Photoshop Convention Live post.

Mike Lane

The Washington State Convention center has wi-fi like I hoped it would. So I decided that I would do some live posting of the Photoshop Power tour that is being held today up here in Seattle.

I got here a bit early, I didn't know how traffic would be (it kind of sucked) so I didn't want to risk it. The vendors were just setting up when I got here. They were Logitech who was pimping their NuLOOQ device, B&H, who had catalogs and one pamphlet that mirrored their PSMAR specials, the genuine fractals people, Wacom, HP, and some kind of digital effects people (photo frames, backgrounds, brushes, etc plugins for photoshop). EDIT, that company is called Graphic Authority.

I got to use the NuLOOQ for a bit. It was kind of cool actually. You can customize the thing with your most used shortcuts so you don't have to keep going back to the keyboard. I think the thing I liked most about it was the way that it let you move around your image. By twisting the rubber ring you could zoom in and out and by pushing laterally on that same ring you would move around your image on the screen (if you were zoomed in enough for it to move that is).

I signed up in HP's raffle for one of their fancy 21" photo printers. The second prize was a crappy point and shoot. Maybe I'll be selling something in the flea market soon :lol3

Anyway, I think we're getting started. More later.

Mike Lane

Gah! They're pimping Adobe RGB. Bad bad bad for displaying images on the web guys. C'mon!

Mike Lane

Freaking great tip on how to find the middle gray color of an image. Add a new layer on top of your image fill it with 50% gray by using edit>fill (or -f5) and select 50% gray from the Use: dropdown box. Set the blending option to difference. Then add a threshold layer and move the slider all the way to the right. The darkest parts of the image will be middle gray so adjust the threshold until you see a tiny bit of black showing up. Set a point with the color sampler tool and click cancel in the threshold box. Then delete the top layer and open the curves dialog box. Click the middle eyedropper and then click on the point you just saved and voila! A perfect middle gray selection. Cool

Mike Lane

Some interesting tips, but not too much that I haven't seen before in the first hour. I felt like I was reading a Scott Kelby book.

DavidTO

Keep 'em coming! (I'm checking out nulooq)

Mike Lane

I see we're going to jump straight into chapter 15 of Margules' Lab color book with the Image>apply image command. They're doing a quite simplistic version of what Margules uses. Choosing to apply Lab, a, or b to the whole image. He should try applying applying a to a or b to b as Margules did. Oh well. But it is a very quick way to add some pop to an image. In Lab mode do image > apply image and then apply the a or b channel and play around with the overlay method and the opacity. Quick and easy but not too powerful.

Lots of jumping back and forth from Lab to RGB. Margules specifically says to use the convert to profile but the presenter likes to do the image > mode > Lab which is more destructive.

New tip... instead of flatten image use this e ( e). That takes all visible layers and will merge them into a new layer on top. If you have a type layer there are some quirks. If you need to change the type in the merge, you need to delete the merged version, change the type and then re-merge.

Mike Lane

click ( click) on the add layer mask button in the layers palette adds a layer mask filled with black.

Mike Lane

Okay, the crowd had no idea about the lens correction filter so I'll mention it here. Go to filter > distort > lens correction. On the left side of the box, find the straighten tool (the 2nd tool from the top) and drag a line that is parallel to something that should be horizontal or vertical. The image will rotate automatically. Then you can use the scale slider on the bottom right instead of cropping the image to finish it up.

Mike Lane

Something I never thought of. If you've got multiple adjustment layers that each have their own settings and layer masks (or not) you can combine those layers them into a group and add a layer mask to the group itself.

Mike Lane

You can use the gradient map adjustment layer to imitate the look of a digital IR shot. Add a channel mixer adjustment layer that emphasizes the green and de-emphasizes the red and blue and then add the gradient map adjustment layer on top and edit the gradient in the gradient editor. Make a gradient that goes from black to white then to white and then to black. Adjust the blend stops and the diamond blends a bit.

Then experiment with the blending if options to fine tune it.

Nobody's probably following this. I'll try more when I get a chance later on.

Mike Lane

Lunch break. More later.

Dee

I'm reading!

Mike Lane wrote:

Lunch break. More later.

Keep postiing...

Didn't know about that lens correction trick. Will have to try that out.

USAIR

I been reading too Mike
Keep them coming

Thanks
Fred

Mike Lane

cool thanks guys. I'm back. So far my impression of this convention is that overall it's for those who haven't bothered to read up much about photoshop. There were lots of ooohs and aaaahs with very basic curves adjustments and things like that. But that's not to say that I haven't learned anything obviously. I particularly like the trick about finding the mid-gray in an image. That was super handy.

For those who didn't follow that one. If you set the blending option to difference it will subtract the value of each pixel in the bottom layer from the top layer. So if your top layer is middle gray every pixel in the bottom layer that is middle gray will become completely black. So if you are looking for the middle gray in an image (to set the midpoint in curves or levels or whatever) you can use that technique to find it. Color casts be gone!

Of course that doesn't work in camera raw so you're stuck with guessing there

Mike Lane

Fix color casts with match photo. Go to image > adjustment > match color and click "neutralize". Use the edit > fade if it goes a bit too far. Easy.

Mike Lane

Applying a selection and feathering it and filling that feathered selection with a color is exactly the same as creating an object and applying a gaussian blur. The advantage of a gaussian blur is that you can preview it.

Mike Lane

removes all the pallets except for the tools palette in all adobe products. Got a Wacom tablet? Make that a shortcut

Mike Lane

dragging out a marquee selection? If it isn't in the right place while you're dragging it, don't let go of your mouse button but hold down your spacebar and you can reposition it on the fly. Once it's in the right place, let go of the spacebar and it's as if you started your marquee tool in a different place.

Dee

It's the little things

Mike Lane wrote:

dragging out a marquee selection? If it isn't in the right place while you're dragging it, don't let go of your mouse button but hold down your spacebar and you can reposition it on the fly. Once it's in the right place, let go of the spacebar and it's as if you started your marquee tool in a different place.

Like this that make our life easier and bring a smile to our faces!

Mike Lane

We're in the killer tips section. The short version of it is that if you want to create photo effects, get cool with using layer masks and brushes... And get the kelby killer tips books.

As long as you have your top layer selected and you are using the move tool hit + (or -) to switch between blend modes.

If you are using any tool that has a blend mode associated with it (the brush for example) and you hit + (or -) you will change the blend mode.

Mike Lane

click on the new layer button in the layers pallet you get a new layer below the active layer.

Mike Lane

Whoa, you can take the layer styles for a given layer and create a new layer from that! Freaking cool! Let's say you wanted to have a cast shadow, you do a drop shadow using the layer styles dialog. When you get done, click on the down arrow next to the layer styles icon. Then right click on the layer styles and click create layer. That separates the layer style into its own layer. Now just use free transform to make the drop shadow a cast shadow.

Mike Lane

We're in the session learning how to speed up your photoshop work. Topics include actions, batching, droplets, and the image processor. I'll have to read up on all of this but I think the droplette could be amazingly useful.

Mike Lane

Okay, time for smart objects. I really don't understand smart objects so I'm very interested to learn about what I can do with them.

In bridge you can select an image and click on file > place > in photoshop. That is a quick way to make a smart object. Any adjustments you do to this smart object will reference the original so things like resize won't be saved in the new image.

This is awesome for people who are creating custom layouts for things like wedding packages or portraits or something. Once you have your layout down you can easily update the images that get put into that layout by just changing the smart object.

Apparently you can set a camera raw file as a smart object. So if you want to adjust the raw file, you can double click the smart object in the layers palette and it will open ACR.

For those of us creating web pages in photoshop, I can see this being extremely handy. No more destructive resizing or 10000 layers in a document. Plus Illustrator files can be used as smart objects

Mike Lane

If you've done one free transform operation, you can do the same exact transform by doing t.

Speaking of the free transform. If you're trying to make a transformation a specific number of pixels larger it's difficult if you've got the horizontal and vertical scale values set up to be percentages. Here's a tip, right click on the percentages and select pixels for both horizontal and vertical. Man I wish I would have known that a long time ago!

Mike Lane

Well that's it. Well that wasn't much in the way of terribly advanced photoshop techniques but it did shed some light on some new cool things for me. Hopefully you guys got a bit out of this too. If anyone has any questions, ask away.

Stustaff

Wow! want to get home and try those out!

I WISH there was a book very small only a 30 or 40 page job that had all the tips and bits like this in one place!

I have Kelbys CS2 fpr photographers book which is great but a little tips book would be amazingly useful.

Andy

Mike, this was awesome - live, play by play! You've provided some great arcana, that can be really useful.

Thanks for doing this.

flyingdutchie

Mike Lane wrote:

Freaking great tip on how to find the middle gray color of an image. Add a new layer on top of your image fill it with 50% gray by using edit>fill (or <shift>-f5) and select 50% gray from the Use: dropdown box. Set the blending option to difference. Then add a threshold layer and move the slider all the way to the right. The darkest parts of the image will be middle gray so adjust the threshold until you see a tiny bit of black showing up. Set a point with the color sampler tool and click cancel in the threshold box. Then delete the top layer and open the curves dialog box. Click the middle eyedropper and then click on the point you just saved and voila! A perfect middle gray selection. Cool

Kewl <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/clap.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" >
But i have a question about this tip.
Can this also find parts of your images that are not gray but that should be gray? I.e. find a gray item in an image with a strong color-cast (incorrect white-balance)?

Mike Lane

flyingdutchie wrote:

Kewl
But i have a question about this tip.
Can this also find parts of your images that are not gray but that should be gray? I.e. find a gray item in an image with a strong color-cast (incorrect white-balance)?

They demonstrated that tip on a headshot of a woman that had a strong yellow color cast. The before and after was amazing. I know what you're getting at and I don't know why it worked so well. But it did work. I'm not sure what the limits are though.

Mike Lane

Andy wrote:

Mike, this was awesome - live, play by play! You've provided some great arcana, that can be really useful.

Thanks for doing this.

My pleasure!