Photoshop

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 » 

If you scroll to the bottom of the home page and click on the last » button, you'll be taken to the first test articles I created for this site, "Creating a Photo-Realistic Line Drawing, Part 1," and the same, "Part 2."

Frankly, I love those techniques so much that A) I wrote them up as an exercise in my book Photoshop CS5 One-on-One and B) I have long felt a persistent desire to document them in video. Which is precisely what I do today.

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