Photoshop

Shaping Up: Five Useful Observations for Understanding Photoshop Shape Layers

Submitted by colleen on 23 May 2013 - 1:50am.

My Secret dekeOderings, of late, I've been trying to unlock the minor mysteries of Photoshop shape layers. Mostly, because if I don't pay strict attention, they don't always work the way I sort of absent-mindedly expect them to. And any passive knowledge I might have once had about using shape layers got disrupted by some recent changes to how they work. 

So, after watching some dekeVideos, reading through some of our One-on-One books, and perusing the internet for advice from trusted friends, I have arrived at the following helpful (to me) observations. 

1) Those once-inscrutable options bar icons for using a shape tool have now been replaced by equally inscrutable words (which you could have found in the tooltips pre-CS6). Either way, there are three options for what happens when you use a shape tool. 
Whether you're used to the pre-CS6 era icons (square with smaller squares, square with pen, square) or the new drop-down menu offerings (Shape, Path, Pixels), the bottom line is that there are three options for whatever's going to happen when you use a shape tool (or draw a shape with the pen tool).

A shape layer is created when you do the first option---that is, use a shape tool (rectangle, ellipse, polygon...) or the pen tool to create, well, a shape. Like, oh, a martini glass. You scoff. You wonder about my sobriety. But in truth, the classic universal martini shape is a great mixture of curves, perpendicular lines, angled lines, and of course, an olive drawn with the ellipse tool. 

I've decided, arbitrarily, and without the benefit of real martinis (it's too early) or Deke (off camping at Sasquatch with his man-friends) that for me, it's easiest to think about a shape in Photoshopland as being a combination of a vector (a mathematical expression of a line or curve) and the pixels that decorate that line in the form of strokes and fills.

The other two options you can create with a shape tool are paths (which is just the vector with no decoration, thus they live only in the Paths panel) or pixels (which are just the decoration, plopped down one time, then abandoned by the line that gave the initial instruction).

Read on for more of my sober, if whimsical and ingenue-esque, observations. (If you're not a member of dekeOnline, you can become one here for free then continue reading.)  Read more » 

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Deke's Techniques 225: Animating Bird Wings with Puppet Warp in Photoshop

Submitted by colleen on 21 May 2013 - 1:30am.

In this week's free Deke's Techniques episode, Deke begins the process of using the Puppet Warp feature in Photoshop to animate the wings (and comic balloon speech, of course) of this fierce bird of prey.

The Puppet Warp feature in Photoshop allows you to bend and twist parts of your image whilst leaving other parts in place. By applying incremental warps to the wings on multiple copies of this bird, he sets up the flapping wing animation (and bird squawking) that he'll put in motion in next week's episode. 

Meanwhile, I have three key takeaways from this week's movie: Read more » 

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Photoshop Creative Cloud Made Slightly Clearer

Submitted by colleen on 6 May 2013 - 10:59pm.

The key topic of discussion at tonight's LA Web Professionals Group meeting, where Deke was presenting some live Deke's Techniques, was Adobe's announcement about the Creative Cloud. The upshot: Rather than release Creative Suite 7, all updates to Photoshop and its creative cousins will now come via a Creative Cloud subscription. In other words, if you want the new features in the latest version of Photoshop, you're going to get them delivered via the cloud. 

This is necessarily causing some confusion and questions for Creative Suite users. I've got two useful sources for information on "Photoshop CC." If your questions are primarily about obtaining, installing, and using Creative Cloud, check out this FAQ from Photoshop's Chief Customer Advocate (and friend of dekeOnline) Jeff Tranberry. If you want to know why you might care to obtain, install, and use Photoshop CC, then check out Deke's new Preview of Photoshop Creative Cloud's new features at lynda.com. If you're not a member of lynda.com, you can get a free week's trial to check it out at lynda.com/deke.  Read more » 

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Deke's Techniques 212: Creating Synthetic Water Droplets in Photoshop

Submitted by colleen on 9 April 2013 - 1:53am.

Long time dekeItarians know how much I love a good Deke's Techniques that manages to create something (in this case water droplets---mini puddles, really) out of nothing (in this case, a Photoshop layer style applied to a randomly generated pattern.) Here's the effect that Deke created in this week's episode, against a wood background: 

Fabricated water drops on wood in Photoshop

But Deke claims that you can create these mini-puddles against any background. And so I set out to prove that was true using a tile image from Fotolia.com artist Magann instead of Deke's wooden one. Here are the steps, so you can prove it yourself against your own background:  Read more » 

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The Strange Powers of Photoshop's Sketch Filters, plus How to Digitally Immerse Your Nemesis in Carbonite

Submitted by colleen on 5 April 2013 - 5:51pm.

I'd imagine a Photoshop novice's first experience with Photoshop's Filter Gallery brings a certain mild delight. A few clicks, a limited number of options, and voila, a completely transformed image. But fairly quickly, you discover that the effects can be cliché, common, and clunkily applied. Plus, those limited number of options mean that every other person using the filter has access to the same exact variations. 

But you can use filters effectively and expressively by deftly combining them and using blend modes to increase the variability, subtlety, and nuance of your effect. Today's discussion of the Sketch filters in Photoshop's Filter Gallery was inspired by Chapter 35 of Deke's new course, the fourth installation of his Photoshop CS6 One-on-One series, the Mastery course. Here are some things to keep in mind about these filters that will enable you to use them with personality and panache, rather than predictability. 

The Sketch filters live inside the Filter Gallery, and they're special-case filters in that they recolor an image based on the current foreground and background colors. (OK, there are two exceptions, but this is Photoshop, so that's not surprising.) So, with my foreground and background set to the default (black and white, respectively), and my image converted to a smart object (for nondestructive filter application), here are the effects of three Sketch-category filters applied to the same portrait: 

Quick tip: You can change your image to a smart object quickly by right-clicking on it in the Layers panel and choosing Convert to Smart Object. 

Of course, the beauty of using a smart filter (i.e. a filter effect applied to a smart object) is that you can revisit and edit the effect at any time. However, if you want to change the colors that your Sketch-category filter is using (which is part of the fun of these filters in the first place), you'll have to create a new instance. Sketch filters applied as smart filters "remember" the colors you originally used: Read more » 

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