tool

If today's graphic looks like last week's, it because today builds on last week's theme. But the topic is fresh. Today, I show you how to construct rays of soft, blurry, and entirely fabricated light using none other than vector-based shape layers. In Photoshop. With the help of the Polygon tool and the Masks panel. And the Linear Dodge blend mode.

So much sweetness, so little time. Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

Today's free movie examines a masking technique. And for once, we won't be using the image to select itself. After all, this is a light bulb, with fragile, translucent edges and very little in the way of color or luminance to set it apart from its background. Happily, it's man-made (gender-neutral, could be woman-made, don't give a crap), so its edges are entirely geometric, as if created with a French curve, protractor, and abacus. By candlelight.

In such situations, your ally is the Paths panel. Most folks associate paths with the Pen tool. Which makes sense. You can draw paths with the Pen tool, but let's be honest: Even if you love the Pen, it has a sharp point that will, on a regular and unfailing basis, poke you in the butt. (Meaning that it's not always that fun to use.) The better solution: Trace your object with a few dozen ellipses, circles, and rectangles. After all, whether you're tracing an old-school light bulb or a new-school smart phone, ellipses, circles, and rectangles are what our wonderful world of glamorous gadgets are made from.

Here's the official description from lynda.com (which includes many more colons): Read more » 

In my final Photoshop CS5 Top 5 video, I show you Photoshop CS5’s most ambitious innovation, the new painting tools. You have the bristle brushes, which simulate real-world traditional art brushes, down to the quantity and stiffness of the hairs. And you have the mixer brush, which lets you mix your paint with a base photograph as if the photo were rendered in wet oils.

Today's graphic is rendered using Photoshop CS5's one new blend mode, Divide. And though I don't document Divide in this particular video, I assure you, these next 17 minutes and 36 seconds are going to divide your socks off. Read more » 

You never forget your first voyage into the great seas of graphics navigation. Mine was in 1985. I was using MacPaint, my supposed (but entirely fictional) mastery of which helped me land my first design job. I was panning an image using the scroll bars and a coworker, horrified by my behavior, showed me a trick: Hold down the Option key to get what he called "Muffy." While I found it troubling that he'd invented a pet name for something that looked and worked like a hand---did he have a nickname for his actual hand?---I had to admit, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me that such a tool (otherwise unavailable in the software) so much as existed, let alone might save me so much effort.

In creating Photoshop, Adobe "borrowed" the hand tool. But it assigned a different shortcut: the spacebar. Which just so happens to be the biggest key on the keyboard. It's as if Adobe was saying, this tool needs a shortcut more than all the others. And I couldn't agree more. Read more »