layer mask

Last week, I changed a red car to solid gold and then, in the lynda.com Online Training Library, to jet black. This week, I do something very nearly resembling the opposite. That is to say, I take the "black" (cuz they're really dark gray) stripes on a zebra and render them in color. Which you might not regularly find yourself doing to a zebra. But you may want to do, say, a piece of black-and-white artwork.

Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

As regulars to this weekly podcast know, Photoshop Top 40 is a reverse-order countdown of what I consider to be the best, most essential, can't-live-without-'em features in all of Photoshop. Some are sweet, some are sexy, some are sizzling cool. And then there's this one: the gradient tool.

I mean, every program offers a gradient tool, right? But Photoshop's is special. Not only can you paint a soft transition from black to white, or between any two or more colors for that matter. But you can also soften the transition from one image to another. The gradient tool fades, swipes, tapers, and more. It is, simply put, one of Photoshop's simplest and most powerful masking functions. Read more »