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Showing posts from August, 2011

Designing a beautiful website

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Making a mask from a selection

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Making a mask from a selection -         Draw some brushstrokes on an empty layer -         Make a new layer and fill it with lots of color -         Ctrl click the first layers thumbnail and then the vector mask button -         Turn off the first layer to see that the new layer has a vector mask identicial to the shape and opacity of the first layer

Selections

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Selections Some useful things you might not know about selection If you want to select an area the same shape as a layer, hold CTRL and click on the layer thumbnail. The selection tool is not restricted to a binary choice between an area that is selected and an area that is not. You can have semi-transparent selections: -         On an empty layer make a gradient from opaque to transparent. -         Use free transform ( Ctrl+T )     shrink it. Hold Shift when resizing to maintain the proporthion. If you haven’t used   free transform yet, it lets you resize, skew and distort the selected layer.  Click and drag a corner point to resize, Ctrl click and drag a corner point to affect just that corner, Ctrl click and drag on any side to skew the whole layer. Move the cursor near a corner and you get a rotate option. Hold SHIFT when rotating to snap to more useful angles. If you have a recent version of photoshop, you should see a ic

Other presets

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Other presets Presets don’t just apply to the Brush tool. You can use them to remember your settings for every tool. Another preset I I use fairly often is my ‘SmudgyBlurryDabble’ blender You should have noticed by now that the default smudge tool is horrible but it can be turned into a nice blender with some alterations -         Look through your brush files and a fairy round paintbrush stroke, like this one:  -         Select the smudge tool (R or SHIFT + R until you see the finger icon), right click and select the same brush tip -         Click on the brush settings (These numbers are just a rough guide because I don’t know what brush tip you’re using) -         My diameter is about 60pixels. It’s easy to change this from image to using the {} buttons but try to pick the size that will usually fit the image size you usually work with (I rarely work bigger than 2000px in either dimension) -         Set the spacing to about 20% or les

Saving presets

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Saving presets After some experimentation (remember to see how the brush ‘flow’ setting affects your brushstrokes), when you’ve got a bunch of settings you like, you don’t want to have to apply those settings every time you want to use that kind of brush so : -         Click   Window > Tool Presets If there are already presets here, click the arrow at the top right of the tool preset palette and go to   Preset Manager.   Select all the presets and delete them ( this isn’t permanent, it’s just removing them for now so you can create a new uncluttered bunch of presets) -         At the bottom –right of the palette there’s a ‘create new tool preset’ icon. Click it and then give your preset a name There is an option to ‘’ include color”. I recommend you UNtick this. If it’s ticked, then whenever you use that preset it will change your foreground color to the one you had selected when you saved it. You will probably not want to use the same