Creating Toxic Waste Effects

This week we are going to look at creating a text effect using the new scatter brush option. This effect is simple to create and its not limited to text , you could create some great background effects with this technique.

Start with some text on a new layer.

Render the type so we can modify it freely.

Select quickmask mode.

Under brushes, choose one of the presets that use the scattering option.

Pain through the text using the brush.

Press the "Q" key to switch off the quickmask. You will now see a selection.

You will need to inverse the selection. Ctrl/Cmd+Shfit+I

Press the delete/backspace key to cut into the text.

If you want a stronger effect press the del key again. Here I pressed it 3 times.

Add a standard drop shadow in the layer styles and choose a bevel similar to shown. Be sure to change the gloss contour.

Change the color overlay to a bright green color.

And here is our effect!

If you want to go a step further add a 1 pixel stroke using layer styles.

This creates a very interesting effect.

Experiment with this effect and see what you can come up with. Terrain maps for 3D come to mind.

See you at the café www.photoshopcafe.com

June 20th, 2006 | Colin Smith | Text, Tutorials | Comments (8)

Creating A CD in Photoshop

This week we are going to look at how to draw a CD. We will be using the new opacity options on the layer palette. We will also be using the fade fill command. Not too many people even know about this incredibly useful tool.

So without further adieu lets make a CD!Create a new document 5" X 5" at 72 dpi in RGB mode.

Use the guides to define the center of the page.

Choose the elliptical marquee tool and holding down the Shift and alt/option key draw a circle from the center.

Create a new layer.

Choose the rainbow conical gradient tool.

Begin at the center and drag the gradient tool to the outside to create the fill.

Now choose a greenish color and fill right over the top of the gradient.

Press Edit>fade fill

I Selected color mode and lowered the opacity to 73%. Experiment to see what works best for you.

You should have something that looks similar to this.

Now make a smaller selection with the elliptical marquee tool.

Press the delete key to cut a hole in the CD. Don’t deselect.

Create a new layer and Fill with white. Make a smaller circle and delete the center.

Your CD should now resemble the picture here.

Using the layer styles, add a bevel to the small ring.

Lower the fill opacity to 6%.

Notice how the layer style remains and the fill is reduced.

Merge the 2 cd layers together.

Apply a beval and a drop shadow to the layer.

Here is our final CD!

I hope this little tutorial showed you how to use some handy Photoshop tools as well as give you a fun little image to play with.

Until next week… See you at the café www.photoshopcafe.com

June 20th, 2006 | Colin Smith | Effects, Tutorials | Comments (7)

Making Medals in Photoshop

I am going to show you how to create a medal here.. We are going to create a medal for the fictitious "snow bike" category in the fictitious 2001 Olympics, sorry purists :)

Begin with a blank canvas at 72ppi and RGB mode.
Import your art onto a separate layer. I used the font "webdings" here with the letter "b" which happens to be a bicycle.

Using the elliptical marquee tool draw a circle around the bike.

Create a new layer and fill it with the default copper gradient.

Add some type. "2001 Salt Lake City."

Lets wrap the text to the circle.

On the toolbar, click the warp text tool.

Choose arc and adjust the bend to suit. Tip: You can drag the text to a different position while this tool is active.

Here is the result so far.

Lets make the Olympic rings.
Create a new layer and using the elliptical marquee tool make a circle. Hold the shift key to constrain to a perfect circle.

Edit>Stroke
Use a 2 pixel black stroke to create a ring.

Now here is a great tip to duplicate the rings:
Press Ctrl/Cmd+Click the layer thumbnail to load the ring as a selection.
Press the alt/option key and click on the ring and drag a copy. Do this 3 more times to create all 5 Olympic rings.

Position everything and add the word "Olympic" in a suitable font.

Merge the bicycle and "2001 Salt Lake City" text.
Filter>blur>gaussian blur

Run a 1.1 pixel Gaussian blur, this will cause these elements to blend more smoothly with the coin.

The result

Ok prep time over. Lets make this puppy pop!

Start with the bike layer. Double click the layer name to open the layer styles box.
Copy the settings from the bevel box. Don't forget to change the gloss contour.

Choose a color overlay and select orange as the color.

Its beginning to take shape.

Copy the layer style to all the layers.

You can do this by just clicking on the word "Effects" and dragging it to any layer you want and the effect will be duplicated.

Here is our medal with the layer style applied to all layers.

Lastly we will modify the style on the coin surface to produce a realistic result.

Double click the word "effects" to open the dialog box again.

Make these changes to the bevels setting.

Add a default drop shadow.

To get a nice shimmer, apply the satin effect.

Here is our finished medal.

I hope this weeks article inspires you to create all kinds of medals and coins.

See you at the café www.photoshopcafe.com

June 20th, 2006 | Colin Smith | Effects, Tutorials | Comments (5)

Unlocking the Hidden Power of the Crop Tool in Photoshop 7

I was working on a magazine this weekend and after scanning and cropping about 50 pictures I stumbled across something I never noticed before, if I doubled clicked inside an image with the crop tool selected it would apply the crop. So out of that revelation this weeks article was birthed. We all use the crop tool, but do you know its hidden power?

Start with a scanned image, Notice the perspective of the photo? This is very common, when the picture is taken below the object, it gets smaller at the top. This is especially common with pictures of tall buildings.

Choose the crop tool

Notice the option on the option bar? Make sure that the shield is turned on.

Now drag out the tool like you would with the rectangular marquee tool. See how the area outside the box is grayed out? This is the effect the shield gives you, it previews the area to be cropped.

Now check the perspective option in the top toolbar.

Drag the top corners to compensate for the perspective.

Double click anywhere in the cropping area to apply the crop. Notice how the picture has been straightened up.

Another option is the cropped area. You can choose either delete (which discards the image data outside the cropped area.) or you can choose hide. (This changed the image canvas size, but leaves the image data intact so you can reposition it or enlarge the canvas to reveal the entire image if you change your mind)

Note that you have to convert the background to a regular layer for the "hide" option.

Here is a crop set with the shield turned off and set to hide, double click to apply.

Here is the crop applied and the image nudged over to the right. If the image was deleted and not hidden, we would have blank pixels to the left when we tried to nudge it.

Lastly, lets look at a fun trick. This is also really useful for fixing crooked images.

Draw with the crop tool. Position the cursor outside the rectangle and on a corner until is turns into a double-sided curved arrow. Drag the crop area around until it is slanted.

Apply the crop and see how it creates a slanted crop.

Well, that's all we have time for this week. I hope this has helped show you some new things you can do with the "not so" plain old crop tool. One last tip: With the tool presets in PS 7 you can save your crop sizes and use them over again to save time.

Until next week, see you at the café www.photoshopcafe.com

June 20th, 2005 | Colin Smith | Tools, Tutorials | Comments (5)

My First look at Photoshop 7 and “must have” features

I cant believe that its time for a new release of Photoshop already. After playing around with 7 for a couple of weeks, I can say there is a lot about it that I like. First I want to look at some of the smaller production tweaks that will make our everyday lives so much easier. Then we will have a peak at 4 of the biggies.

The first and greatest thing that is obvious about 7 is the fact that it is carbonized for OSX and it looks and feels great. Even though its still in Beta, Photoshop 7 is incredibly stable under OSX and it runs fast too. 7 is also built for Window XP.

I will have to mention here that there was only one thing I didn't like about version 6 and that was, when you had an image larger than the canvas and you hit the free transform tool, the bounding boxes were outside the canvas. This meant that you had to resize your entire document before resizing the image. I am happy to say that in vs 7 this is fixed and the bounding box is now inside the canvas. Kudos to Adobe for listening to the users on this one.

The history palette now has a new button called "create new document from snapshot" just 1 click and any history state will become its own document. What a way to save multiple versions of a document.

The text enhancements keep coming, we can now control the style of a font from the Character palette. Functions include All caps. Small caps, Bold, Italic, Underline, strike through, Subscript and superscript. There is also another level of anti aliasing called sharp for small text.

This one gets my award for biggest minor tweak. Yes, they have finally added an option to delete Hidden layers. No more dragging them all to the trash. This is a big time saver for me, as I am sometimes working with up to 300 layers and I like to do some house cleaning to keep my file sizes down. While we are on the layers palette, there is no option for nested layer sets yet, hopefully they will put them in the final release.

And finally... the spell checker is here. Not only that but its in a huge array of languages and they added a search and replace text.

In Imageready, the rollover palette has been enhanced and now shows all the rollovers for the entire document and not just the selected slice. You can also view the animations here and easily create animated rollovers. Look for my article next week when we dig deeper into the new rollover palette.

Of course you have already heard about the tool presets. There is a little button on the bottom that says, "current tool only" I would suggest using this as it simplifies things and lets you see what you have at a glance and saves you a lot of scrolling.

The brushes palette has undergone a major overhaul. There were a few complaints about the way the Photoshop 6 brushes pallete worked and it looks like Adobe more than made up for it in version 7. I could write an article on this palette alone, but let me say my favorites are the scatter brush and dual brush allowing you to combine 2 brushes together. This palette also has amazing control for your Wacom tablet.

And last but defiantly not least, I would like to mention the new File Browser.

You can now open your files through Photoshop's own built in browser which gives you a visual representation of the images on your disks and it also provides detailed information on each one. This is great for search those stock Photo disks and files imported from your digital camera. No more guessing what those cryptic file names mean.

There you have it. I'm happy to have had the opportunity to share some of my favorite features of Photoshop 7 with you. Is it going to be worth the upgrade? If you are on the Mac definitely! If you are on the PC... oh yes you will want it too. To use a cliché, the best just got better. Unless I see you at Photoshop World this week, see you at the café www.photoshopcafe.com

June 20th, 2005 | Colin Smith | Tools, Tutorials | Comments (1)