Today’s Plan:
- Some Review
- Photoshop
- Homework
Photoshop Friday
A few basics
- If at any time you cannot find a panel in a tutorial, then go Windows > Workspaces > Reset Essentials. Sometimes as I am working I accidentally close a panel or click on a different workspace. This will take you back to home base.
- First thing: always make sure to unlock the image with which you are working in the layers panel. It is generally good practice to make a copy of the original just in case.
- Once you merge layers in a photoshop file, there is no going back. Generally, there is no reason to ever do this (except for rasterizing some layer masks for transformation, but this is super high end stuff. If you think you need to do this, make a copy of the .psd file first). TL;DR: beware the word “rasterize.”
- On the left-side of the screen is the tool panel. Any tool with an arrow in the bottom-right corner has extra options. Left-click and hold to see those options.
- If you get into trouble with marching ants, then go Select > Deselect. Hold shift to add more, hold alt to take away.
Here’s the list of things that we listed on the board last class and a few other things I remembered reviewing previous tutorial days:
- How to resize an image (image size vs. canvas size; how to change between inches, pixels, and picas)[Download this image]
- Note image display size on the bottom-left corner
- Image > Image Size vs. Image > Canvas Size
- Reminder: Resolution; 72 for most screen projects, 300 for print. Photoshop has gotten a lot better at improving the resolution of an image. Save first; this can crash a machine.
- Left-toolbar > Crop Tool. First rotate, then trim. Then hit the check mark to commit to the crop. NOTE: notice how the crop is a permanent effect.
- Repairing an image. Left-toolbar > Magic Healing (looks like a band-aid).
- More complicated: sharpening a blurry image. With the photo layer selected in the Layers panel, go to the Filter menu and choose Convert for Smart Filters, so you can sharpen without permanently changing the photo. In the Filter menu, choose Sharpen > Unsharp Mask.
- How to work with text (resizing, selecting, placing text on a line)
- Advanced: placing text on a path
- How to work with color
- Selectin objects and Using Blur and other effects
- Simple Blur
- Blur Effect on one layer
- Spot Grab
- New Content Aware Grab (note–this nearly crashed my computer). Select > Select Inverse. Now we can do all kinds of stuff.
- Erase a background
- Layer > New Layer Adjustment > Black and White
- Filter > Go Nuts
- Creating a Background Gradient
- Using a layer mask. Here is a fairly quick (11 minute) tutorial on how to clip an image into block text. Doing so isn’t hard and teaches you some advanced layer techniques.
- Saving and exporting
Homework
Complete and submit the Photoshop exercise in Canvas (if you didn’t do that Wednesday).
Work on your poster designs–I’d like to do a crit on Monday so that I have time to comment on them and you have time to revise them before Friday.
