Adobe Photoshop - Articles - Zimbio

Learning Photoshop?

Thu, 25 Jul 2008 11:28:02 GMT

posted by michaelra

I found a couple of sites when I was trying to find a simple Adobe Photoshop tutorial to put an effect out of my photos.

You won’t find hundreds of tutorials in there, but most of them are easy to learn, especially if you are not a designer, but want to play around with Adobe Photoshop. These sites give you a step by step guide with screenshots. Worth having a look.

The first Adobe Photoshop Tutorial site is “Photoshop CS Tutorial”

Photoshop CS Tutorial seems to focus more on how to enhance your photo images, rather than creating 3D effects on Photoshop.

Unleash the beauty within!

Check out the Photoshop CS Tutorial site here.

The second Adobe Photoshop Tutorial Site is “Photoshop Lady”.

Photoshop Lady will teach you all the tips and tricks to create masterpiece effects, such as 3D Effects, Abstract Effects, Drawing Effects, how to make icons, and many more!

Lots of cool stuffs inside!

Check out Photoshop Lady’s site here

Feel free to share your own designs with Photoshop here on my comments section. I’d love to see what people can do with Photoshop (as I’m no good with it - I guess a programmer can’t be a good designer, and vice versa? :D)

Acrobat Training Should Always Include Bookmarks

Thu, 25 Jul 2008 16:04:00 GMT

posted by tomstateler
By Lynne Kramer
When we run Adobe Acrobat training courses in London, one of the first topics we tackle is bookmarks. Almost everyone will agree that PDFs are a great invention but it can sometimes be rather tedious to navigate through them. That's where bookmarks become useful: they are clickable headings which take you to a specific part of the PDF document and allow you to get around a lot faster than scrolling or paging.

When you distribute PDFs that contain important information about your products or services, you want to make sure that your audience can get to key facts as quickly as possible. Adding bookmarks to your PDF files can make them more useful and attractive to potential clients.

The bookmarks panel is one of the navigation panels normally displayed on the left of the Acrobat Reader screen. To show bookmarks, click on the bookmark icon or choose View - Navigation Panels - Bookmarks. Click on a bookmark to move to the page that it links to.

Bookmarks cannot be created using Acrobat Reader: you will need Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard, the versions of Acrobat you have to pay for. But, for the most part, you will also need one of these two bits of software to create your PDF as well.

Once you have created the PDF, open it with Acrobat Standard or Professional and open the Bookmarks panel. Next, navigate to the first page that you want your audience to be able to find easily, choose New Bookmark from the Options menu in the top right of the Bookmarks panel and enter a name for the bookmark. Repeat this procedure to create as many bookmarks as you think useful.

Creating bookmarks can be bit tedious. However, there are a few ways of speeding things up. Firstly, you don't have to type a name for each bookmark. You can highlight some text on the page then choose New Bookmark. Acrobat uses the highlighted text as the name of the bookmark. Another thing you can do is to use the keyboard shortcut for New Bookmark. This, as you can probably guess, is Control-B.

You can also generate bookmarks automatically. For example, there is Adobe PDFMaker. This handy utility is automatically installed along with Acrobat Standard or Professional and creates an extra menu in all Microsoft Office programs called "Adobe PDF". It also creates an "Adobe PDFMaker" toolbar.

When you create a PDF using the Acrobat PDFMaker, any paragraphs formatted with a Word heading style, e.g., "Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc., will automatically create PDF bookmarks as do all entries in tables of content and indexes. In the same way, if you PDF an Excel workbook with the PDFMaker, bookmarks to each sheet will be automatically generated. In PowerPoint, too, bookmarks to every slide in the presentation will be automatically generated.

The major DTP packages will also automatically create PDF bookmarks based on styles, indexes and tables of content), in much the same way as Word. This applies to QuarkXPress, InDesign and Serif PagePlus. If you own one of these three software applications, you don't actually need to have a copy of Acrobat to create your PDF files, since this capability is built-in to each of these brilliant programs.

It is also worth mentioning that bookmarks can do more than just link to a particular page within the PDF document. Firstly, by default, they actually link to a view rather than a page. Thus, for example, if a page in your document contains a map, you can zoom in on the map till it fills the screen and then create a bookmark. When your users click this bookmark, they will be taken to the exact zoom level that was current when the bookmark was created.

Free Photoshop Tutorials - Get Photoshop Tips

Wed, 24 Jul 2008 17:46:00 GMT

posted by tomstateler
By David Peters
Want to get rid of that nasty shine that you get taking pictures? Well now you can, follow these easy steps: Let's start with a great, overlooked trick. After opening the image, open the same image again in a new window. In Photoshop, choose Window ->Arrange -> New Window. In Elements choose View->New Window. This allows you to view one window zoomed in for detail work and the other window at 100% so you can judge the effects. Using the magnifying glass tool draw a box around the area of shine. Make the box big enough to also show a fair amount of un-shiny skin. Select the Clone tool. At the top of the page select Mode: Darken and use the slider to set Opacity at 50%.Using the Clone Tool, select an area of un-shiny skin by putting the circle over the area and holding down the Alt button while left-clicking the mouse. To best match skin tone try to select the area of skin closest to the shine. Quick tip, to easily resize the Clone Tool circle simply use the bracket keys, [ and ] - much easier than moving your cursor back and forth between the photo and the Size slider. Now simply click on the shiny area and watch the magic happen. You'll have to experiment a little for best effect, and for larger areas be sure to resample the un-shiny skin frequently. In the zoomed-in image the effect might look too obvious, so you'll need to keep an eye on the 100% image to track your progress. Notice the difference on the tip of the nose, the cheek, and above his eye.

For those who do not know, Adobe Photoshop is a program designed to let people edit various images on their computers. Its primary purpose is to let people perform touch ups on pictures before printing them. Of course, each succeeding version of Adobe Photoshop included more and more tools which let people add effects and do various other things to their photographs. The Adobe Photoshop of today actually allows people to add sound and animation to their photographs for sharing on the internet. In the past, people who took bad pictures were stuck with them. A lot of things can go wrong in a picture. There's the usual red-eye, skewed angles, shaky focus and others. Adobe Photoshop was the tool that made all of these things disappear. With Adobe Photoshop, people can take pictures like amateurs and still produce images like pros! However, like almost any other person who has been held back by the fear that the Photoshop CS might be too sophisticated and complicated to be learned, there is a need to first familiarize with the basic and the advanced functions of the software. Even Adobe Systems recognize the fact that its Photoshop CS offering is challenging to use. Do not fret. There are now numerous ways on how you could easily and conveniently get a tutorial for the software. You would logically not be able to learn how to use the computer program for yourself. However, there are many centers and firms that aim to provide crash courses and lessons for the initiative.

For consumers with old family photos to restore and enhance, there is now a new easy-to-use internet offering that provides an absolutely no-obligation service. Using only e-mail or the good old postal service to deliver photos to Caledonian Digital, even the most inexperienced computer users have nothing to fear.Glasgow, Scotland (PRWEB) August 18, 2006 - UK based Caledonian Digital launches a no-obligation Photo Restoration and Digital Enhancement service that even consumers with only basic computer and internet experience can use. With no requirement to create an account, log in, upload files or download software, Caledonian Digital's new online photo restoration service is easy to use. Using only e-mail or the postal service, even the most novice computer and internet user can feel confident using this service.Customers either send their photographs by post, which are then scanned on-site and returned, or they send scans of their photos or images from digital cameras by e-mail.Requests for service will be completed within 72 hours of receipt of photos or images, and all purchased orders include 1 free 6x4 print, with free shipping worldwide.

To use the dodge tool, select it in the toolbox, choose your settings in the options bar, pick a brush from the pop-up palette, and drag in the image to lighten the chosen tones. This tool has an effect on click, but does not do any additional work until it's moved (unless you click the airbrush button). However, repeated stroking over the same area does have a cumulative effect. If you choose Edit > Fade immediately after using this tool, you can change the opacity of the strokes you have just applied.

In photoshop there is an awesome tool called the spot healing tool. There are soemtimes the photos that you really don't like becuase of an object that is in side the picture. What you can do is remove that thing and replace it with the background of the rest of the photo. It's easy enough to do but does take some practice. You will easily click on or drag accross the object that you dislike and it will be gone. Then the retouched area is combined with the background around it creating a flawless area where the object used to be. It's that easy!

Photoshop is the dream machine for all photo enhancers and designers. Not only can you make any portrait look perfect, you can do it easily and convincingly once you know how. It's always a good idea to make a new layer, an exact duplicate, of your photo before you ever start the enhancement process. That way, if you decide you need to undo several steps, you'll always be able to quickly undo. Click "Layer" in the horizontal menu bar, click "Duplicate Layer," then click "Ok." Onward to the teeth-whitening.

Tons of people are using photoshop, but what aren't they using it for and should? Restoring Old Photographs. Have a look through that old family photo album - the really old one from up in Grandma's attic. Inside there are probably a few photos from way back when that haven't stood the test of time so well. They've got cracks and tears that really spoil their appearance. Scan them into Photoshop, and then set to work with the Clone Stamp, Healing Brush, and Patch tools. The Healing Brush in particular is a great tool for this purpose as it samples data from one part of the picture and blends it in with what's already there. Correcting Mistakes. We've all done it: Had an attack of "finger over the lens syndrome," or got too close with the flash, so our subjects suffer from "red eye" and look like extras from a horror movie. Use the crop tool to salvage something usable from your obscured photo, and the enlarge wizard to blow it up to a reasonable size. For "red eye" and "pet eye," use the eyedropper tool to sample color from around the iris, and a brush to paint away the red.

Adding your own options to the XP right click menu.

Wed, 26 Jun 2008 12:42:00 GMT

posted by AskTheAdmin
As avid Windows users you have seen how applications add right click menu options. For instance Mcafee antiVirus adds a shortcut to Scan For Threats in the selected folder or Resco's options to encrypt or de-crypt a folder.

Now you want to add useful right click options for yourself and AtA is here to show you how!

It is actually pretty easy and involves NO registry editing like you might have expected. Simply open up my computer choose Folder Options and then File Types

And then click the advanced button and then the New button to associate an Action with this file type. For this example I am associating JPG files with editing in Adobe CS2. In the action line I type what I want to show up on the right click menu and the application used to perform action is the command line for the magic behind the shortcut.

I advise you to use the Browse button to browse on over to the EXE associated with the application you want to open. Here I browsed over to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Photoshop.exe . It puts this in quotes leave them there and put a space after the last quote and add another quote followed by %L and another quote. This passes the selected file name to the application. Without this it will just open Photoshop and what good it that?

But after you are finished and click ok on all the open windows you can go check out your handy work by right clicking on a JPG...

And what do you know? It actually works! Ah what a great way to start the day shaving valuable seconds off of my work flow. It might give me an extra 15 minutes over the course of the day to play with FireNes!

_TheRightClickThisAdmiN_Check out our RSS feed. Need Free Tech Support? Ask The Admin a Question

Okay...It's Time to FLASH the World!

Mon, 15 Jul 2008 03:04:00 GMT

posted by magic_fella

This IS a blog about Photoshop and Photography. It's going to stay that way. But I wanted to let you all know why I may occasionally break down into sudden fits of Inarticulate Sounds and Complete Suffering. I am told that the world is using FLASH. And it's time for me to set aside significant misgivings and actually learn this Adobe program.Most of my professional life has been spent avoiding anything to do with coding or the mega-geek stuff that makes this old brain ache at the very notion of yet another learning curve. You may or may not know that I am (in addition making a chunk of my income working with Photoshop and PowerPoint) a professional magician. I work with corporations doing trade shows and I do stage shows for kids. I like it all. My first coding avoidance technique had be the design my website (http://theseriouslyfunnymagicguy.com/) which I took from a Dreamweaver template (for a SPA!) and created with great fear and trembling. But more and more clients are demanding Flash in addition to Photoshop and PowerPoint. I created my own logo (the guy in the upper left corner) from a picture my wife took of me one evening in Rome. I decided against anything showy and decided to go with the photo and a plain text. I've designed a few logos in my time (which pre-dates the dinosaurs) and, while clients often want something really flashy, the intent of a logo is to communicate an idea clearly.Have you noticed that I am even avoiding dealing with Flash in this blog? **sigh** So the other day I took the plunge, spent money on Adobe Flash CS3, downloaded a couple of courses and got a library book on Flash CS3 (I used to buy TONS of books but noticed that I read them once and pretty much forgot about them) and started learning. **sigh** You know what I felt when I looked at the Flash desktop for the first time? It was very similar to the feeling I had when I looked at Photoshop for the first time. Only the toolbar was familiar. But there were TONS of things I didn't recognize. It was sort of like being in a country where you sort of speak the language -- but not really. It was an "Oh my God" moment. So I have an acute sympathy for those of you approaching Photoshop for the first time. So here I go. Don't worry. I won't file endless updates on the learning of a new program. But I might mention it now and then. It will most likely be an inarticulate sound of human suffering as my brain stretches into uncomfortable horizons. I understand that the above logo (developed in Photoshop of course) can be made to do some very cool things once I understand Flash. So that's what I am going to do. Prepare to be Flashed, World. Eventually.