Working with Layer Order

Here’s another finished tutorial design from psd.net. I’ve had to clean up the layer order of this because it was a little messy and put some layers in sets such as ‘unused’. Do this if you don’t want to throw layers in the trash. Note that the big ‘II’ layer is beneath the separate text layers above it yet above the gold custom gradient background.

Working with Layers Part I: Layer Sets

Linking layers is easy and allows them to be moved or transformed together. Just click on the link space when you want to link another layer to the currently highlighted layer. Remember you can also right click anywhere on the document when you are on the moVe tool to choose from layers that are right beneath that point.

Discover the Layer Mask

Use the eyedropper tool to get a sample of any color in your document.

Click and the sample will now become the foreground color that you can work with.

For this educational tutorial, get an eyedropper sample to get your new foreground color in the color picker. Now drag the background layer of [...]

Discover the Single Marquee Tools/ Pixel Stretch Technique

For fun you could try a pixel stretch off of the girl to work with similar colors and make that the background. Pixel stretch off of anything..it might make it more interesting. Then you can have people guess where it actually came from.

Discover the Lasso for making selections

You can also right click when you are on a marquee or lasso tool and choose Layer via Copy to put the selection onto its own layer. There are ways to edit the (lasso) selection which are covered in Basic Photoshop training and other tutorials here.

Discover Image Size and Resolution

You can now Save As and choose a different file name to save a copy or you can save in a different file format for a copy or just Save to overwrite the file. I always use .psd and .jpg’s the most often. I’ll save my designs in .psd and export as .jpg’s (which flattens all of your layers). I don’t recommend .bmp. Gif’s are used best for vector format work or if you want to preserve transparency (a whole different topic).

Basic Image Enhancement

Touching up images first comes with mastering or having knowledge of the skills to use Photoshop’s tools. As you learn the tools, it will become more instinctual to know what to do in order to touchup or repair each different image.

Discover Selection Modification 2: +Create work path

Just work your way all the way around the area you want to deselect. With the polygonal it will draw straight lines and you click to add a point to move it in another direction. What’s weird and cool is that you can click ‘outside of’ the actual document with the polygonal lasso to help work your way around to the start point to close it off. Try this out for yourself.

Discover the Magic Wand for Image Adjusting-part 2

In this case the sunset was appear behind the main subject so if this happens to you remember that you have your transform options under the Edit menu. Go ahead and flip it horizontally. Now the sunset appears on the other side where there is breathing room for it to be. This is good common design sense which you probably have, it’s just good to know the tools to how to do it!

Discover the Magic Wand for Image Adjusting-part 1

If there are areas that were accidentally ‘added’ to the selection you can ‘subtract’ them. For example here we don’t want any part of her selected as part of the blue wall so take your lasso and draw around these areas to ‘subtract’ them from the desired blue wall selection.

Discover the Clone Stamp

I’m going to show you the Clone stamp tool in this tutorial. First another review of how to create a fill. This is one way to do it. First, make a selection with a rectangular marquee (or any other marquee).

Discover the Brushes Palette

When using brushes be aware of the what’s going on in the layers palette. You’ll almost always want to make sure that you are on a new layer if you’re going to do some painting. Create a new layer by pressing the new layer icon that looks like a white piece of paper on the bottom of the layers palette.

Look :Discover the Background Eraser

The difference between contiguous and discontiguous is really quite simple. Contiguous will erase everything that is within the color range closest to the crosshairs. If there is something in the way (such as a braid of hair) that breaks up the flow of the closest color range, it won’t reach beyond to erase it (even if it is within the reach of the brush).

Discover Adjustment Layers

You can see the effect of the entire image is now extremely contrasted. Note the layers palette. This is important to understand; the layer order of the adjustment layers. It can start to get complicated when you get involved with multi-layer graphic designs and some of which include custom adjustment layers (get my Basic Photoshop dvd training). But for now you need to understand that adjustment layers apply to all visible layers beneath it in the layers palette.

To use Record and Play an Action

As a basic Photoshop user moving on, be aware of this tremendous power. Actions can get really advanced with stops, etc. You can even create and run entire batches to create templates out of a folder of files. The possibilities are endless!

How about discover hue and saturation

Click on the Colorize box. Now you can move the Hue sliders around to choose a value which you can preview in real-time to see your wall change color.This is cool because, if you’ll notice that the wall is still retaining its ‘texture’ and isn’t just being ‘filled’ with a solid color. This makes Hue/Saturation a great adjustment tool. You can use it a lot for such things as changing the color of people’s clothes or hair.

Making a Website Layout in Photoshop

This tutorial goes through the steps of using Adobe Photoshop to create a website template that looks like a circuit board.
This layout is just an aesthetic design, so the technical details are not accurate. If you want to make your layout technically accurate, please feel free to do so.