Photoshop actually offers several different types of layers: plain old layers, background Note layers, adjustment layers, text layers, smart object layers, and others. If you have Photoshop Extended, you can also have 3D or video layers.
How to. Fiddle with the Background Layer By default, when you open a file or create a new document in Photoshop, it automatically creates a background layer for you. This layer is locked to prevent you from accidentally performing certain changes to it, such as moving the layer or rearranging its layer order in the Layers panel. In some instances you might want to edit your background layer directly not edit a copy. If you are exporting to another program or to video or 3D work, you may want transparent areas in your background layer, so that other objects may show through beneath the layers in the Photoshop document.
For whatever reason, if you want to unlock your background layer, simply double-click it. A dialog box will pop up asking you for the name of the layer and for a few other properties of the layer.
The new default name is Layer 0, as shown here. You are then free to use the layer as you please. The icon looks like a notebook page about to be turned. The page-turning icon used to create a new layer can be seen throughout Photoshop and in almost all Tip Adobe applications.
It is a universal icon indicating that something new will be created. Remember this if you ever get stumped. This works if you want to create a new brush in the Brushes panel, a new style in the Styles panel, a 3D light in the 3D panel, and so on.
The Layers panel will then show you that a new layer has been created. Photoshop automatically names it Layer 1.
If you create another new layer which you can do by using the same method , the default name will be Layer 2, and so on. Or if the layer is already created, you can rename it by double-clicking exactly the name of the layer and typing the new name.
How many layers can you have in one document? As many as your computer can handle. What Is That Checkerboard Pattern? But with the new layer that was created, you may have noticed that the layer thumbnail is a gray-and-white checkerboard pattern. What gives? It basically tells you that nothing is there. You can change the size of the layer thumbnail by going to the fly-out menu of the Layers panel Tip and selecting Panel Options.
From there, you can choose whether to make the thumbnail larger, smaller, or to hide the layer thumbnail entirely. Hiding the layer thumbnail can help speed things along if you have a really big project with a lot of layers, or if you are on a slow computer. Just use the default Photoshop size from the Preset drop-down list, and make sure the Background Contents drop-down list is set to White.
Next, make a new layer by clicking the Create A New Layer button in the bottom right corner of the Layers panel. These two color swatches are the foreground and background color swatches. After clicking on that color swatch, we will meet an important new friend called the Color Picker see Figure In the center of the Color Picker, we have a tall, narrow bar from which to select the basic color. You can drag the little arrows on the hue slider vertically, or you can simply click the color to use.
Next, we need to go to the big square on the left to fine-tune this blue color. Now select the Brush tool by clicking it in the Tools panel, or by pressing B on your keyboard.
This turns your cursor into a paintbrush. Notice that the in Chapter 5. For now, make sure that your new, blank paint squiggle is on the new blank layer is selected, and just drag in your document to paint a layer we created, and not on the squiggle see Figure Create another new blank layer.
Go back to the swatch in the Tools panel, and open the Color Picker again. This time, change the color in the narrow color bar from blue to green, and click OK to accept. The layer with the green squiggle is on top of the layer with the blue squiggle in the Layers panel. And it also covers up the blue squiggle. But we can change this through the magic of layers. Simply click the layer with the green squiggle, and then drag it down below the layer with the blue squiggle see Figure This would be a great time to rename them discussed earlier in this chapter.
Another Project: Opacity and Layer Blending Another one of the features of using layers is that we can blend them together in interesting ways.
The most simple and speedy way to blend layers together is by using opacity. Opacity is the opposite of transparency. Combining Images Before we adjust opacity to blend layers together, we need to have layers to blend. Our first step is to open multiple images.
I will then repeat that multiple files, they show up as tabs process to open the file dark image. To follow along, open in the Photoshop interface. Or you can just read and watch me work some sweet image-editing magic on these pictures. These are displayed as tabs toward the top of the interface see Figure Click one of the tabs to switch documents.
This is one of the new, cool features in Photoshop CS4. You have a couple of ways to do this. First, you can select one image and then copy and paste it onto the other one.
In our example, we want to copy and paste the dark image on top of the light one. You can also select the entire image by going to the Select menu at the top and choosing All. Tip You can also copy and paste by choosing those options from the Edit menu. To blend these by lowering the opacity of the top layer, click and drag on the word Opacity in the Layers panel.
Figure shows what the project looks like now. Notice how the increased transparency of the dark image layer allows some of the light image beneath it to show through. This allows for even more of the light image beneath to show through. The final result looks like the house is surrounded by early morning fog. Even if your only mission in Photoshop is to remove blemishes or annoying people from photographs, all photos essentially consist of variations in color. Colors also have strange powers, with each color evoking different emotional responses.
Just realize going into this chapter that it might feel a little incomplete. Entire books have been written on most of the following subjects. I cover here only what you need to know to get started with Photoshop.
The Essentials of Color Before we get into how to use color in Photoshop, we first need to look at what makes up a color. One color model that has always made sense to me is that of hue, saturation, and lightness. We see this model often in Photoshop as well. These three properties refer to different elements of a color.
You can choose among several ways of looking at color, and great variations in terminology exist. What Is Hue? Hue is what most people probably think of when they think of color. So, even though red and pink are different colors, they still share the same hue.
It uses the hue, Note saturation, and lightness model to adjust colors. Saturation is the intensity of a color. As we increase saturation, colors become more vibrant and intense. As we desaturate colors, they become faded and washed out.
Completely desaturating a color will produce gray. Figures and show a blue color with different levels of saturation. Note that both of these blues have the same hue and lightness. The only thing that has changed is the saturation.
What Is Lightness? Lightness is a self-explanatory color property. Increasing lightness makes a color lighter closer to white , while decreasing lightness makes a color darker closer to black. One of the most common tasks in any image editing program is to make things a little brighter. In lower-budget image editing programs and sometimes even in Photoshop , when you brighten an image, it universally brightens every pixel.
The reverse is also true; when you darken every pixel in an image, you also darken the brightest pixel, completely losing pure white. Figures and show the same blue from Figure with varying amounts of lightness. Pastel colors are created by increasing lightness and decreasing saturation.
But when certain colors are used in certain ways, they do influence us. Sound farfetched? In contrast to stop and danger signs, infomercials want your money, so they FIGURE The blue swatch try to create feelings of reliability and stability. This is typically from Figure with reduced done with blue, as it radiates professionalism and trust.
I used examples with these two colors intentionally, because they can evoke such powerful responses from people. Red and adjacent colors such as yellow and orange are referred to as warm tones. These are powerful colors that can create not only feelings of warning, but also passionate emotions such as anger or rage. See Figure to see how warm colors can add to the intensity of art.
Or we can add just a little tint of these colors to create warmth instead of heat. If we have a photo, we can tint it with a warm color to add a little warmth. Did You Know? About Tinting Like many concepts in the world of color, tinting can be confusing because the term is often used in different ways. In painting, a tint of a color means a color mixed with white to lighten the color, and a shade of a color is a color mixed with black to make it darker.
Using this definition, pink is a tint of red. Essentially, it means to subtly add a color to an entire image. This has an effect similar to using a colored filter on a camera lens.
Perhaps the most common type of tinting is seen in sepia-toned images, which are photos that are black-and-white with a faint, dark yellow tint to them think of the first part of the Wizard of Oz.
This subtle addition of color to an entire image is the definition of tint that I will be using throughout this book unless otherwise specified. Also, as with warm colors, how the temperatures make you feel is a good guide to how the colors should be used.
Cool things like a breeze or ice cream are generally seen as calming and relaxing. But cold things can create feelings of alienation or fear. Cool colors work the same way. Used with restraint, cool colors create a relaxed feel. Used more intensely, they can create feelings of isolation. Figure shows an image as is, and Figure shows it tinted with cool colors. Does the image with the cool tint make you feel differently about it? What story does it tell that the original image does not? Because colder colors can create relaxed feelings, they are often the best choice for professional Tip circumstances, like bank logos and the already-mentioned infomercials.
Examine Restaurant Logos The use of colors in restaurant logos is a great way to study the effect that colors have on us. Notice that these logos are often the color of the foods that are served there. Most foods have earth tones, so it makes sense that red, yellow, and orange are used so often.
These colors are also mostly found in comfort foods, which is another reason for these businesses to use them in their logos. Some restaurants want nothing to do with the greasy, unhealthy food served at these places. Instead they want to serve fresh food that caters to a more health-conscious audience. So what color would you guess they would use in their logo? It is possible to create really intense art that has blue in it. These are just general guidelines. But remember that they are guidelines because they resonate with human nature, not because some ancient nerd arbitrarily made this stuff up.
Using Colors Together A friend and hero of mine, noted illustrator Bruce Heavin, once said something very profound about color that has always stuck with me. Like notes on a musical scale, colors become beautiful, ugly, intense, or out of place based on the colors that surround them.
If we surround the pink heart with red hearts see Figure and more pink hearts, it would look like a card your mom might buy. The Color Wheel The color wheel see Figure is a way to view the relationships between all colors. If you plan on doing any kind of art or design with Photoshop, I strongly suggest picking up a physical color wheel. Although I like to have mine in hand, you can also view color wheels online. Several different color wheels based on different models of color are available.
Because the wheel shows color relationships, it becomes an invaluable help in choosing colors to paint or design with. If you get stuck while designing a web site, DVD menu, or digital art piece, you can try one of these color schemes. These are also called the primary colors. Knowing that these colors are the base colors helps us as we start looking at other color relationships. Using red, yellow, and blue together when they are bright and fully saturated is a very popular Tip color scheme when designing for an audience of young children.
Secondary Colors When two primary colors are combined, the result is called a secondary color see Figure When experimenting with color schemes such as primary and secondary colors, you can achieve Tip a similar degree of visual harmony by using desaturated versions of the colors.
You can also try using lighter and darker versions of the colors. Complementary Colors Complementary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel. Check out schemes from complementary Figure to see some examples of complementary colors. See the figure caption for answers to the riddle.
Another familiar set of complementary colors is blue and orange, used often in business Note web sites. Because of their high contrast when used together, complementary colors are best used sparingly, especially when fully saturated. So do the world a favor, and use complementary colors prudently. Split Complementary Colors Split complementary colors are closely related to complementary colors. However, instead of using colors opposite each other on the color wheel, one color is chosen, and then both of the colors on either side of the complement are used.
In other words, instead of using the color across the wheel, it uses the colors next door to the color across the wheel. See Figure for a diagram of how split complements are determined. Analogous colors are ones that are right next to each other on the color wheel. For example, looking at the color wheel, we see that violet, blue-violet, and blue are analogous colors.
In Figure , we see an example of these analogous colors in action in a sample design. Try going to www. For example, if you had a red color and wanted to make it pink, you would add white light if you were working with a file to be output to the Internet or a TV screen. If you were trying to do the same thing with a file that would be printed, you would create pink from red by subtracting red ink.
Understanding the behavior of color models is absolutely essential to working with color in Photoshop, because this program is used all over the world by professionals in every medium. Many color adjustments work differently depending on the color space used in the current document.
If you are a web designer, or if you do video work, or if your final output will always be to a screen or monitor, then you will always want to use the RGB color mode for your documents.
This is because colors on monitors and screens are created with light, and red, green, and blue are the components of light. RGB is often called additive color. This is because we add more color in RGB mode to get to white. This makes sense if you think about it. If you had a green spotlight shining on a white wall, the color would be green. If you increase the power of the spotlight, eventually the color would probably become white. Likewise, as with light, the complete removal of R, G, and B will result in black.
These four colors are the color components of ink and are used for most printed art. Why are these four colors used for ink instead of RGB? So, where does black come in? Black is also abbreviated as K to avoid confusion with blue B. In theory then, we should be able to get to black by adding C, M, and Y together. Or so it would seem. This is one of the biggest reasons why the colors you print do not match what you see on your computer screen.
About Spot Color It can be a real headache having a great design with amazing colors and not being able to print it correctly. The good news is that there is a solution. The bad news is that it can be a pain to work with, and it costs a fortune. Another benefit of spot colors is that they are spot-on accurate pun intended. For this reason, spot colors are often used for companies like Coca-Cola that have a certain color closely tied to their brand identity.
The most popular spot color company in the United States is called Pantone, which is why spot colors sometimes are called Pantone colors. This is somewhat similar to how a facial tissue is often generically called a Kleenex. Spot colors are amazing, yes, but you definitely pay the price for the magic. In my opinion, Photoshop deals with color very intuitively; it all just makes sense.
This will lay a great foundation for the things you will learn in the rest of the book. These colors can then be used for painting, filling areas with color, and a whole bunch of other things.
In Photoshop, the quickest way to access the Color Picker is by clicking once on either of the two swatches at the bottom of the Tools panel. But what exactly do these buttons do? I find the HSB model the easiest to understand. This is also the default color model for the Color Picker. Because H is selected by default, the narrow bar shows us a range of hues to choose from.
After you feel comfortable with the Color Picker, try experimenting with other color models. We adjust both attributes in the big square on the left of the Color Picker. To select a color in the big square, just click on the color you want. At first, this square probably just seems like a big mess of colors all thrown together.
But these colors are actually arranged in a very intelligent way. To adjust saturation, adjust the little circle horizontally. Colors on the right are saturated, while colors on the left are desaturated see Figure Similarly to how we set saturation, we adjust brightness by selecting different colors along the vertical axis. Colors at the top are completely bright, while colors along the bottom are completely dark.
To sum up, we pick colors by starting with the hue in the center of the Color Picker , and then we fine-tune the saturation and brightness in the bigger square in the Color Picker. The upper-right area shows you your previous color on the bottom , and your new color on the top. In that way you can compare and contrast the old and new colors easily see Figure Try to create these colors in your Color Picker: How to.
Understand the Color Picker Warnings Not to sound ominous, but you should be aware of a couple of warnings in the Color Picker. The top warning resembles a yellow triangle with an exclamation point in it. This indicates that the currently selected color cannot be reproduced using CMYK inks. But thankfully, Photoshop offers you an alternative color right below the warning. If you click that swatch, the CMYK-safe color will be chosen for you. The other warning, immediately below the CMYK warning, similarly lets you know that the currently selected color is not a web-safe color.
As with the CMYK warning, click the swatch below the warning to select the safe color that Photoshop has suggested as an alternative.
Every number has a color, but the numbers that describe that color change based on the color model used. So, an RGB color might be 35, , This refers to how much ink is used to create the color. A standard CMYK color might be listed as 56, 0, 86, The field with a number sign at the bottom of the Color Picker is used for hexadecimal colors.
Hexadecimal numbers are typically used to describe colors on the Web. A hexadecimal number might look like 8c24cf. I know it looks weird. But you can type those in as well. You can use the Adobe Color Picker to find it and generate the hexadecimal number for you. Then just copy and paste the hexadecimal number from the Color Picker into your web application. If you like a particular color, you can click the Add To Swatches button in the Color Picker to Tip automatically store it in your Swatches panel.
Using Swatches Just like at a paint or carpet store, swatches in Photoshop are little samples of color. Swatches are stored in the Swatches panel see Figure If your Swatches panel is not visible, you can go to the Window menu at the top of the interface and select Swatches. All the little squares in the Swatches panel are saved colors that can be used at any time.
You can also save your current foreground color as a swatch by clicking the Create New Swatch Of Foreground Color button. You can Tip load them by going to the Swatches panel fly-out menu and clicking on the name of the swatch library you wish to load. The Eyedropper Tool The Eyedropper tool is very helpful for selecting colors you find elsewhere. You can click that orange color with the Eyedropper tool, and it will become your new foreground color.
Then tool in the Tools panel just click anywhere on an image to sample the color from it. When you have the Adobe Color Picker open, it turns your cursor into a temporary Eyedropper Tip tool, no matter what tool is selected. So, you can move your cursor outside of the Color Picker and pick a color from an open document if you wish.
Now, with great pleasure, I will introduce you to some fantastic creative tools in Photoshop. But it is now our privilege to investigate the things in Photoshop that inspire, the things that allow us to create from scratch. Remember as we go forward that while there are some good rules of thumb for editing images as we touched on in the previous chapter on color , there are no rules for painting and creating art.
What unlocks their potential is the talent you bring to the table. But I know how to get Photoshop to make one for me. Just let yourself go and be creative.
You might be curious as to why those are two separate entities. Brushes are objects in Photoshop with limitless ability. You can use them to instantly create fields of grass or an entire document full of multicolored confetti—with one mouse click! Even more than that, you can use brushes throughout Photoshop. Obviously, you can use brushes to paint and create art, but they are also used by other tools.
You use brushes to erase, fix texture problems, and to perform other tasks as well. Even if you only edit photos in Photoshop, this section on painting will be extremely helpful for you. If you own the Extended version of Photoshop, painting with 3D objects has been vastly expanded in CS4. You can now paint directly on 3D objects to change their diffuse maps. Not only that, but you can also paint directly into other channels as well, such as bump map, reflectivity, self-illumination, and several others.
And these 3D features work amazingly well. You may want to reread this paragraph a few times until that sinks in. But even then you may not quite believe me, so let me prove it to you. First, create a new blank Photoshop document with the default settings. Make sure the blank layer is selected in the Layers panel before moving on. Next, select the Brush tool in the Tools panel. Just press B on your keyboard, and the Brush tool will be selected.
At the bottom of this drop-down, you can see a collection of premade brushes for you to choose from. The number at the bottom indicates how large the brush is. However, you need to choose a color to paint with. When you paint, the color of the paint is the foreground color, which is the upper-left color swatch at the bottom of the Tools panel white, as shown here.
Click the foreground color swatch to open the Color Picker, select a color, and click OK. The other swatch, the Note background color, is not used nearly as often. In the top area of the new document, drag with your mouse to create a paint stroke. It should look like an ordinary paint stroke see Figure If the Brushes panel is not currently showing in your interface, just click the Window menu at the top of the interface and select Brushes.
This is especially useful for creating Tip paint along document edges, such as for frames. The Brushes panel, shown in Figure , is the headquarters of the Photoshop painting engine.
Although you can access basic brush options from many places in Photoshop, this is the only place you can find the most powerful of the brush options available to you.
At first glance, this panel may intimidate. The big square area on the right is where we make those adjustments. Photoshop often likes to organize large amounts of data the way it does in the Brushes panel. In all of these places, you click on the left to select a category and then click on the right to adjust the parameters of that category.
On the left side of the Brushes panel, select the category Brush Tip Shape. The right side of the panel updates to show you options for the brush tip shape see Figure This determines how far apart the brush repeats the original shape when you paint with this brush.
Drag this option to the right to increase the space between the circle shapes that this brush is made of. Now try painting in your document again below your original paint stroke, and check out the magic see Figure Try doing that with a real paintbrush! When creating a large painting with the same paint stroke or a regular-sized paint stroke in a lower-resolution paintbrush after increasing the document such as a web graphic , you may notice that the paint spacing stroke is not completely smooth.
See Figure for a typical instance of this. To fix this, simply reduce the Spacing value to bring the repetitions closer together. I find myself fiddling with most often. Thankfully, your mouse cursor actually turns into a shape that represents the size and shape of your paintbrush when the Brush tool is selected.
That brings me to some of the most useful keyboard shortcuts—the brush size shortcuts. You can adjust brush size in a variety of ways such as using the Brushes panel , but the best way is to use the bracket keys on your keyboard.
They look like this: [ and ]. Pressing the [ key on your keyboard will decrease the size of your brush, while pressing the ] key will increase it. Adjust Brushes You have several ways to adjust basic brush parameters such as size, shape, and hardness. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, you can also use the Options bar at the top of the interface to adjust basic brush properties. Most of these options are stored in the Brush Preset picker we looked at earlier.
Perhaps the quickest and easiest way to adjust basic brush properties is by right-clicking while using a tool that uses brushes. The right-click menu that appears closely resembles the Brush Preset picker drop-down found in the Options bar. But Photoshop provides multiple ways to do the same thing for a reason; no one way is more or less correct than another. Using those not only allows you to change the size more easily than by using any menu, but with the keyboard shortcuts, you can also dynamically see the size of the brush as you increase it.
Knowing how to adjust brush size solves your problem. You can make any brush significantly smaller or larger than it is. Brushes are based on shapes made with pixels. Custom brushes that are resized and enlarged Caution too much may create paint strokes that appear pixelated. About Brush Hardness Brush hardness refers to the edge of the shape used to create the brush. See Figure for the difference between a hard-edged brush and a soft-edged brush. Edges that are soft are essentially feathered, or in other words, blurry.
Feathered edges are good for blending colors together. To adjust hardness, you can go to either the Brushes panel or FIGURE A hard-edged brush the Options bar, or you can right-click in the document with the top and a soft-edged brush Brush tool selected.
Photoshop will automatically create a straight line from the first point to the next. About Brush Shape Since brushstrokes are just repeated shapes, what if we used more than just circles to paint? If you want to start with a fresh canvas which I recommend , then you can undo the paint Note strokes; otherwise, delete the layer you painted on, and create a new one for this exercise. Scroll down here in the right-click menu to select the Scattered Maple Leaves brush.
To let this brush do its thing, you need to select a good color before painting. Click the foreground color in the Tools panel to open the Color Picker and select an orange color. Next, drag only once in your document, and look at that—holy autumn, Batman! How is it possible to drag once and create all of this autumn madness? You made multiple leaves, but they were also scattered randomly, and they were given a variety of colors as well. In the Brushes panel, you can scatter brushes and create random color.
Sometimes paintbrushes are more than they appear to be. Can you imagine trying to paint with a laptop? There is a solution. The pen functions like a mouse on the tablet. So, if you draw a happy face on the tablet with the pen, it will paint a happy face in Photoshop. Not only does this tablet recognize the pen for input, but most tablets even the cheap ones also recognize the pressure you apply while painting.
Newer or more expensive models have even more sensitivity. Other models also recognize more from the pen, such as how much it is tilted or rotated, which is really helpful for digital calligraphy.
But this story gets even better. Photoshop is specifically built to respond to these tablets. You can tell Photoshop that when you press harder, it should automatically make the brush size larger. Or you can set it so that as you press more lightly with the pen, it makes the paint more transparent or scatters it less or changes colors—or all of the above.
You can also adjust other parameters with the tablet. To get Photoshop to recognize and use a tablet, go to the Brushes panel and find a property that has a Control drop-down list. From the drop-down list, select Pen Pressure to control that property by using the pen and graphics tablet. Graphics tablets really help you get the most out of the paint capabilities of Photoshop.
The most common manufacturer of graphics tablets is Wacom pronounced WALK-em , and their tablets can be found online and in many stores that sell computers and peripherals. As powerful at painting as Photoshop is, the most powerful painting program is Corel Painter. Note Painter even allows you to change the type of bristles on brushes and to change colors of individual bristles as you can in the real world.
The first one goes back to something that we covered in Chapter 2. You can imagine how time-consuming it would be and how it would interrupt the creative flow to keep going back and forth to the Tools panel to switch tools. Another great painting tip deals with sampling colors while painting. Suppose you want to print this image on a poster that is larger than the image.
But what we could do without losing any image quality is to expand the canvas of this document, which would create more blank space around the document. We can then expand the background pixels of this image by using painting tools.
Go to the Image menu and select Canvas Size. That opens the Canvas Size dialog box see Figure We probably want to increase this document by about a half inch in all directions. Make sure that the Canvas extension color is set to White, and click OK. This expands the size of the document by a half inch on all sides.
Now, we can paint more of the background to expand the landscape around the castle. There are a few different colors here. This will temporarily toggle the Eyedropper tool. This trick works especially well with really defined colors like the ones in this image. If this were a photograph, shadows and soft edges all over the place would make it more challenging. When painting more than a few Caution strokes, you should create a new layer and start painting on that.
Note that the blend is smooth. As with anything we do in Photoshop, before we start playing around with the Gradient tool, create a new blank layer to create gradients on. Next, select the Gradient tool in the Tools panel. To use the Gradient tool, make sure that the new blank layer is selected, and then drag in your document from one side of the document to the other. Your colors might be different than mine which is okay for now , but essentially one color was created where you first clicked, and another color was created where you let go of the mouse, and everything in between was a smooth blended transition between the two see Figure Before we change the color, be aware that where you drag your mouse controls how these colors blend together.
Draw the gradient again which you can do on top of the existing gradient—it will in effect paint over the original gradient , but this time instead of clicking from one end of the document to another, click in the middle of the FIGURE The result of document. Then move your cursor a little, and let go of the a shorter drag with the Gradient tool mouse button. You can drag in any direction to Note create a gradient. You can also begin to draw or end the gradient outside the image if you want to leave one of the colors out of the document.
Changing Gradient Colors Changing the colors of gradients is a little tricky, both to access and to adjust. To do this, go to the Options bar with the Gradient tool selected. In the Options bar is a thumbnail preview of your gradient, with a little drop-down arrow to its right.
See Figure for a close-up. Click the arrow to choose from a set of gradients that ship with Photoshop. Click the gradient itself to access the Gradient Editor, shown in Figure , and manually change the colors of your gradient. You can also choose from the gradient presets in the Gradient Editor.
These are called color stops. Double-click one of these to open the Color Picker, and choose a new color for that area of the gradient. You can also click in a blank area at the bottom of the gradient to add multiple colors to the gradient. Or you can drag gradient color stops closer together to adjust the transition between colors. Use this to control the Tip transparency of certain areas of your gradient. Changing the Type of Gradient You can also change the shape of the gradient by clicking the buttons in the Options bar when the Gradient tool is selected.
If FIGURE A radial gradient you are like 99 percent of Photoshop users, you will probably only ever use linear gradients the first button and radial gradients the second button. The term linear means relating to a line. Radial gradients see Figure create gradients that start from a center point and radiate out from around that point.
Radial gradients are great for creating focus in the center of a design or for creating sunbursts. Using Gradients Gradients are useful in art as well as design. Notice what a gradient adds to the background of the design shown in Figure Subtly using gradients in difference that a gradient makes backgrounds and other elements of design is very popular in the background of this design.
Figure shows a gradient preset that ships with Photoshop that attempts to re-create a metallic look by using only a gradient. Notice the multiple colors in this gradient, as well as the fact that the stops have been adjusted to be closer to each other to create more abrupt transitions between some of the colors. It kind of looks like vector shapes. Sometimes art is not built with pixels, but is built instead with mathematical equations called vectors. Vector graphics are a little more complex, as you might imagine.
They are created with anchor points, segments, tangents, and handles. The great benefit of vector shapes is that because they are made with math, they are infinitely scalable. You can increase and decrease their size indefinitely, and you can take an object that was created very small and blow it up to fit on a billboard without losing any quality in either instance.
Figure shows two circles: one raster that is, made with pixels and one vector. Figure shows those same circles enlarged. It will be immediately apparent how useful vector shapes are. Vector art, by its FIGURE The shape created very nature, is more suited to cartoony art, art with flat areas of with pixels is on the left; the one created with vectors is on the color.
Because of its scalable nature, vector art is also the most right. At this size, they appear common method of creating logos. The castle image that we looked at is a perfect example of vector art. Everything has a hard edge, and there are big areas of flat color. Even though Illustrator is the champion of vector art, Photoshop also has some vector capabilities.
Delving into the ins and outs of vector art creation is beyond the scope of this book. However, we can quickly and easily create vector shapes in Photoshop by using one of the many shapes that ship with the program.
The vector-based shape tools are found toward the bottom of the Tools panel. Click and hold down your mouse on the Rectangle tool to see all of the shape tools. It looks like an amoeba, or maybe like the silhouette of Patrick Star from SpongeBob. The other shape tools are just what they say: the Rectangle tool basically creates rectangles, and so forth. The most important new option is the Shape drop-down list.
Click that to see the default shapes library, shown in Figure If you needed to, you could print them the size of Texas assuming, of course, that you had a Texas- sized printer , and the quality would be perfect. First, check the color swatch on the right side of the options to make sure this is the color you want. It will automatically create a layer for you, called a shape layer.
Shape layers are essentially areas of solid color that are masked by a vector shape. Both the fill color and the vector shape remain completely editable. To create the shape, drag in the main document window. You might notice how easy it is to create a really terrible lightning bolt. To make sure that your horizontal and vertical dimensions remain in proper proportion to each other, hold down SHIFT while creating your shape.
These dots shape layer are called anchor points. These points can be easily adjusted to change the shape of vector layers. This is another reason why vector shapes are often used for computer drawing.
You have a few different ways to adjust vector layers. In the tool slot immediately above the spot where we found the Custom Shape tool in the Tools panel are a couple of helpful vector-adjustment tools.
They are two arrows, one black and one white. The black arrow is called the Path Selection tool, and its primary purpose is to select and move entire paths. If you want to adjust individual anchor points or the segments that connect them, use the white arrow—the Direct Selection tool.
With the Direct Selection tool selected, drag one of the points to move it see Figure You can also drag segments to move those around. Using Layer Styles Layer styles are special effects you can apply to layers. These special effects include such things as shadows, glow effects, pseudo 3D effects, strokes around objects, and more. My favorite aspect of these effects is that they can be adjusted or removed at any time.
Even after you save the document and FIGURE You can double- close Photoshop, the layer styles will be completely editable click the blank area next to the when you reopen the document.
Applying Layer Styles To apply layer styles, you can click on the fx icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. Alternatively, you could use my favorite way to apply layer styles: just double-click a layer in the blank area to the right of its name see Figure You cannot apply layer styles to a background layer.
Note If you opened the Layer Style dialog box, go ahead and click Cancel to close it. Before we actually apply anything, we need to create something to apply a style to. Layer styles work best with shapes, text, and other objects that are smaller than the document. Make sure that your foreground color is not black or white. Then paint a paint stroke with this brush on a new layer see Figure As with the Brushes panel, the effects on the left are like categories.
Click the check box to turn effects on or off. Click the name of the effect to see the options for that effect in the big area on the right side of the dialog box. In the Layer Style dialog box, make sure that the Preview check box on the far right is checked. This will allow you to preview the result of your changes as you make them. Click Drop Shadow on the left side of the Layer Style dialog box. This instantly adds a drop shadow behind the paint stroke see Figure Compositing, or combining multiple elements with a drop shadow applied into the same scene, is also greatly assisted by drop shadows.
Drop shadows are also used to create a kind of 3D effect. You can customize the shadow by adjusting the parameters on the right. Just click Outer Glow. Now, even for demonstration purposes, this looks too terrible to continue. This will remove that effect. This creates the illusion that your object is 3D. A style is a collection of effects. The fx icon that is now on the right side of your layer serves as a reminder that layer styles have been applied to that layer.
Also, on the rightmost edge of the layer is a small drop-down arrow. With this open, you can see all layer style effects applied to this layer. Click the visibility icon next to the Bevel And Emboss effect to hide it. Click the same spot again to make it visible again. Feel free to venture off on your own. First step, start from scratch. Next, create a new blank layer. The fastest way to do this is to press D on your keyboard.
In one of the fuzzball three ways we discussed earlier in this chapter, select the brush called Fuzzball, which is pixels large, and is on the right side. Then press X on your keyboard, which will eXchange the foreground and background colors. This will make white the foreground color, which is what we want for painting with. Click one time to paint a single fuzzball at the bottom of the document in the center. Check Figure to see what I have so far. Double-click the name applied of the black background layer to rename it something more descriptive, like Black Background.
Do the same thing with the fuzzball layer, renaming it Sparks or something similar. Double-click the Sparks layer to the right of its name to open the Layer Style dialog box. Then click Outer Glow on the left side to add a glow. Notice how the glow effect is subtle, but it makes the sparks seem more electric and intense see Figure If the fuzzball were on the Note same layer as the black background, we could not add a glow to it, because the glow would go around the border of the black layer.
In the Tools panel, choose the Custom Shape tool. Then, from the Shape drop-down in the Options bar, choose the lightning shape. As before, drag to create a lightning bolt. If your lightning bolt appears to have a jagged gray line around it, just click once on the Tip thumbnail of the shape on the shape layer in the Layers panel to deactivate it. That creates a glow on the outside of the object.
The result so far is pretty cool. This creates a glow on the inside of objects. After clicking on Inner Glow on the left, you should see its options on the right side of the Layer Style dialog box see Figure This will create a larger glow inside the lightning, as shown in Figure If you wanted to change this further, you could click the color swatch at the top of the Inner Glow options. You could also try adding other effects to the lightning bolt, such as Bevel And Emboss. Because we created the Sparks layer first, it shows up behind the lightning bolt.
Our sparks need to be in front of the lightning bolt. So, in the Layers panel, drag the Sparks layer on top of the shape layer that contains the lightning bolt. After I fiddled around a bit, my final result can be seen in Figure Selections tell Photoshop which part of the image you want to be affected by edits that you make.
Basic selections are extremely easy to make. Filters are like special effects. With your image open, go to the Filter menu at the top of the interface. From the Filter menu, choose Pixelate Mosaic, to open the Mosaic filter dialog box, shown in Figure In the Mosaic filter dialog box, change the Cell Size value to Read the download Instructions here.
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