Designing a beautiful website

ĤĂŔĨŚĤ (@harishreddyv4) has
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Making a mask from a selection

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

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 icon in the toolbar. This lets you distort the layer using a mesh warp.

-        Ctrl click on the layer thumbnail. – it seems that the selection is just a rectangle but actually the full gradient is selected. The selection dotted line only shows you pixels that are more than 50% opaque. The less transparent pixels are selected, you just can’t see that yet.

-        Turn off the layer and make a new empty layer

-        Pick a new color and use Alt+Backspace to fill the selection with foreground color (use Ctrl+Backspace to fill with background color) - press Ctrl+D to deselect and notice that the opacity is identical to that of the original Layer.

Other presets

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 less.

-        In ‘Shape Dynamics’ set the angle jitter to 100%

-        In ‘Scattering’ set the scatter to about 250% on both axes and set the ‘count’ to about 3

-        In ‘Other Dynamics’ set the Strength to ‘Pen Control’

This image shows the effect that this preset has on three blocks of color. The’ Before‘  image shows the size of the smudge brush used.

A Preset like this can be hard for some computers to manage in real-time so reduce your ‘Scattering’ amount and ‘count’ settings until it runs smoothly.

Save the smudge presets the same way you saved the brush presets.

Saving presets

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 color every time you use that preset.

-        Click OK. The preset appears in the palette. Click the blue arrow menu button and click ‘save tool presets’.

Now photoshop will remember all the settings  you had selected for  that brush and it has created a file on your hard drive that you can bring from one computer to another to continue using your own presets on different machines.

The presets are not referencing  the original brush tips you’ve used so if you transfer the presets 

To another computer you don’t need to also transfer the brush set 

Here are some examples of my presets. You’ll probably be able to guess how they were made. If any of them are confusing, ask and I’ll explain.