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10 Handy Photoshop Shortcuts for Working with Layers

Technique Comments Off

Dec 072017

Adobe just released this helpful 2-minute video that shares 10 handy shortcuts you can use in Photoshop when working with layers.

Here’s a quick rundown of the 10 shortcuts (watch the video above for visual demonstrations):

1. Add layer masks to hide all

To quickly add a layer mask to hide all of a layer, just hold down the Option key on Mac (or Alt on Windows) and click on the “Add Layer Mask” button in the Layers panel.

2. Delete layer masks

Instead of dragging a layer mask into the bin, you can just right click the layer mask itself and delete it from the tooltip menu that appears.

3. Add a layer mask based on selections

Creating a layer mask of a selection you have made is a useful thing to do for Photoshop users. Clicking the “Add Layer Mask” button will reveal your selection, but if you want to hide it then you just need to hold the Option key on Mac (or Alt for Windows) while clicking.

4. Invert a layer mask

If you want to invert your layer mask, just hold Command + I on Mac (or Control + I on Windows) to quickly move between the two.

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Twenty Helpful Tips and Tricks for Photoshop

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Nov 202017

Photoshop is a tremendously intricate and nuanced program, and you can never have enough tips and tricks to navigate all its features and options and make your workflow both more powerful and more efficient. This helpful video will show you 20 more tips and tricks you might not have seen before.

Why the Brush Tool Has a Weird Purple Line in Photoshop CC 2018

Technique Comments Off

Oct 242017

If you’ve started using Photoshop CC 2018, you may have noticed a strange purple line following your brush around as you’re using it now. That line is called a “brush leash,” and here’s a helpful 6-minute video by retoucher Pratik Naik about what that purple line is and how you can use and customize it.

Basically, the purple brush leash is meant to serve as a guide for the Smoothing feature of the Brush Tool. Turning Smoothing down to 0% removes the purple line and restores the brush tool to the original version.

You can also turn off the brush leash in the Cursors panel of your Preferences.

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10 Tips and Tricks for Making Difficult Selections in Photoshop

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Mar 142017

If you’re just starting out in Photoshop and would like to learn the art of making difficult selections to isolate things in photos, check out this great video tutorial by Tutvid. It’s a 37-minute lesson with 10 tips and tricks on methods that range from beginner to advanced.

“Learn to make virtually ANY selection and cut out anything you would even need in Photoshop,” writes Nate Dodson. “We’ll make simple, straight-line selections with the Poly Lasso tool, we’ll select car parts with the Pen Tool and edit the path, we’ll use Calculations to create extremely intricate and difficult selections VERY quickly, we’ll learn to use and work with Select and Mask as well as Refine Edge, we’ll build a selection based on a single channel, and SO much more!”

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Affinity Photo is Now on Windows: Get the Free Beta

Technique Comments Off

Nov 122016

curves

One of the most highly regarded Photoshop alternatives is now available on Windows. Affinity Photo today launched its free public beta for Windows users, allowing anyone to download the popular pro photo editing software.

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Affinity Photo first launched as a free public beta for Mac back in February 2015, amassing over 230,000 downloads before officially launching in July 2015 with a $50 price tag.

The app was selected as Apple’s “App of the Year” that year, and currently has a 5/5 star rating in the iTunes App Store.

The new Windows version of Affinity Photo is a feature-for-feature clone of the Mac version, so you’ll find all the familiar tools.

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Photoshop Updated with Face-Aware Liquify, Content-Aware Crop, and More

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Jun 232016

faceaware_1

After teasing us with the magic that is Content-Aware Crop a few weeks ago, Adobe is finally ready to release that feature and a few more into the wild. Photoshop CC 2015.5 is officially here, and it’s got a few tricks up its sleeve.

The newest version of Photoshop CC comes with a couple of speed and performance improvements like we see in most updates—this time it’s a 3x performance improvement when working with fonts and Content- Aware Fill features. But beyond that, there are three new features you need to know about: Content-Aware Crop, Face-Aware Liquify, and the Selection and Masking Taskspace.

Let’s take them one by one.

Content-Aware Crop

If you haven’t been reclining beneath a shady rock recently, you’ve already heard of and probably seen this feature in action. As the name suggests, this much-requested feature brings Content-Aware technology to the Crop tool.

Basically: it lets you crop outside the lines by intelligently filling in any empty space you create. This lets you straighten crooked photos without losing precious bits of your image, or simply expand the canvas you’re working with.

So you can go from this:

Iceberg_Original

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Photoshop Trick: How to Stitch Together Difficult Panoramas

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May 162016

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If you’ve ever tried to stitch a panorama in Photoshop, you know that the program is not always up to the task. In this “Photoshop Secrets” tutorial, photographer Jimmy McIntyre will show you two tricks that will help Photoshop stitch even the most difficult tiles together into a beautiful pano.

The first 4:40 of the video is a small bit of self-promotion followed by tips on how to shoot panoramas to make stitching them in Photoshop easier: he talks about overlap between tiles, shooting a lot of extra info around the edges, and more. These are important tips if you’ve never shot panoramas, but if you want to skip straight to the tips on stitching together difficult panoramas, jump straight to 4:40.

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Adobe Camera Raw 9.5 Has a New UI That Matches Photoshop (Finally)

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Mar 212016

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Adobe Camera Raw is no longer the ugly duckling of the Adobe photo editing software family. Adobe just released version 9.5 of the RAW conversion software, and the update brings a new user interface that matches the look of Photoshop and Bridge.

“Your color scheme within Camera Raw will mimic Photoshop and Bridge, and you can change your color scheme by visiting the interface preferences within the host application,” Adobe says.

Here’s what the Adobe Camera Raw interface looked like in the past:

beforeuij

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Adobe is offering this pro photography app for free

News, Technique 1 Response »

Dec 232015

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Adobe makes some of the most powerful graphics tools available, such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Photoshop is by far the most popular tool for graphic designers and hardcore photo editors, but it isn’t Adobe’s only photo tool.

Adobe also makes a program called Lightroom, which is just the photo editing features of Photoshop. It’s a nice streamlined experience for people who don’t need Photoshop’s mountain of graphic design tools.

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Creating Photoshop Composites for a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 4×4 Brochure

Technique 1 Response »

Oct 232015

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-Benz Canada commissioned me in 2014 to shoot photos for the 2014 Sprinter lineup. In addition to those photos, I was also asked to piece together brochure images for the newer and not-yet-released 4×4 Sprinter model. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the Photoshop work that went into the 4×4 images.

The reason I was able to go overboard for this retouching demonstration is because this assignment was crafted exclusively behind-the-computer. There was little to no camera work from my end for these images.

It’s no secret that Photoshop is a big tool in the advertising/automotive world, and tweaking images to give a vehicle the most impact has been used for decades. In this case, a new 4×4 version of the Sprinter was being released, but the actual 4×4 model wasn’t available for photography. Considering small differences like wheels, badging, and ride height were the key differences compared to the 2WD model, retouching was an efficient route for this assignment.

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10 Editing Techniques That Changed My Photography

Technique 2 Responses »

Apr 212015

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In the digital age you as a photographer are expected to be familiar and knowledgeable with Photoshop. It can be argued back and forth if this is right or wrong and whether Photoshop is ruining photography. But I see Photoshop as a tool, just as the darkroom was a tool to manipulate images. I have put together this list of 10 techniques that helps me get the most out of my images.

As my photographic skills grew so did my curiosity for better images. The more I observed the photographers I looked up to, the more I noticed the images they took were not straight from the camera. Post processing plays a big role in today’s photographic society. Whether it’s used subtlety, or for major composites, it’s definitely an important skill to know. Over the last few years, through experimentation and taking bits and pieces of what other photographers have shown me, I built a workflow that I use for my post processing. This list is an overview of how I edit my photos. There are thousands of post processing methods; this is just what I have developed and what has worked for me. This is not a beginners guide to Photoshop…

fstoppers

Affinity Photo Beta Has Landed – Free Beta!

News 3 Responses »

Feb 272015

“We have been trying out the Affinity Photo Beta over the last few days and we are impressed. It looks and feels like Photoshop, but it’s built with new fast code and will be an outright purchase when launched.

There have been possible Photoshop replacements before, the $30 Pixelmator app being one of them. We’ve tried that and it’s pretty good, a clean layout with robust backward compatibility with PSD files. It hasn’t convinced us yet to blow away the Cloud subscription, but if we were forced to use Pixelmator alone for images, it wouldn’t be a problem. Just a case of being very familiar with a piece of software and using it as it’s the path of least resistance.

So we weren’t first out of the blocks to download the Affinity Photo Beta when it was announced. We should have been as we now rather like this direct Photoshop competitor.”

WallApp: See What Your Photo Would Look Like Displayed In A Room

News 2 Responses »

Nov 132014

It’s always good to have a visual, whether it’s presenting your photography to clients, or if you’re selling them as artwork. WallApp is all about quickness, while giving your photography a clean and professional platform for exhibit. This browser-based tool will let you see photos in the context of a room display, without having to resort to Photoshop to create one.

If you’re familiar with mockups, and use them in your business, WallApp is pretty much that in a nutshell. In just below two minutes, I was able to drag-drop an image to upload onto the system, arrange the size I wanted, and save my file. It was that easy.

There’s also a variety of rooms to choose from at the top, and you can scroll around to whichever suits you better.

For more info please click the link below:

slrlounge

Photoshop CS6 Beta free download released

News 1 Response »

Mar 222012

Photoshop CS6 Beta free download released – SlashGear

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTYcRWPsZUg

Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta | digital image editing software – Adobe Labs

How to Create a Realistic HDR Image: A Simple and Fun Method to Create an HDR Image, without Photomatix, by Jacob Shultz

HDR Images, HDR Info, HDR Styles 3 Responses »

Apr 242011

I use Photomatix and several other HDR software programs, however that is not the only way to create a composite of different exposures. Photographer Jacob Shultz has perfected a Photoshop workflow that gives him great results. Click the link below to read his tutorial at DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY SCHOOL:

How to Create a Realistic HDR Image: A Simple and Fun Method to Create a HDR Image, without Photomatix

Jacob Shultz Design and Photography