Chapter 1: Palettes and Tools. Painting straight lines Photoshop's controls over straight lines and angles are not as obvious as they may initially seem to be. In this article Daniel Wade shows you how to make better layer masks and channels using some of Photoshop's built--in features. Freeform and straight lines The Lasso tool has been familiar to us since Photoshop's inception. Its sibling, the Polygon Lasso, was introduced in Photoshop 4 and, in Photoshop 5, another family member, the Magnetic Lasso Tool, joined the clan. The team at Design Graphics show you how to combine freeform and straight line selections. Automate with Actions Ever needed to quickly find the centre of an image and/or create horizontal and vertical guides that marked the centre of an image? Michael Ninness demonstrates how to construct an Action in Adobe Photoshop that will instantly create the guides for you and align them in one easy step. Painterly effects with the Art History Brush Photoshop's Art History Brush lets you paint with stylised strokes using source data from a History State or Snapshot. By experimenting with different options, you can simulate the textures of painting with different artistic styles. Julieanne Kost shows how to achieve these painterly effects. Let Photoshop do the work Hands up all the lazy Photoshop users who'd prefer that it did a little more of the work? The truly lazy Photoshop users wouldn't raise their hands, they'd just nod and say 'Yeah. I'm lazy'. Daniel Brown shows you how to do more with less effort using Photoshop's automation features. A bumper Crop Photoshop 6 saw the Crop tool promoted to its own spot on the toolbar with a host of productive features such as Shielding, Perspective, Hide or Delete and cropping, based on the foremost image's dimensions. Julieanne Kost demonstrates. Automatic masking tools There are a variety of ways to isolate a foreground object from its background and delete it so you can replace it with another background. Julieanne Kost shows you how to use Photoshop's masking tools for quick results. Photoshop blend modes Blending modes are one of the most powerful features of Photoshop, allowing you to alter the behaviour of a tool or layer to interact with the underlying image. With help from the Adobe Photoshop 7 manual, the Design Graphics team demonstrate what each blending mode does. Custom picture packages Photoshop's Picture Package feature is a great way to print the same image at several sizes on a page. But what if you want to print different images? Russell Brown shows you how to take advantage of Photoshop's Actions to create your own custom picture packages. Patching without smudging Photoshop 7's Healing Brush and Patch tool are great for repairing images, but they can also be used for creative uses such as making elements of an image disappear. Russell Brown shows you how to leave no evidence at the scene of the patch. Natural media brushes Photoshop 7.0 opens up a whole new range of possibilities for creating artistic effects. With the new painting engine, you can create imagery that looks as if it was painted using natural media. Adobe Systems demonstrates some ways to customize the Brush tool. Photoshop 7 brushes Photoshop 7 added a powerful new paint engine allowing you to simulate natural media for painterly effects. You can also create and save custom brushes using the new Brushes palette. Daniel Wade takes a look at where everything is and how to make the most of the new brush capabilities. Chapter 2: Paths, Selections, Channels and Masks. Working with difficult hair Separating a picture from its background can be difficult, especially if the image has problem areas, such as spiky hair. Using a path can be almost impossible and may not always provide a realistic final result. Colin Wood demonstrates another method that uses the Multiply blending mode. Manipulating selections When you need to mask out a shape that has regular curves, do you trust your painting skills? How steady is your hand? If the shape is a circle, the job is easy. But it's not so easy when the circle is on an angle and you have an ellipse to deal with. Your secret weapon, explains Colin Wood, is Transform within Quick Mask. Creative Calculations Calculations can make the task of producing complicated alpha channels as easy and quick as clicking a button. Photoshop's live preview allows you to see the result you will get, blending modes give you flexibility and the addition of a mask widens your creative possibilities. Colin Wood demonstrates. Chapter 3: Layers. Pasteboard blues no more In Photoshop, what you get is sometimes not what you see. This is particularly true if your original image extends beyond the image boundaries onto the 'pasteboard'. Although you are not actually seeing the entire image, it is all there. Out of sight should not be out of mind! Colin Wood explains. Just passing through There's a new blend mode in town called Pass Through and you're going to want it. Available when using Photoshop 6.0's (or later) Layer Sets, it offers the ability to control how layers interact with each other. Julieanne Kost shows you where you'll want to use it. Chapter 4: Colour effects and correction. Adding body When an image is slim on tonal range, a simple levels adjustment can throw away detail and add too much contrast. Colin Wood shows you how to use multiple layers of an image using blending modes to add body, curves to add contrast and saturation to bring out the colour. Sepia tints There are a number of ways to convert a greyscale image into a sepia toned image for reproduction using four--colour process printing. Carl Stevens shows us one of his favourite techniques, which will enable you to save your settings and apply these same effects to other images for greater consistency. Removing colour casts Finding the ideal image may require some extra work to suit your purposes. The lighting may not give you the effect you want, or there may be a colour cast. Carl Stevens shows you how to use Photoshop's Curves to quickly colour correct an image. Tonal range improvement Carl Stevens takes the next step with Photoshop's Curves to improve flat images that lack dynamic tonal range. By setting black (shadow) and white (highlight) points, he uses Curves and adjusts the HSB brightness value to improve the image considerably. Using Curves on midtones Over the years too many people have used Curves and Levels simply by hitting the 'Auto' button, often destroying any mood that was in the original shot. In this article Carl Stevens takes the mystery out of Curves, demonstrating how to achieve improvements and special effects in minutes. Colour correction by numbers Colour casts can be introduced as a result of the time of day that a photo was taken, reflected light illuminating a scene or even the type of camera you're using. Julieanne Kost shows you how to expel a colour cast using a combination of Adjustment Layers, Color Samplers and the Info palette. Posterising colour shapes If you need coloured roundals or targets in a hurry, the Posterize command is here to help. When combined with a Gradient Map, the process is quick and easy. Colin Wood shows you how to make coloured regular shapes in three easy, non--destructive steps using adjustment layers and your imagination. Creating a digital master Image editing in Photoshop can be a series of compromises as each correction stretches the tonal range of your image, creating gaps in your histogram. One solution is to capture and correct your images in 16--bit then convert to 8--bit as a last step retaining you image's tonal range. Daniel Wade elaborates. Better seas The scene you see when you take the photograph so often fails to appear in the image quite as you remember it. For example, a bright blue sea can end up as a green sludge. Colin Wood shows you how to clean up the high seas, adding depth and modelling. Chapter 5: Light and shadow effects. Repairing digital photographs Pictures from digital cameras can come with problems waiting to ruin your day. If you don't fix 'noisy' images early in the editing process, you will pay a high price later on. Colin Wood provides a quick way to overcome a common problem found in pictures taken in dim light. The dreaded noise; a silent killer. More realistic drop shadows Shadows didn't suddenly appear with the advent of the desktop computer. When we add artificial ones, they can appear unrealistic. A flat picture often needs that extra 'lift' to make the image seem to be sitting in the background; not floating in mid--air. Colin Wood shows how to add that extra touch of realism. Realistic shadows Creating a realistic drop shadow can be a tricky task. There are also situations where you'd like to replace an existing shadow when placing an object in a scene with a different shadow direction. Carl Stevens shows you how to improve your shadows considerably. Relighting an image Photoshop's Lighting Effects filter gives you a wide range of possibilities for lighting your images. Carl Stevens shows you how to use Lighting Effects to relight a scene, adding light to dark images, changing the focus and adding warmth. You can even exaggerate the original texture with lighting effects. Advanced Levels The first (and sometimes only) thing you have to fix in a picture is the levels. A picture may not have actual black and white points, but a narrow dynamic range makes for a 'thin' image. Photoshop's Levels adjustment does a great all--over job, but that's the problem; it's all over. Colin Wood demonstrates a new way with Levels. Curves without colour shift Photoshop's Curves command is a powerful correction tool that can save the day depending on your knowledge of how it works. It does have a tendency to create colour shifts, so Daniel Wade shows you how to restrict adjustments using the Luminosity blend mode. Chapter 6: Palettes & Tools. Make better line drawings An artist expects to see the same fine lines of his drawing converted to his digital file. Most flatbed scanners have only a small preview area which makes it difficult to see the final result, and time consuming to get the desired quality. Carl Stevens demonstrates how to obtain the best result from your line art scan. Preparing scanned cartoons for print Reproducing colour cartoons in print can be a nightmare, especially when there are fine black lines. If the print registration is not accurate, you will see all four CMYK colours instead of a solid black line. Carl Stevens explains how to reduce the colours under the black using CMYK Setup. Bringing out detail without grain Unsharp masking is the usually the first, and sometimes the only method we use to sharpen images for print or web. But sometimes you want to 'sharpen softly', without bringing out the grain or emphasising certain details or patterns. The High Pass filter is the answer. Colin Wood elaborates. RGB soft proofing Photoshop 6.0 offers the ability to 'soft proof' your document directly on the monitor. This displays an on--screen preview of the document's colours as reproduced on a specific device. Julieanne Kost shows you how to set up Photoshop to print to a profiled printer that you have an ICC profile for. The big descreen Outdoor events like this Formula One Grand Prix frequently have giant video screens which are difficult to photograph and which create moire patterns when viewed on a monitor or when printed. Colin Wood provides a solution. A touch of summer Sometimes your memory of a scene is coloured by the weather; you remember the day as warm and sunny but your pictures look cool and overcast. Colin Wood shows how to add a little sunshine easily using some colour and a layer blend mode. Fixing sky problems In your haste to catch the moment on film or CCD, sometimes you get more in your picture than you wanted like the edge of a building in this case. If you don't want to crop off the offending intrusion, then you must fix the problem where it exists. Here are some of Colin Wood's tips for skies. Simulating gingham fabric It is sometimes easier to create exactly what you want rather than hunt around only to find that you still don't have what you need. Colin Wood's tip to simulate gingham fabric incorporates several hot tips that will save you hours and enhance your proficiency in Photoshop. Transform Again Changing the size and shape of an element is a breeze using the Transform function. By mastering the Transform Again function, either in multiple or single layers, you will be able to create hypnotic patterns or dazzling multiple images in minutes. Colin Wood demonstrates. Repairing JPEG artifacts JPEG has formed the backbone of photographic image delivery on the web and digital camera storage for several years. One of the drawbacks of the format is that at lower quality levels, JPEG artifacts can reduce reproduction quality. Carl Stevens helps out with JPEG repair techniques. Making pattern grids You may not think of a chequerboard or a line grid as being repeating patterns, but they are. By reducing them to their basic shapes you can simply repeat the patterns to produce chequerboards and grids of any dimensions. You have tried the long, laborious way; here's a shortcut from Colin Wood. Align and Distribute Photoshop's Align and Distribute tools found in the Options bar give you twelve options for aligning or distributing elements on linked layers. A few minutes experimenting with the buttons should translate into speed improvements when laying out your next composition. Daniel Wade elaborates. Combining two scans for a better final image Photoshop is excellent for improving and manipulating images, but you can assist the process by capturing as much correct information as possible at the time of the scan; even if different areas need different settings. Carl Stevens shows how to get the desired result by combining two scans of the same image. Chapter 7: Special F/X. Distorting text The Displace filter is an undervalued tool in the Photoshop toolbox. Michael Ninness shows you how to use it in combination with 'Blend If' in Layer Styles to combine text with textures for a great effect. Creating stone textures Jazz up your page by creating some funky stone textures with the built--in capabilities of Photoshop and the expertise of Ben Willmore. Image restoration A great number of important images have been made over the years on photographic materials that are less than 'archival'. Thanks to Photoshop and its ability to bring back images to their former glory, Brian P. Lawler brings Gran back from obscurion. Using Liquify Photoshop 6.0 introduced a great new feature for creating custom distortions to images called 'Liquify' and it's even better in version 7. Julieanne Kost gives you a tour of this dynamic distortion and warping tool that allows you to push, pull, rotate, enlarge and shrink any area of an image. Ageing metal textures Finding the perfect texture in the 'real world' can be a difficult process, particularly if you're trying to show a 500 year--old postnuclear holocaust, windbeaten, chemical ravaged, heat--affected sheet of metal. Bill Fleming shows you how to combine multiple images to make a 'super texture'. Adding depth of field Sometimes you can make a subject stand out by making it appear in sharp focus against an unfocused background. Rita Amladi shows you how to create the illusion of depth by changing the depth of field of an image with some simple techniques. Restoration and retouching In her book, 'Photoshop Restoration & Retouching', Katrin Eismann explains techniques for saving and improving images. Here she shows us a number of alternative techniques for dustbusting and removing mould from an image. Quick textures from scratch The first port of call for many designers in need of a texture is a stock image library or a third--party plug--in. At Thunder Lizard Production's Photoshop 2001/DC conference, Michael Ninness demonstrated some quick steps to create detailed textures using Photoshop's standard filters. Seeing the big pixel Colin Wood shows you how to combine giant pixels in a layer mask with a high resolution image. The trick lies in creating a coarse pattern of pixels at a low resolution and then increasing the resolution of pixels while retaining the same pattern. Fast and flexible knockouts The knockout feature in Photoshop 6 is powerful and flexible, so flexible that many of the variables are interchangable. This can make your head spin trying to understand it. Colin Wood provides a simple guide to show how it works together with some sample settings that will enable you to get fabulous effects fast. Gradient Map halos The Gradient Map is a great way to create very cool brushes. In fact, any greyscale art that contains a range of greys can be used as the basis for a colourful image. You can even paint with crazy cool brushes and create halos from heaven. Colin Wood shows how. Photoshop Pattern Maker Photoshop 7's Pattern Maker allows you to create random seamless patterns based on any area of an image with a wide range of controls. It's also a useful tool to make your own Pattern presets which can then be used to paint out unwanted elements in an image. Daniel Wade demonstrates. Special effects Sometimes you need a special effect to enhance or to draw attention to an image. Colin Wood provides some quick and effective special effects that will add variety to your layouts.
