Here’s an interesting weight loss tutorial in Photoshop. This is an older video, but it demonstrates the effects very well.
Use Photoshop to virtually put someone on a diet in Photoshop! Music: Kevin MacLeod
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Photoshop Effects For Posters
Content provided by webdesign14.com, edited for clarity
If you’re not used to poster making within Photoshop to shade your paper prints, then this list of effects will definitely be of help. These are by far the most favorite Adobe Photoshop effects that poster creative designers choose to use. They’re all the essential tools along with features to help anybody produce attractive looking posters with Photoshop. So keep reading and also make a note of all these effects.
1. Posterize! Naturally, the fundamental effect that you can use within Photoshop to help make the coloration posters really seem like paper prints may be the effect called “Posterize”.
As the label indicates, this effect in essence provides what will be a little more grainy outcome present with a number of the far more aged poster designs. You can find this effect in the Image->Adjustments selection. You can of course modify the intensity of the effect by changing the slider once you activate this effect.
2. Opacity effects. Yet another excellent result that is definitely for coloration poster patterns is opacity effects. The particular opacity is simply how opaque as well as clear the layer is. Sometimes, excellent poster design and style effects can be done any time one particular level is a bit more obvious above or below another layer.
3. Photo filters. Beneath image adjusting solutions, you might also have an interest to utilize a particular photo filter adjustment for the coloration cards. This adjustment helps you to include a number of coloration masks to your design. If you like “Sepia” effects that will replicate old photographs, then you might want to use photo filters for your personal custom made posters.
Photo filters also allow you to apply warming as well as cooling filters or even just personalized shades to achieve the same impact just with distinct tints. There are a number of applications or plugins to create these types of effects, and maybe they are just the thing for ensuring background scenes or even just acquiring particular effect. For more information on photo filters, Google “photo filters”.
4. Artistic filters. Now, if you want your poster to be more imaginative, you can utilize the creative filter systems with Adobe Photoshop. You get to these beneath Filters-> Artistic option. Using this pool of filters you can add wonderful creative effects just like Tinted Pad, Film Feed, and a lot of different filter effects that make your paper prints resemble a far more modern day thing of beauty. Naturally, you can certainly alter just how powerful the filters are by adjusting the various sliders.
5. Stylize filter. A different sort of filter found beneath the filter selections are classified as the stylize filters. This doesn’t seriously add imaginative addendums to your custom made poster design, but it surely manipulates the style by itself to provide a specific form of exciting influence. Some of the prevalent stylize filters have the stuck shape benefits, wind turbine side effects along with polarize effects.
6. Drawing filter. If you need your color posters to look more like paintings or drawings, then the drawing filter is a filter collection that you want to understand more about. You could basically alter your posters right into a charcoal print, a new visual painting, or the photocopy variety print out along with many other effects. This can be ideal for making certain impressionistic elements mimic what we are looking at attractive to anyone.
7. Texture and consistency filters. Last but not least, when you need your coloration styles for your posters to look just like these were branded with some type of substance, then your texture and consistency filters tend to be what you would enjoy. These filters convey a specified method of “material” for the entire layer to your design. You may make this look like it was published around canvas, throughout gemstone, with components and lots of other types involving textures. Many people also acquire further smoothness to make really specific looks. This is a plus in order to imitate diverse products inside your color poster pattern.
With almost all these seven useful side effects, your current color paper prints need to be really well beautifully made with quite eye catching images. Naturally, use all these effects together with taste, do not overdo these filters. You will want to be able to make use of them adequately and at the proper application for a variety of styles.
Read more on Cool Photoshop Effects
Creating the Illusion of Shallow Depth of Field
In this, my first video, I show you how to change the depth of field of an image to reduce background distractions. The video is a little rough since it is my first. I would be very interested in hearing your feedback on this. Thanks for taking the time to watch it.
A couple of things I forgot to mention in the video. When using the brush tool to get up close to the edges as you are creating the mask, use a medium soft brush, the blending is better and looks more realistic. Getting the edges to look right takes some practice. Also, when using the clone stamp tool to remove the haloing around the subjects, as long as you are painting on the image (not the mask), you don’t need to worry about cloning over the edges of the subjects. The mask is taking care of this.
Hometown Project – Week 2
Historic Colorado & Southern Railroad Train Depot
The Colorado & Southern Railroad Train Depot was built in 1902 and together with the adjacent 4th street became the center of business in Loveland for many years. The depot today looks very much the same as it did when it was built, and is one of the oldest buildings in Loveland. There are other buildings in the area that are much older, but it was the train depot that brought businesses into the area and put Loveland on the map. In the 1970′s the downtown area of Loveland died when the shopping malls came into the area, and was pretty much neglected until 1997 when efforts to revitalize the downtown area began. Much of the downtown area buildings have been restored to their original state and the downtown area is alive and well today.
Today, the depot is not used as it was originally designed. It is now the home for a sports bar & grill on one end, and other businesses on the other end. The trains still come through Loveland, but they don’t stop for passengers anymore.
Taking The Shots
Taking the shots for this week required visiting the location twice – once in the morning, and again in the evening. The morning shots were pretty easy to take. Since there was plenty of light and I knew the shutter speed wouldn’t drop below where I could hand-hold the camera, so I didn’t bother with the tripod. The other advantage was businesses had not opened yet, so traffic was a non-issue. This was not so with the evening shots.
I used my 28-75mm f/2.8 lens and set it to about 50mm. There were some deep shadow areas and some pretty bright areas in the scene, so I set the camera for auto bracketing to 7 exposures (-3ev, -2ev, -1ev, 0ev, 1ev, 2ev, 3ev) figuring this would allow me to capture the full dynamic range of the scene. I used manual mode at f/11.0.
For the evening shots, I set the camera up the same way. Not that I needed to bracket my shots, but I wanted to see what kind of HDR I could get with a night shot. The biggest problem I ran into was vehicles driving through my shot, and people walking through my shot. Because it was night, I had to use slower shutter speeds and the tripod. Having set up on the street corner, this attracted attention and I found myself trying to explain what it was I was doing, who I was doing it for, and for what purpose. People can be so inquizitive sometimes. Anyway, I didn’t mind as I was waiting for the light.
Post Processing
Post processing started in Lightroom. I use Lightroom to catalog and organize my images. I will also use Lightroom to do post processing on images that are not HDR. Since these images were shot with HDR in mind, once I had all the images in Lightroom I would select a set (series of bracketed images) and export them to Photomatix to generate the HDR image. The new version of Photomatix is great, it has a preset for a natural look and this is where I start for my images. My goal is to achieve a natural looking image that is as close to what the eye sees as possible. Once I selected the natural preset I found that bumping up the strength gave a little better look. While in Photomatix tone-mapping, I will usually only adjust the strength and light smoothing sliders. This is because when it comes to color and contrast, photoshop does it better. I save the tone mapped image and then open it up in photoshop as a smart object. I use the smart object just in case I need to make adjustments that are best done in camera raw. Once I’m done with any camera raw adjustments, I apply a levels and curves adjustment to make it look like I remember, and will fine tune the image with some dodging and burning as needed. Then it’s back to Lightroom where the image receives some final tweaks and sharpening.
That’s it! I hope you are enjoying following along. If you have any thoughts or suggestions I would love to hear them, just add a comment. Thanks – I’ll see you next week with another installment of my Hometown Project!
Hometown Project – Week 1
By now, many of you may have already seen the image for week one. I posted it on Flickr yesterday.
The image for week 1 is “Liberty Statue at Lake Loveland”…
I chose this image for several reasons – 1, it was and is a symbol of America and represents freedom, 2, it is also symbolic of Loveland (more on this later), and 3, it is a bit of history in the city of Loveland Colorado. I composed this image specifically to include the double parallels of the symbols of freedom in this country – The Statue of Liberty, and the Flag.
Taking the Shot
I took this image at about 1:40pm – ooh, shame on me for shooting during the “bad” times of the day. Well, during the winter months the sun is lower in the sky and doesn’t get so harsh that you can’t get a good image. Now before you say it, I know … the best time to shoot images outdoors is closer to sun up, or sun down. However, if the sun is still providing interesting shadows and light, I say – fire away!
Since the face of the statue looks east and the sun light was coming from slightly behind, I found that if I exposed for the scene (not the statue) the statue was in silhouette. If I exposed for the statue, the scene was blown and much of the detail lost. This left me with a couple of choices – 1, use fill flash to lighten the face of the statue and expose for the scene, or 2, bracket the shot and shoot for HDR at the following exposures: 0ev, -2ev, -1ev, +1ev, and +2ev. I chose the second option because I was lazy and didn’t want to return to my vehicle to get the flash. In retrospect, the flash might have been a better option, but then maybe not. Either way, I should have returned to the vehicle to get the flash or the tripod. Since I didn’t do either, I fired off the five bracketed shots handheld (not good if you want a good sharp merge in HDR).
Post Processing
I loaded up my bracketed images into Lightroom and chose the -2ev, 0ev, and +2ev images. I don’t really need the -1ev and +1ev images, but I will shoot them anyway just in case I might want to use them for blending in photoshop, and because my camera won’t shoot bracketed at 2ev, it will only do 1ev. So, once I had the three images, I exported them into photomatix to create my HDR image. I then used the tone mapping option and adjusted the sliders until I had the look I wanted. At this point though, the face of the statue was a bit blocky and didn’t look good but I knew I had a shot where the face of the statue did look good – +1ev. I saved my HDR image as a tiff image, then selected the tiff and the +1ev image in Lightroom and sent them to photoshop for editing. In photoshop, I placed each image into a layer on the same document with the tiff (HDR) image on the top layer. I added a layer mask and then painted over the statue with a black brush to reveal the lower layer.
Then I selected where I wanted the border to be, inverted it so from there out to the edges would be selected, then added an adjustment layer for brightness/contrast and lowered the brightness. I selected where I wanted the border again, and adjusted the selection for border and place this on a new layer and painted it black. At this point I was ready to finish up the image in Lightroom with an adjustment to the exposure, adding vibrance, and sharpening the image.
About the Image
This statue is one of over 200 “Little Sisters” of the Statue of Liberty in New York. These statues were placed all over the country in the 1950′s by the boy scouts of America in celebration of scouting’s 40th anniversary theme “Strengthen the Arm of Liberty.” The original statues were made of copper fashioned to a wooden frame and weighed about 290 pounds. Over the years, weather and neglect claimed many of them. In 1985, Loveland’s statue was replaced with a bronze model and stands tall and true today.
Loveland is an artsy town and is home to a number of world renoun sculptors whose work can be seen in many places within the city. Replacing Liberty’s little sister with a bronze one was a no-brainer for the city council, as this would preserve the “Arm of Liberty” for many years and help to promote the city as home to many world class sculptors. Every year, Loveland is home to the “Sculpture in the Park” event which brings sculptors from all over the world to Loveland for this three day event in early August to display and sell their work. No where else will you see so many sculptures in one place! Loveland is a wonderful place to live if you like the arts!
In the following weeks, I may or may not be as detailed as I have been with this post. I guess this would depend on your feedback – do you want to know more or less about the images and/or process I use to create them?
Cropping – Photoshop vs Lightroom
If you are a user of both Photoshop and Lightroom, you are probably aware of the differences in the crop tool. If you are new to Lightroom, you may not be aware.
Photoshop’s crop tool is based on size. This means that if you crop an image to 8 x 10, your image will be cropped and resized to 8 x 10. Lightroom’s crop tool is based on aspect ratio. This means that if you crop an image to 8 x10, your image will be cropped to fit an aspect ratio of 8 x 10, but it will not be resized. This can be a very handy way to crop images because cropping to 8 x 10 in Lightroom also handles sizes 4 x 5, 16 x 20, and other sizes that are multiples of the aspect ratio. Pretty cool – except…
This can be a problem when it comes to printing from Lightroom – or at least it seems to be a problem. If the actual image size is smaller than the aspect ratio crop in Lightroom, printing seems to be ok. However, if the actual size of the image is larger than the size you are printing to, there could be some clipping that occurs when it prints. This happens even when the settings in the print driver are set to “fit” the size. Very frustrating.
If you need your image sized and printed exact, then Lightroom may not be the answer. Photoshop on the other hand will do a fine job of making your image exact – at the expense of flexability. I wonder if Adobe would consider adding an option in Lightroom to do cropping by size? Or Maybe this whole clipping issue is in my printer driver. Maybe I’m off on a tangent – what is your experience?
