To achieve a HDR-kinda look you can either play with RAW images, various software, filters or do a similar effect MUCH much easier. See how.
Photoshop quick tip – how to fake HDR
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Tag Archives: photoshop
Photoshop quick tip #2 – clone stamp tool
Sure we now have a content aware fill in photoshop and it works well for removing small elements from a surface, like wrinkles on the skin and such. But it’s still good to use the Clone Stamp tool (S key) to retouch some things by hand. We all know that, but some people recently asked me – why is this a good way if you can’t really undo it after you save the psd ? Well that’s not entirely true and this info is mostly for those people. It’s such a big piece of software that sometimes there are options that are easily overlooked. If you’re retouching a photograph you can create a layer on top of it, and in the Clone Stamp tool’s options change the sampling mode to current layer and below, so the changes will appear only on the new layer. That makes it easier to revert to the original if you ever choose so.
Photoshop quick tip #1 : Autoalign of elements
Many of us might actually miss that because it’s not an option often used in tutorials online and the “snap to objects” function is used quite a lot in photoshop as well. But let’s imagine we have a couple of text fields and we want to align them vertically or horizontally together. Well we can do that with a set of these tools, the icons should be pretty much self-explanatory as it allows you to either align the baselines or centers of objects and it shows which kind of alignment each icon represents. Go and try those out!
Testing Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5
I downloaded the trial version of CS5 today and of course the first thing I wanted to see is how well does it really handle the hyped content aware fill. Below are my results.
Note that sometimes I had to use the content aware fill a couple of times to fix little mistakes previous fills had done. But overall it’s a very powerfull tool. The results are not as perfect as their promotional video but jaw-dropping nonetheless.
Test 1 – removing me and my snowboard from a cellphone picture. So there’s dirt and heavy jpg compression at the start.
The before picture you can see above, the after just below.
New photoshop functions to make designers obsolete?
Designers will loose their jobs?
Or are they? So content aware fill, puppet tweaking and many more things that seem to make very hard and complicated tasks oh so easy. So now anyone can retouch a photo easily or remove a person from a photograph while preserving the background. So is it the end of designers? Will the clients do their work themselves now with all those “easy to use” automatic tools?
No, not really
Do you bake your own bread? Even though it’s not that hard now is it? Do you print your own business cards? Nah, I didn’t think so. The tools are still for us designers to use and abuse (because the abuse is actually the path to using the new tools creatively and not just as automatic gizmos). It is still up to us, maybe until apple starts to attack Adobe even more and buys Pixelmator or something to create a competition ;)
Don’t be evil, right?
New, easier tools will make our lives easier but they won’t make us disappear. So don’t worry fellow designer! You’ll keep your job. Better worry about paying Adobe their share and as usual it ain’t cheap…
Photoshop tutorial – light trails / curved beams
Today I’ll show you how to create those ubiquitous light trails or as I think of them “curved beams of light” that can either go around a character or be just in the front looking like “light painting”. We will create the image above and it will take about 10 minutes to do so because it’s all about the PEN tool in photoshop. If you don’t really know how to use the pen tool then find a tutorial that shows you the basics of the tool before you proceed.
Rotate and duplicate photoshop tutorial
A quick little tutorial for photoshop this time (sorry, doesn’t work in pixelmator yet, but let’s hope they add this function in some time as well).
Here’s what we’re gonna do with just one shape, without manually rotating and positioning them.
Read more to find out how we do it!
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Working hard
I’ve been extremely busy lately, doing a couple of projects at once and I realized a pretty good way (aside from the treadmill I use to “take a break”) is to open up all the projects, however different from each other they might be, and work on each for a couple of minutes, adding touches and changing the overall user-perspective. It really can help you look at your new business layout (no people in suits please!!) in a totally new way.
We reached 10,000 views on our iPad parody recently, and currently we’re working on the next “visual” thing that will be available really, really soon (probably on monday).
There are some new authors around here, so keep the RSS feeds handy, since each one is an expert in his field, and we can all learn a lot from that collaboration.
Textures are designers daily bread
Well in many cases they are. Maybe not if you’re into minimal style graphics with just white background and solids, but for all of us that like to do stuff as bitmap as possible textures sure come in handy.
3d modellers would also love some new additions to their texture library. That’s why I’d like to recommend to you a great website that’s all about free textures. Go check out CG Textures !
Square Extension photoshoot tutorial
Now I will show you roughly how we created those “town painting photos”. This tutorial is for people who basically understand the software (this can be done in either photoshop or pixelmator on mac). We used pixelmator. The most fun part was of course taking the pictures, and imagining (keyword here!) what can we do with them later. I strongly suggest to keep that in mind while on a photoshoot. Some amazing ideas can come at any time. The effect is supposed to be a little “unrealistic” and “neon’y” so here goes, experiment and play with it: