Learn Photoshop Now - Beginner Photoshop Tricks

Selecting Colors from an Image Quickly To turn any color into the foreground color Press I to activate the Eyedropper Tool and then click on any color in your image. To turn that color into the background color, press the ALT Key and click on any color in your image.

Change Brush Tip Sizes Quickly With a brush selected, simply Press the Right Bracket Key “]” to increase the size of your brush tip, or Press the Left Bracket Key “[” to decrease the size of your brush tip.

The Move Tool & the Arrow Keys Getting in the habit of activating the Move Tool through the keyboard is a timesaver; you can do this using the shortcut, “V”. Once you have the Move Tool activated you can use the keyboard arrow keys to push a layer or selection in 1 pixel increments. You can speed things up by pressing the Shift key along with the arrow key to nudge in 10 pixel increments.

Hide Your Palettes Press Tab once to hide all your palettes. Press Tab again to bring them back. Press Shift Tab to hide all your palettes except the toolbar.

Zooming In & Zooming Out You can zoom in on your image by pressing CTRL and the plus sign ” ” (Mac: Command and the ” ” sign). Conversely you can zoom out by pressing CTRL and the minus sign “-” (Mac: Command and the “-“sign).

Navigating In Magnified Images If you have lost your bearings when zooming in on a large image you can jump quickly to specific views using the following shortcuts: To set the view to the top left hand corner of your image press the Home Key. Press the End Key to set the view to the bottom right hand corner of your image. To move the view one full screen down press the Page Down Key. Press CTRL Page Down (Mac: Command Page Down) to move the screen view one full screen to the right. Press CTRL Page Up (Mac: Command Page Up) to move the screen view one full screen to the left.

Selecting Just The Pixels On A Layer An easy way to select an object that is on a transparent layer is to Press the Command Key (PC: Control key) and click on the layer with the object in the Layers Palette. This makes sure that only the opaque pixels (the pixels that are visible) will be selected with the marching ants, instead of the entire layer.

Tile Images for Better Visibility When you simultaneously open a bunch of files in  Photoshop  they automatically cascade, and it can be difficult to select individual windows within all the overlapping files. To eliminate this problem choose Window> Arrange> Tile and all of your open files will rearrange themselves to be visible all at once. When you’re ready to close the windows you don’t have to spend time closing them individually, instead use the Close All shortcut Control Option W (Mac: Command Alt W).

Getting Rid Of the Welcome Screen – And Bringing It Back When you first open  Photoshop  CS you will probably see a Welcome Screen that has links to Tutorials, Tips and Tricks, and a set of Color Management Help Files. At some point you might want to stop this screen from coming up. You should see a check box at the bottom of the screen that you can click to hide the screen at startup. Later on, if you change your mind and decide that you want to have it show up again, you can temporarily bring the screen back by clicking under the Help menu and choosing Welcome Screen.

Cycle Through All Of Your Open Documents Sometimes you’ll want to find one of your open documents that is hidden, but navigating using the Window menu won’t help because you can’t recall the name of the file. Instead press Control-Tab repeatedly (MAC and PC) to cycle through all of your open documents.

Five Things You Can Do With Photoshop

1. Add and organise layers.

One of the most powerful features in Photoshop is its ability to work with layers. Layers allows the user to place different shapes, images and text in different locations and depth within the master document that you are working on. One example is having a rounded rectangle shape with a different colored stroke on the outside that acts as a right or left content region of a Web 2.0 theme. You can add another layer on top and use an image for that layer with rounded corners. Text may be placed on top of that layer, and effects such as a drop shadow and outside glow may be added.

There really is no limit to the amount of layers one can use and Photoshop provides the ability to add folders in the Layer Window to organize your layers inside of. Moving layers within this window is a breeze.

2. Save in various formats including optimizing your design for your website.

A really neat feature that Photoshop has is the ability to automate image files into a high resolution PDF file. This is fantastic for high quality printing requirements. For the website designer, Photoshop can optimize images into JPG and GIF files that are common for viewing on the Internet. The settings can be adjusted for fast viewing online while maintaining good image appearance and quality.

3. Create vector shapes.

Photoshop comes with several preloaded vector shapes. They are quite easy to select and can be enlarged and scaled based on your needs through the transform tool. There are a variety of shapes that can be found online for both free download and for purchase.

4. Slice your design for use in your website.

The slicing tool provides the means to break the design into several areas that can be exported into Dreamweaver which is a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Other online tools are available to transform the layers of your design into a functioning theme for common Content Management Systems. These tools vary, but generally a knowledge of style sheets and CSS is required for optimum use.

5. Create animations.

Photoshop allows you to take several layers and create animations with them, such as mouseovers for text in websites or animated GIF files. Certainly not a substitution for Adobe Flash, animated GIFs, when used in proper context, can be useful, such as creating an animated advertising banner on your website.

Photoshop has come a long way in its development cycles, but certainly is a required tool for those who can master its potential.

Why You Should Learn Photoshop

Photoshop is one of the most popular and versatile image editing software available today. While professional designers and editors swear by it, it can be extremely helpful for other people as well. Most digital software emulate the features of Photoshop, which makes it easier for you to work with multiple software.

There are many reasons why you should learn Photoshop and how it can help you. Let’s explore some of them in this article:

1.) Photoshop can be used to restore old images in a way that they become as perfect as new. Remember those old family portraits that are now crumbled and worn out but still quite special. All you need to do is scan the photo and open it in Photoshop. Now using various tools such as healing brush, clone stamps, patch corrections tools etc, you can transform the old photograph into a brand new picture.

2.) One of the basic things taught in Photoshop for beginners courses is Textual Effects. Through the Type Mask Tools, Color Palettes and other techniques, you can add a variety of effects to your text – both online and in Print. Also by using the ‘Move’ tool, you can add text to your photographs. This is a great way to create personalized T-shirts with funny slogans & pictures. Through simple steps, you can add a whole world of effects to the otherwise dry and plain Text.

3.) Another popular Photoshop trick is to combine graphics with text – a simple and easy way to create covers for CD’s and books. You can also use it to add graphics to videos, through specialized editing software. Once you have developed some level of ability with this software, you can manipulate images in many ways.

4.) Photoshop is the perfect software for covering up photography mistakes such as poor lighting, a blotch or a mark on the picture, overexposure, red-eye and so on. There are many options such as the crop tool, eye dropper tool, paintbrush etc that can correct most mistakes and make your photograph seem like a masterpiece.

5.) Through special features such as the artistic brushstrokes, Photoshop allows you to instantly turn ordinary pictures into a work of art. Once you are satisfied with the final results, get it printed on quality paper and hang it on your wall, for the world to see. This is a great way to decorate your house in a cost-effective manner.

Photoshop can open up a world of options for you – from turning your pictures into masterpieces, to editing images of all kinds, there is a lot that can be achieved with this editing software. You do not need to be a technology expert or computer whiz to work with this digital software, as anyone with even some basic understanding of computers can learn Photoshop and create wonders.

Photo Restoration With Photoshop Elements

This is a review of Photoshop Elements for anyone interested in dabbling with digital photo restoration, photo repairs or photo enhancement while not spending a fortune on full-blown professional digital editing software. When I was first introduced to Elements while doing a photography course it blew my mind to see what you could do with it and that was Photoshop Elements 2 and was a few years ago. There is now a Photoshop Elements 9. Quite honestly, once you buy the software, from version 5 and beyond, I wouldn’t recommend buying every new version unless you are a serious, must have the latest software geek or are going to do a lot of digital editing. That said though, each version does have extra little bits which tempt you into upgrading, the prices generally come down when its been on the market for a while so try not to buy straight away unless of course you want to and can afford it. Bear in mind that for the later versions of the software you will need windows vista or windows 7 and a decent processor.

There are lots and lots of things you can do in Elements so I will go through a few here. Firstly you can organise thousands of photos in the organiser, add keyword tags to them so that you can find them easily or find them by time and date, the organiser is excellent once you get the hang of using it.

Second, you can of course resize and crop images but lots of digital editing software packages can do that. Many people like the fact that photo restoration and photo repairs can be undertaken once you get the hang of the basic principles, badly damaged photos are very time consuming to repair though and so if you need a professional please visit my website. Photograph enhancement options are numerous, from quick fixes to digital face lifts, slimming people, colour correction, removing unwanted objects, people, portraiture, sharpening. It’s all there once you learn how to use the tools. If you want to be a bit more adventurous you can be creative with Elements and present your work in a professional way, you can add signatures and watermarks. You can turn photos into works of art like watercolours and lots more.

That is Photoshop Elements in a nutshell and I used this software when I was learning digital editing so if you want to give it a go I would highly recommend it. I would also attending workshops or a short course on digital editing through your local colleges or at night school because this will help to give you a grounding in the basics and familiarise yourself with the various tools in the toolbox. If you don’t like the idea of that buy a good book. One of the authors I have read in the past is Scott Kelby. He teaches in a fun and informative way and there are lots of step by step guides in his books. I am in the process of writing a book and also do produce eguides if you are interested. I have also published some free teaching videos on YouTube and on my blog so feel free to take a look at them. The main thing to remember is to have fun with digital editing and be creative with it.

Creating Business Cards in Adobe Photoshop

Creating business cards in Adobe  Photoshop  is easy. This guide will walk you through the steps to do so.

First, after starting up the  Photoshop  software you can start a new document. To do this, click file on the upper left corner of the program and choose ‘New’ from the drop down menu.

This should bring you to the panel for the specifications of your new document. Business cards are usually 3.5 inches in width and 2 inches in height so you might want to go with that. Just type in 3 in the width box and choose inches on the drop down menu next to it. Do the same for the height except you should type in 2 and then make it in inches as well by choosing inches on the drop down menu next to it.

As for resolution, choose 300 DPI so you will end up with a nice, clear document once everything is done.

Having rulers while working on your business card document is recommended. You can use the rulers by clicking on ‘view’ and ‘show rulers.’ Rulers are really handy in making guide lines to make sure the elements in your business card is centered.

After you have set your document to show the rulers, you can set them to a non-printable line or ‘guides’ on your document. You can create guide lines by clicking on the rulers and dragging them to where you want them on your document.

You will need to these guides work because you will need to do so for the next step in creating your business card. In this case, we use guides as bleed lines, which are the safe, printable areas on your business card layout that you will place your design elements within.

There are other types of ‘lines’ that you should be aware of.

The cut lines serve the purpose of showing where your design will be cut away from the much larger sheet of paper it was printed on. Making cut lines ensures color all the way to the very edge of your cards and that once it is cut, there will be no white spaces on the edge of the card.

The safety lines on the other hand are what the innermost lines are called. Anything outside these lines run the risk of being cut off. Cutting machines may not be very accurate so, staying inside of this area ensures that important text and/or graphics will not be cut away. It also helps your card be more readable during the design process. You will want to keep all of your non-background text, logos, pictures, and other design elements inside of these lines.

To create these guides, you should first create the cut lines. Drag two lines from the top ruler and drag one of them to form a small margin on the top and a margin the same measurement on the bottom. After, drag two lines from the rulers on the left side and drag them to form a small margin the same size as the ones on the top and bottom. You should end up with a kind of frame.

To make the safety lines, repeat the same process and create the frame inside the cut lines.

If you don’t want to go through with making the lines though there are downloadable free templates on the internet. Just download those and then open them in  Photoshop .

After making these lines or downloading a template, you should be all set to layout your graphics and font on your business card.

Once you place all of design elements on the business card template, you should flatten the image. This can be done by right-clicking on ‘Layers,’ and selecting ‘flatten image’ from the drop down menu.

Next, open an 8×11 new document and then paste the images on the entire page. You can paste up to 8 images on the document. Make sure they have enough margins or space between the images.

After it’s printed, you can cut them manually or if you printed the business cards through a printer, they should be able to cut the business cards for you.

Achieving Education With Photoshop Tutorials

In case a given software program is brand-new to you, eventually you lack enough concept of the software’s applications and also applicability. To get over this situation, the best way to start with a piece of software program is to try first a tutorial. It is a comprehensive and step-by-step guidelines which helps you apprehend how to use it in executing several sort of duties. Tutorials hold a slow but certain way of learning but are shown to be extremely helpful in treating an interest that could be not known or possibly new at all to the user.

Some corporations proudly hosts a variety of tutorials which you can use to further improve your current knowledge as well as talents on many of these matters like page posting, designing, formats, features and applications and others. In case you are in to graphic designing and making use of many Photoshop software packages, having a handful of Photoshop Tutorial will obviously lend you a hand. It will help you to have practical knowledge in several things particularly the basics. When you know the basic, the rest will follow. It is of great importance since it will form a foundation education about all operations and all the features accessible in the Photoshop. Self-exploration regarding different advanced tools and strategies will be faster and easier and much less bothersome if you know by now how things operate.

Resulting from technological developments in communications and also publication, people nowadays are becoming ever much more linked. On account of Internet as a enormous collection of information and connection throughout the world, it has provided us to be able to gain knowledge in a quicker pace. Which means that if you would like to know Photoshop but do not have plenty of time to visit to a training program, then the online Photoshop Tutorial is definitely the best for you. There are numerous Photoshop Tutorial that are available online which are posted by a variety of graphic designers and Photoshop masters. Certainly the good thing regarding these tutorials is it is free to obtain and incredibly helpful. Therefore everyone has been given the ability learning on their personal time. Another methods of obtaining Photoshop Tutorial are still applied for example Shopping for Training DVDs and Unique Demonstrations but are less effective since it is time consuming and cited to be too costly.

The Photoshop Software is an excessively well taught software, which has a simple user interface. Nonetheless, as a consequence of unsubstantial experience it is typically mislead to being complicated. That is why newcomers can greatly reap the benefits of Photoshop training and tutorials. On the internet or not, some of these resources will surely make you a graphic designer amazingly rapidly!

Building Green Solutions

Why are building green solutions so important and why is it such a special opportunity for us. Yes, I said us.

Amazing things have happened on planet earth in the past couple hundred years, especially for industrialized society. There are great challenges for the many people of the third world but for most of us,

We live and work in air conditioned spaces, use transportation that turns hours into minutes, enjoy comforts, food choices, merchandize and services that were previously available only to the very wealthy.

We are at an interesting crossroads at this time however. We have exhausted some of the resources that make this life possible. Most of our current energy resources have side effects that are dangerous for coming generations. Some of the boundless opportunity that appeared in our nation’s youth has been replaced with difficult choices and job insecurity. We are ushering in a generation that for the first time will probably see a decrease in their standard of living.

What does building green solutions have to do with all these ostensibly, unrelated issues? In the pitch of the Great Depression one attempt to feed the economy was provided with a jobs program, road works that provided jobs in the short run. Government ‘created’ jobs to stimulate the economy and some believe this had a measure of success. This was job creation at it’s most direct level, not exactly supply and demand.

There is a consensus that ‘stimulating’ the economy in the form of lower interest rates and greater government spending is a proven way to revive a struggling economy. This too has really nothing to do with the fundamentals of capitalism, supply and demand.

Now we have a call on multiple fronts to find solutions, solutions that speak to many issues, find energy solutions that are economical yet do not create hazardous waste, solutions that are affordable and accessible to most of the population.

Building green solutions addresses all these issues while also creating new technology, new expertise, a whole new area of employment that simply did not exist before. It is exactly, supply and demand. Our greatest sense of creativity, our greatest sense of invention does indeed respond to need and respond to special circumstances requiring special solutions.

It is not a government program design to ‘create’ work but rather a response to a need whose specialty will create jobs in research, production, and implementation. The United States is challenged to compete in factory production with third world countries. Our high standard of living has also made it difficult to compete in large production and agriculture with countries whose labor cost is a mere fraction. Yet we still lead in technology and the technology of living green is in high demand all over the world.

What else is special about ‘green technology’ and green solutions?

Everybody wins. Resources that are kinder to our environment reduce the impact of our lifestyle and begin to reverse global warming. Countries such as China with fast growing economies and faster growing populations now more than ever need solutions to provide their people energy consuming amenities without destroying their environment.

What else will building green solutions provide? This could be the fun part. We don’t know.

We have witnessed a digital revolution in the past decade, an information revolution that has changed life all over the world. It brought with it new energy, new research, new products, new possibilities, and new jobs. Who would have thought they would be sending a picture from the Zoo as they are talking to their friend across the country? Who would have thought they would be carrying more data on their key chain than all the banks in New York in our last century?

We have every reason to believe this same innovation and same new invention will accompany our ‘green revolution’. New ideas are rarely stale and very rarely solutions unto themselves. Rather they open up new pathways, new ways of thinking, new solution that open even more possibility.

Should our government subsidize this research, subsidize this possibility for self-reliance and true economic growth? Of course it should but the green revolution is here and with or without the assistance from our government, energy solutions for the planet will define the 21st Century.

T Boone Pickens has cited ‘the greatest transfer of wealth’ in mankind. It is difficult to imagine the relief for our deficit and the savings we would appreciate if our cars did not require fossil fuel. This same shift away from global warming and pollution makes you wonder why this hasn’t already happened.

It would be wonderful if the United States became a leader in renewable energy, creating new industry, new income, and great employment opportunity. It would be wonderful to see our economic recovery reach America beyond the first few blocks of Wall Street.

This is an industry that will touch every other whether it is better insulated housing or more fuel efficient automobiles. We have reevaluated our lifestyle and the assumptions and extra costs of fifty years of ‘suburbia’. More energy efficient lifestyle villages are common now, offering most of what any family needs within blocks instead of miles. This in turn will significantly reduce driving time, fuel consumption and the pollution it creates.

As we begin to implement greener living, the common cause for all nations will begin to surface. Green solutions belong to lifestyle not geography and can be implemented and enjoyed anywhere. This ‘common cause’ can easily foster cooperation versus conflict which will reduce the enormous expenditure on defense and security systems.

Think globally, act locally.

Would you like to participate? There are literally hundreds of resources and links to how you can learn more, access more, and do more from your home, in your lifestyle decisions. From issues as diverse as green roofs to space heaters, solar lamps to rainwater harvesting, you may be surprised just how easy it can be to make your contribution.

One of our favorite resources on how individuals can learn and do more is the ‘Green Guide’ provide by the National Geographic, www.thegreenguide.com.

Bon Appetit.