Easy Way to Happiness

Brushes are the core component of many tools in the toolbox, and confident brush handling is essential for the effective application of these. You need to master brushes because this gives you many ways in which you can use and edit brushes will equip you with a whole new set of skills, and give you access to a wide range of powerful and creative time-saving techniques. The Brush Preset picker will help you to find the right brush fast so make the most of it. With some Photoshop tools, such as the Clone Stamp, the Brush Preset picker is used simply to edit the tool’s brush size, softness and opacity.

Making custom brushes is one of the easiest things in the world. Seriously! I don’t know why I’ve read some tutorials that make it out to be this multi-step, intimidating process. Creating your own brushes helps to customize both your artwork and the Photoshop work environment. The Hard Part: “But … you said this would be easy!!” Technically, yes, but I’ve found that some people actually reach a little stumbling block when trying to think of what would make a good brush. Well, the short answer is ANYTHING! I’ve made brushes out of fuzzy leopard slippers, bananas, old trash cans, fabric swatches, dirt … hundreds of things. It helps to have a scanner and/or a digital camera … that really opens up your possibilities. Just a quick walk around your house might yield dozens of fun textures you can make brushes out of. But, even if you don’t have either of those, you can often snurch some good textures off the internet. Try a Google search for marble tile and see what comes up. Sometimes you’ll get a nice big image to work with. I’m not condoning stealing someone’s art photos to rip a brush off with, but if it’s just a sample photo of tile, or fabric, or screen, or whatever, I think it’s perfectly fine … you’ll be drastically changing the image in the next steps anyway.

To demonstrate the way the interface changes as you use it, try selecting the type tool from the toolbox (the one that looks like a capital T). You will see straight away that the toolbar changes entirely to allow you to set font name, font size and so on. In the history palette, your use of the type tool will be added to your history, and a new layer will be created for your text and shown in the layers palette.

Photoshop, Adobe’s digital photo editing and graphic design powerhouse, is capable of creating professional quality logos and designs that will allow you to compete with professional designers for graphic design business. There are many software applications available that advertise the ability to produce high quality graphics and logos. These applications can range in price from $30.00 and up. The problem with many of these applications is that they use pre designed templates which the user pieces together to form logos that really are not that original and sometimes appear a little generic.

Adobe’s Photoshop is the number one choice digital photo editing software application among today’s professional photographers, graphic artists and web designers. It is not only the best but easier to work with than you might think. Many shy away from Photoshop because there are intimidated by the complexity. With the help of a good Photoshop tutorial you can begin to learn Photoshop within minutes and be on your way to restoring those old photographs and preserving your family’s memories for year to come. There are less expensive digital editing applications but the problem is that they often have very limited capabilities when it comes to doing high quality digital photo restoration. Those cheaper digital photo software packages often utilize a one size fits all approach to photo restoration and they just don’t have the functions to deal with all of the types of damage you may encounter in renewing your old photos.

The Caledonian Digital website is user friendly and offers extensive information relating to the services provided, as well as providing recent articles on various aspects of digital photography, and links to sources of hardware, software, and reference material for photo restoration enthusiasts.For additional information on the launch of Caledonian Digital’s new hassle free photo restoration and enhancement service contact Charlie Templeton or visit www.caledoniandigital.co.uk.

The tools we use in Photoshop are levels, curves and saturation for changing contrasts; and, color balance to bring the image back to the way the natural eye would see the color. Here is what we tell our photographers in the Handbook of Reuters Journalism… Photoshop is a highly sophisticated image manipulation program. We use only a tiny part of its potential capability to format our pictures, crop and size them and balance the tone and colour. For us it is a presentational tool.The rules are – no additions or deletions, no misleading the viewer by manipulation of the tonal and colour balance to disguise elements of an image or to change the context. Photoshop is a powerful image processing program with many more tools to help photographers produce the best quality image they can for the type of photography they do.