Tip of the Day | Page 32

Get More Realistic Drop Shadows On Press

Here’s a quick tip for getting more realistic drop shadows in print: Add some noise. When you choose Drop Shadow from the Add a Layer Style pop-up menu in the Layers palette, there’s a slider for adding noise to your shadows in the Layer Style dialog. When you add just a small percentage, it makes your shadows appear more realistic when they show up in print.

July 7th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Cloning From Image To Image

If you’re retouching an image using the Clone Stamp tool (S), not only can you clone from the image you’re in but you can also clone from any other image that you have open. All you have to do is make sure both images are open at the same time. Go to the other image, Option-click (PC: Alt-click) on the area you want to clone from, switch back to the image you’re working on, and then start painting. When you do, you’ll be cloning image data from the other image.

July 3rd, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Want Better Gradients On Press? Here’s The Tip

If you’re designing a job that will ultimately go to a printing press in CMYK mode and it’s going to contain one or more gradients, you’ll get better printed results (less color shifts) if you create those gradients after you convert to CMYK mode.

July 1st, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Going To Press? Make Sure Your Monitor Is In The “Right Space”

By default, the RGB space for your monitor is set to sRGB, which is an okay mode for designing Web graphics. However, if you’re producing graphics for print, the sRGB mode is just about the worst RGB space your monitor could possibly be set at. It clips off lots of colors that are actually printable in CMYK mode, and therefore is pretty unsuitable for prepress work. We recommend changing your RGB workspace to an RGB space that’s more appropriate for doing print work. We like Adobe RGB (1998), which is a very popular RGB space for prepress work. You choose this RGB space under the Photoshop menu, under Color Settings (in Windows, Color Settings can be found under the Edit menu). When the Color Settings dialog appears, under the Working Spaces area, choose Adobe RGB (1998) from the RGB pop-up menu.

June 30th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Let Photoshop Do Your Resolution Math

You don’t need a calculator to determine how much resolution you need for printing to a particular line screen—Photoshop will do all the math for you, right inside the Image Size dialog. Here’s how: Open the image you want to print. Go under the Image menu and choose Image Size. When the dialog appears, click on the Auto button (it’s right under the Cancel button). When the Auto Resolution dialog appears, all you have to do is type in the line screen of the device you’re printing to and then choose a quality setting. Continue Reading »

June 26th, 2008 | tmaloney | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Never Swap Colors Again When Cleaning Line Art

When cleaning up line art images with the Pencil tool, you can spend a lot of time going back and forth to the Toolbox to switch your Foreground color to black (to fill in missing pixels) and then to white (to erase pixels that shouldn’t be there in the first place). It does help if you use the keyboard shortcut D to set your Foreground to black, and then X to make white your Foreground color, but there’s actually a faster way. Once you select the Pencil tool, go in the Options Bar and turn on Auto Erase. What the Auto Erase option does is pretty neat—when you click the Pencil in a black area of pixels, it paints white; when you click it on a white pixel, it automatically paints black. It happens automatically—so you never have to switch colors again—saving you a ton of time, travel, and keystrokes.

June 25th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Are Your Colors Press Ready?

If you’re working on an image that will be printed on a printing press and you select a color that’s outside the range of what a CMYK press can reproduce, you’ll get what’s called a Gamut Warning right within Photoshop’s Color Picker. This is just to let you know that the color you’ve chosen is outside the CMYK gamut. Just below the warning is a tiny color swatch showing you what the color you picked will really look like when printed in CMYK mode. To find out where that color resides within the Color Picker, click once directly on that tiny swatch and Photoshop will pick that color for you.

June 24th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Scanners Aren’t Just For Flat Objects

Even though your flatbed scanner is normally used for scanning (you guessed it) flat images, it doesn’t mean you can’t scan images that have more dimension (such as a watch, a ring, a yo-yo, you name it). The only problem is, scanning an image that lifts the lid adds lots of ambient light into your scan, introducing so many outside colors and reflections that it makes the scan all but unusable. The tip for getting around this is deceivingly simple: Just put a black sweater (or black felt cloth) around the object you’re going to scan, and you’ll get great-looking scans, even with the lid open. The black sweater soaks up that ambient light and you’ll be amazed at how natural and balanced your scanned objects will look.

June 23rd, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Straightening Scans In 10 Seconds (Or Less)

If you’ve scanned an image and it’s crooked when you bring it into Photoshop, you can fix it in about 10 seconds flat. Just switch to the Measure tool (it lives behind the Eyedropper tool in the Toolbox) and drag it along the top edge of the image you want to straighten. That’s the hard part (and that should give you an idea of how easy this technique is). Next, go under the Image menu, under Rotate Canvas, and choose Arbitrary. Photoshop automatically enters the amount of rotation (courtesy of your earlier measurement), so all you have to do is click OK and bam!—the image is perfectly straightened.

June 20th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Correct In CMYK Or RGB?

We’ve been asked the question of whether to correct in CMYK or RGB a hundred times. As a general rule, we try to do as much color correction as possible in RGB mode, and if we’re going to use the image on press, we only convert to CMYK at the end of the correction process. The main reason is that CMYK mode throws away data—a lot of data—and why would you want to correct an image with significantly less data than your scanner can capture? We want as much data as possible while correcting images, and when we’re done, then we’ll convert to CMYK (under Image, choose Mode) and toss the data that won’t be used on press.

June 18th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (2)

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Photoshop Tutorials

- Reverse Restoration
  Corey shows you how to make a new photo look damaged by blending in some unusual textures.
- Rain Drops
  In this tutorial, Corey not only creates the raindrops, but also the splashes that are formed with the raindrops hit the hands.
- G.I. Joe
  Corey's tutorial this week was inspired by a real American hero!

More Fun with 3D

Continue exploring the possibilities with Photoshop’s new 3D tools.
Reverse Restoration

Corey shows you how to make a new photo look damaged by blending in some unusual textures.
3D Background Effects

Use Photoshop’s new 3D tools to create some dazzling background effects.
Striking Match, Part 2

In the second part of this tutorial, Corey finishes creating this illustration of a striking match.

Layers TV: Episode 110
New episodes are coming soon. In this old episode, RC goes start to finish through a Flash CS4 project using the new 3D tools and importing an audio file. Corey talks about the distortion features inside of Adobe Illustrator. You can download each episode by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes. var so = new SWFObject('http://media.kelbymediagroup.com/players/player.swf','mpl','500','300','7'); so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true'); // so.addVariable('type','rtmp'); so.addVariable('file','http://media.kelbymediagroup.com/switch/video/layers-tv-episode-110.mp4'); so.addVariable('plugins','hd-1'); so.addVariable('hd.file','http://media.kelbymediagroup.com/switch/video/layers-tv-episode-110-hd.mp4'); so.addVariable('hd.state','false'); so.addVariable('image','http://www.layersmagazine.com/images/layerstv-logo.jpg'); so.addVariable('height','300'); so.addVariable('width','500'); so.addVariable('autostart','false'); so.addVariable("backcolor","0x000000"); so.addVariable("frontcolor","0xF1F1F1"); so.addVariable("lightcolor","0xF88E21"); so.addVariable("quality","100"); so.write('player'); [...]
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac
The new professional-level Quadro FX 4800 with 1.5 GB of memory brings a much-needed performance upgrade to the Mac Pro lineup.
Prezi
Prezi is a Flash-based visualization, storytelling, and presentation tool that allows you to create nonlinear presentations.
Terry White’s New App | Printing from Lightroom 2
Happy Thursday everyone! Just wanted to pop on in and share what’s new in the intranets: Terry White’s New Iphone App Terry white over at his techblog is usually covering all sorts of technology and letting us know what his favorite apps are for the iphone. He’s taken that love and mixed it with [...]

Adding Keywords to Multiple files

In Bridge, you can add keywords to images to make searching for pictures a little less cumbersome. You don’t, however, want the process to become tedious as well. By either Command-clicking (PC: Ctrl-clicking) or Shift-clicking on images, you can select multiple files inside Bridge. Once you have the files selected, you can go to the Keywords panel and turn on any keyword you like. This will apply the keyword to all of the files that you have selected. It takes away a little bit of the pain of categorization, but just a little.