.0px

Now you will see stuff that will have grain and noise. Increase the threshold so that the noise does not get sharpened. Use your best judgement and increase the threshold to the lowest setting possible where everything looks smooth.

Now adjust the radius so that everything looks sharp but still natural. You’ll have to use your best judgement.

Now finally decrease the amount until everything looks natural.

The final version of the image:

This ends the first part of a multiseries sharpening tutorial. In the next tutorials I will cover the new Smart Sharpen filter in CS2. I will also share with you other techniques with which you can sharpen your images. See you next time.

Please leave comments.

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Using Photoshop you can easily and quickly create a stencil that you can use to carve up pumpkins.

The first step is the most important. Find an image that has enough shadows and shapes so that we can carve a face with out having the pumpkin break up. For this tutorial I’m going to use a screen shot from The Exorcist. The picture can be disturbing for some people so be careful when you click on more:-

Okay. Step 1. I chose this picture:

I chose this one because a) It’s scary. b) There are lots of well defined shapes in the image. For example there are well defined light areas and well defined shadow areas. Most of the shadows are joined together and that would make for a pretty stable pumpkin.

Step 2. De-saturate the image by going to Image > Adjustments > De-saturate and you will end up with something like:

step 3. Go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast. I did contrast 100% and brightness -60% and I got this:

step 4. Next grab the pencil tool and use black for the foreground color. Make all the black areas so that they are easy to cut and are solid. Make sure that there are no floating black shapes because those would be impossible to cut. I got this:

step 5. Crop and print. I cropped the image and printed out a large image. Big enough that it would fit a pumpkin. Now cut out the white areas and leave the black areas and you will have a very cool carved pumpkin! Here is a big one version of the image:

Large Image

here is a good site to get inspiration: http://www.jack-o-patterns.com/Carvings2005.ivnu

here are some free cut outs made by members of somethingawful.com

HomeStarRunner Pumpkin Stencils

More Pumpkin Stencils

Even more Pumpkin Stencils

First the regular File menu keystrokes that you should remember are:

• New File: CTRL+N
• Open File: CTRL+O
• Save File: CTRL+S
• Save As: Shift+CTRL+S
• Save for Web: Shift+Alt+CTRL+S
• Print: CTRL+P

We’ll be opening and closing and saving for almost every single document that we work on. By memorizing these you will be saving your selves a lot of clicks.

Next are the Edit Menu keystrokes. You must know these in order to become an efficient photoshop artist. The ones I most frequently use are:

1. Step Backwards: ALT+CTRL+Z
2. Step Forward: Shift+CTRL+Z
3. Cut: CTRL+X
4. Copy: CTRL+C
5. Paste: CTRL+V
6. Free Transform: CTRL+T

AND:

1. Merge Down: CTRL+E
2. Select All: CTRL+A
3. Deselect: CTRL+D
4. Inverse Selection: CTRL+SHIFT+I
5. Repeat Last Used Filter: CTRL+F
6. Brushes Palette: F5
7. Color Palette: F6
8. Layers Palette: F7
9. Zoom in: Ctrl+”+”
10. Zoom out: Ctrl+”-”
11. Switch between foreground and background colors: X

Now the rest of the keystrokes that I use aren’t actually official keystrokes that Adobe has meant for us to use (well they have… but well.. read on). For example, if I want to desaturate an image the “official” keystroke is Shift+CTRL+U. I don’t know about you but I want to memorize the least amount of stuff as possible. Basically, if you hold down the ALT key (in windows atleast. I’m not sure about Macs) all the menu items will show one underlined letter. While holding down the alt key press the underlined arrow and that menu is displayed. With out letting go to the alt key continue pressing all the letters till you get to what ever it is you need. So instead of remembering Shift+CTRL+U for desaturation I’ll just press ALT+I+A+D.

The following are some important “unofficial” keystrokes:

1. Levels: Alt I-A-L
2. Feather: Alt S-F
3. Image Size: Alt I-I
4. Crop: Alt I-P
5. Stroke: Alt E-S

Obviously there are tons more. It is up to you, the artist, to decide which ones will save you the most time. I believe that the key strokes that I have listed above are the most useful ones that everyone should know. If I remember some more then I will add them to this page!

The best way to memorize these is by actually using these. I, personally, never sat down and memorized these keystrokes. Just use them enough times and they’ll become second nature to you!

Please post any keystrokes that you use often but I have missed.

Selection masks are different than Layer Masks. Layer Masking basically allows you to fine tune the visible and invisible parts of your layer.

Selection Masks, on the other hand, allow you to have more control over your selections. And selecting stuff is a major part of Photoshop.

Before continuing please make sure that you understand Photoshops Marquee Tools and Lasso Tools. If not then check out our Photoshop Tips Tutorial Page.

Quick Masks

A quick mask allows you to select a portion of your image using your Paint Brush or Pencil Tool. Sometimes it is more convenient and more precise to do that instead of trying to aim exactly using the lasso tool for selecting portions of your images.

The best way to understand the quick mask feature is to actually use it in some examples.

So lets start:

• 1. Here is a picture of a small wrench. This Tutorial will focus on selecting the wrench using Quick masks. First I’ve made a marquee selection around it to select everything that we can easily select



• Next click on the QuickMask button on the Photoshop Toolbar. It is shown on the image below circled in red towards the bottom. You’ll see that a red shade has shown up on everything that was NOT selected. Everything that looks normal is what IS selected



• Next you can grab the Pencil tool (or Brush) and change the FOREground picture to BLACK. Next, roughly paint around the wrench. We chose BLACK because black UNSELECTS and grows the mask. On the other hand, WHITE SELECTS and makes the mask smaller. I have the following so far:



• Next I zoomed in to the image around the edges of the wrench. Then, I chose the PENCIL tool and changed the FOREground color to WHITE. Then carefully selected all the rough edges of the mask. Once I did that I only had the wrench selected.



• Then press the Standard Mode button. It’s right next to the quick mask button on the toolbar. And your wrench is perfectly selected

You can change the way the quick mask works a little by double clicking on the Quick mask button. If you double click on the quick mask button you will get the following window:

There is no real reason to change these options. It maybe a persons personal preference to want to change these. It only controls the color and opacity of the quick mask. You can also change it so that it turns the selection red instead of the unselected area. I don’t recommend changing these unless there is a good reason to.

Now that we have a selection the next thing to learn about is ALPHA CHANNELS.. oooo.. it’s really simple. don’t worry

Alpha Channels

Sometimes you take a long time to get a perfect selection. Then you might want to deselect and work on the whole image and later come back to the selection. Then you have to carefully reselect the object again taking a long time.

It would be nice if we could save the shape of the selection so we could reuse it and not worry about deselecting and reselecting, wouldn’t it?

That is where alpha channels come in. They allow you to Save Selections.

The steps are very simple:

• Here I have created a selection that I want to easily recreate. If I want to add an effect to the entire image I would have to deselect. If I do that I would lose the selection. So we want to save the selection



• With the picture still selected go to the Channels Palette (usually next to the layers palette or go to Windows>Channels) and on the bottom you will see the SAVE SELECTION button (circled in the screen shot below). Click it and you will see an Alpha Channel appear in the shape of your selection



• Now you are free to deselect your image and work on the whole thing. When you want to reselect the portion that you saved just go to the Channels Palette and CTRL+CLICK on the Alpha Channel and your image will be RESELECTED

You can also change your alpha selection in the same way you changed the Quick mask. That is, choose the paint brush or Pen Tool and draw in BLACK to remove from the selection or draw in white to add to the selection.

Using the stuff you learnt here you can speed up your selection process.

I hope this was useful! Comments and Questions are welcome.

We will go over what adjustment layers are and what they are used for. We will also briefly cover the many available options for adjustment layers, and then finally end with some examples where we will use what we are about to go over. For this tutorial I am going to assume that the readers already know some basics of Photoshop such as regular layers and the Image > Adjustments menu.

What is an Adjustment Layer?

We all know what a layer is (atleast I assume everyone reading this does ). We can think of them as transparencies lying on top of each other. Imagine you take a transparency and you draw something on one and then place it on a stack. Next you take another transparency and draw something on it and then place it on the same stack. What is going to happen is that you will be able to see stuff from the first sheet as well as stuff drawn on the second sheet as long as they don’t overlap. That is what basic layers are.

Adjustment layers work in the same way in that you can see through them but they don’t change anything actually below them. So you can apply an adjustment (such as hue/saturation changes) on a transparency/layer and it will become an adjustment layer. Next you take this adjustment layer and place it on our stack of layers. Magically, when look through the adjustment layer everything seen through it seems to have that adjustment. However, it doesn’t actually change the layers below thus giving you a lot of control over what you do. You can change the adjustments later if you don’t like the effect as well.

Read on for detailed step by step tutorials

How to make and manage an Adjustment Layer

• 1. First select the regular layer on which you want the adjustment layer to be placed.
• 2. Next you can either click on the button in the Layers Palette that looks like a half black and half white circle.

• 3. Next choose what ever adjustment you want to apply
• 4. Then set up the appropriate settings for the adjustment you chose in step 3.
• 5. Click OK

Great. Now we have an adjustment layer. Notice that if you hide this layer by clicking on the eye next to it in the layers window you will be able to see the layers below which are unchanged.

Next you can adjust the settings you just in step 4 above by double clicking on the left rectangle in the adjustment layer. This will bring back the settings of your adjustment.

If you want to change the adjustment layer it self then click on the Adjustment Layer and then go to Layer > Change Layer Content and you can change the type of Adjustment Layer. Alternately you could just delete the adjustment layer and then recreate one but the former method saves you a few steps.

Next if you choose BLACK as your foreground color and then paint on your adjustment layer your adjustment layer will go away in the areas you paint on. If you choose WHITE as your foreground color then your adjustment layer comes back in the areas you paint on. If you choose a shade of gray then you will get a semi-transparent adjustment layer. The darker shade of gray you will choose the lighter the adjustment that you applied will appear. The lighter shade of gray you will choose the more obvious the adjustment that you applied will appear. You can not use any colors though. It only works with Black, White and shades of gray in between.

Finally just like regular layers you can also adjust this by playing with the blending options both in the Layers Palette on top (says Normal by default) or by going to Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options.

The Adjustment Options

There are 12 Adjustment Options available to you when you create an adjustment layer. I will go over them in more detail for beginners in later posts but I will give a general description now. They are:

• Solid Color

This slaps a solid color on your stack of layers just like the name suggests.

• Gradient

This puts a gradient on your stack of layers

• Pattern

This allows you to choose a pattern and it applies it to your layer

• Levels

This allows you to adjust the tones in your image. You can set the darkest tone and the lightest tone in your image and make the whole image change appear. You can make a dull image appear bright using Levels

• Curves

You can use this to fix your highlights and shadows using this option

• Color Balance

Adjust the colors of highlights, midtones and shadows separately using this option.

• Brightness/Contrast

This lightens or darkens your image and increases or decreases the contrast.

• Hue/Saturation

This can be used to control the colors, the saturation and lightness or darkness of the image.

• Selective Color

This allows you to add or remove percentage of a color present in your image. If you want your reds redder and your blues less bluer then this is what you use.

• Channel Mixer

This allows you to adjust the reds, blues or greens. So you are adjusting each color channels itself

• Gradient Map

This adds gradients insides different colors of the image. Unlike the gradient tool, that put a solid gradient over everything, this puts colors in each color of the image.

• Invert

This changes all the colors to what is opposite to them in the color wheel.

• Threshold

This changes stuff to black or white. The slider allows you to choose what tones it will be changing.

• Posterize

This reduces the number of colors used in the image.

Examples of using Adjustment Layers.

If only a certain part of your image is too saturated and the rest is alright and you want to desaturate only one area then using adjustment layers is a good idea. You will not risk messing up your original layer so you can tweak it to your hearts content.

If we want to attract more attention towards the butterfly we may want to do it by desaturating everything else.

1. Open up the image in photoshop.
2. Next, click on the Adjustment Layer button in your layers palette and choose Hue/Saturation.
3. Change the Hue to -35. This will decrease the saturation of the colors on the whole image.

Here is a more detailed tutorial demonstrating adjustment layers. If you want to fix the tone/brightness on only one part of your image and fix the colors on one part of your image then you can use levels and hue/saturation adjustment layers.

1. Open up your image. I want to make the hills darker but I want to leave the sky the way it is.