invert

As those of you who work regularly in Photoshop know, inverting is a precarious proposition. Consider this: Have you ever drawn a path outline with the pen tool? In the spirit of making things obvious, Photoshop represents the path by inverting the composite image. Where the image is white, the path appears black; where the image is black, the path appears white. And where the image is gray, the path is the inversion of gray, which is---oh, that's right---gray! And because you can't see gray-on-gray, the damn thing goes invisible. And your typical image is gray, or near gray, a lot.

So obviously, Photoshop's design choice where path outlines is concerned is a mistake. But now let's put you in charge of the design choice. And let's imagine that you want to create text that inverts in front of a composite image. And you don't want to make the same mistake Photoshop makes. While working inside Photoshop. What do you do?

You make text that inverts unambiguously. Where the image is white, the text is black; where the image is black, the text is white. And where the image is gray, or near gray, the text provides as much contrast as possible.

That's what this week's technique is all about. And as if that wasn't rambling enough, here's the official description from lynda.com (which Colleen tells me is much less self-inverted and ambiguous): Read more » 

This week's movie says goodbye to the text effects and hello to photography techniques. Specifically, I show you a quick method for smoothing over skin details in a portrait shot. I start by inverting a layer of High Pass to "unsharpen" the image. (Credit Katrin Eismann for suggesting this trick to me in Martini Hour 059, "In Which We Attempt 20 Photoshop Tips in One Martini Hour.") For my tastes, that results in too much smoothing. So I set the High Pass layer inside an anti-edge mask of my own design. Read more »