Sunday, 19 March 2017
week 9 & 10 brief notes
week 9 _ Making selection
- Using the geometric Marquee tools
. Rectangular Marquee Tool is going to be selected by default , it's a good base tool to come back to because when you right-click with this tool, you gain access to some of the most important commands in Photoshop and the tool's cursor is unobtrusive. Plus, it's really easy to use. If you want to select a rectangular portion of your image, you just go ahead and drag with the tool like so. If you then want to deselect the image, then just go ahead and click outside the selection. If you want to draw a perfect square, then as you're dragging with the tool, go ahead and press and hold the Shift key, like so. And notice, if at any time release the Shift key, then will return to a rectangular selection. So again, if you want a square after you begin dragging, then press and hold the Shift key and keep that key down until you release the mouse button, like so. All right, in addition to the Rectangular Marquee, we also have the Elliptical Marquee Tool, which we'll see in a moment, as well as the Single Row and Column Marquees. Then select a single row of pixels inside the image. By contrast, if switch to the Single Column Marquee Tool and click, then going to select a single column of pixels inside the image. Now, even though I don't use these tools very often, almost never in fact, they can every once in a while, be useful for drawing thin lines. But much more useful are these two guys right here, the Rectangular Marquee Tool and the Elliptical Marquee Tool, which is why they have keyboard shortcuts of M.So just go ahead and press the up arrow key a couple of times in order to nudge that selection outline upward. And again, emphasize, not moving the selected image upward, just moving the selection outline. All right, now I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose the Copy command, or you can just press Control C, or Command C on the Mac, and then switch over to my base image right here. go ahead and zoom out as well. And return to the Edit menu and choose the Paste command, or you can press Control V, or Command V on the Mac, to paste Mars on its own independent layer.And also, go ahead and double-click on this layer name, here inside the Layers panel, and rename this layer Mars. And that's how you use the geometric marquee tools to select either rectangular or elliptical image elements here inside Photoshop.
-Painting with quick selection tool
.Using the quick selection tool, which allows you to brush in selection outlines here inside Photoshop. go ahead and switch over to my image in progress with Mars sitting right here in the middle of it, and turn off the Mars layer for now, just so can better see what doing. Now, going to convert this flat background into an independent layer by double-clicking on it to bring up the new layer dialog box.just go ahead and call this guy, "Landscape" and click okay. Now, we want to mask away the sky, and the easiest way to do that is to select this fourth tool down, which is the quick selection tool. If you're not seeing it, go ahead and click and hold on that tool and select the quick selection tool from the fly-out menu. Now, we want to make our cursor an awful lot bigger. By default, it's set to 30 pixels as you can see up here. You can click on that little down pointing arrow head and dial in a different value, such as 100 pixels, or you can also change the size of the cursor on the fly by pressing the square bracket keys that are next to the P, as in Paul, key on an American keyboard.So pressing the right bracket key makes the cursor bigger. Pressing the left bracket key makes it smaller. Now to select these outcroppings, all you need to do is brush generally inside them. You don’t need to get close to the edge, or at least not that close, and that’s because what Photoshop is doing, and go ahead and zoom in so we can see, is finding what it considers to be edges. An edge, by the way, is an area of rapid luminance contrast in one or more channels. In other words, right here we're seeing this contrast between this bright rock and this blue sky.You basically want to paint all the way down here, if you like, in order to add more to the mountain. The real thing that we want to do though is delineate the mountain from the sky. One of things you're going to notice about this tool is sometimes when you're using it, you'll see an edge as you're painting, and then when you release, the edge will transform. It'll change ever so slightly. Sometimes it actually changes pretty erratically. So, the selection outline you're seeing as you paint isn't always entirely accurate. Now notice that still have this area down here at the bottom of the image that haven't selected. could continue to paint with this tool if want to or just go ahead and zoom out here a little bit. could add in the effect of a different selection tool. So in other words, you can mix and match the effects of different selection tools as much as you want.
- Add , subtract and intersect selections
.switch back to the Rectangular Marquis tool by selecting that tool from the Marquis Tool flyout menu. And now, notice if drag inside the selection and this is true when you're using any selection tool, what you'll do is you'll move that selection outline to a different location, which can sometimes be helpful, but in this case, it's obviously not what I want.So just go ahead and press control Z or command Z on the MAC to undo that move. If drag outside the selection, then begin a new selection outline and wipe out the old one. Again, that's not what want so press control Z or command Z on the MAC to undo that change. Now let's say you want to add to a selection outline, one option is to go up here to these icons on the left side of the options bar and notice the second icon in reads Add to Selection. If go ahead and click on that guy and drag, then will add to the existing selection outline, like so.Again, that's not what I want so press control Z or command Z on the MAC. You also have these options to subtract from the existing selection outline or find the intersection of one selection and another. And just so you can see what that looks like, go ahead and select the Intersection option and then marquis around this area. And notice now, left with just the intersection of that rectangular marquis and my previous selection outline. All right, go ahead and undo that, and of course,going to be doing a lot of undoing .And apparently, should never have selected it in the first place because this is proving to be pretty hard. So just go ahead and reduce my cursor even more and alt paint that sky like so and get in there as closely as possible. Basically, when you're drawing selections like this, it's better to select too little than too much because if you select to much, you'll end up with halos, in our case, blue sky halos around your selection outlines. So go ahead and alt click that little bit of sky away and that little bit of sky as well.And now it looks like we have it so go ahead and press control zero or command zero on the MAC so that we can see the marching ants surrounding these jagged rocks all the way down to the very bottom of the image. And that is how you add to or subtract from an existing selection outline using any selection tool available to you here inside Photoshop.
- Colorizing a layer with color overlay
-. In the end, decided that I wanted to change the color of these clouds here. So that they better match the red inside this Mars-shaped moon. And while this has nothing to do with selections, it is a really great trick for colorizing a single layer, not using a hue saturation adjustment layer, but rather more simply using a color overlay effect. going to start by clicking on the clouds layer to select it. Then drop down to the fx icon at the bottom of the layers panel and choose color overlay. By default, that may end up filling all of your clouds with red like so. That's because, you want to change your blend mode from normal to color if you want to do a straight colorization like so. So you can see now managed to colorize my clouds red. Or, if you wan to maintain the original saturation values, and just change the hue and nothing more, then choose hue instead. In which case, we'll get a slightly more muted effect. Now I can change the color to anything want.go ahead and click on the color swatch. For example, if wanted to make the clouds orange could change the hue value to 30 degrees. And we'd have these muted oranges in the background. Or you can just lift a color from the image itself. Notice, as soon as moved my cursor out of the color picker dialogue box, it changes to an eyedropper, at which point just go ahead and click somewhere in Mars there in order to lift its hue saturation and brightness values. And now going to change the hue to 355, let's say. take the saturation value to 40%, although that doesn't really matter, because we're actually using the original saturation values in the clouds themselves, and brightness value of 100% is just fine. At which point, go ahead and click "Ok" a couple of times in order to apply that change. And the result is the actual final version of the composition that we can see full screen when I press shift+f like so. And then scroll up a little bit as well, so that we can see that the result is a kind of fiery bounce coming off the planet and reflecting inside the clouds.
week10 _ The quick mask mode
. Combining the best of the selection tools
.first thing to do is grab that Quick Selection Tool, if need be from this flyout menu.You may recall that it has a keyboard shortcut of "w", after its companion, the Magic Wand Tool. Now, before start every chapter, just so that you and are on the same page, go ahead and right-click on whatever tool is showing on the far-left side of the Options bar, and I choose Reset All Tools, which is why the Auto-Enhance check box is turned off. That is not what we want, we want it turned on so that we get the highest quality selection outlines possible. Next, going to go ahead and paint above the bird, like so, and notice that Photoshop does a pretty darn good job of selecting this region, but as soon as round the bend here, end up selecting into the beak.And all can say about that is that is the Quick Selection Tool for you. It oftentimes cannot see extremely obvious details. Which is why we'll need to come back to the beak in just a moment. But first, just go ahead and paint under the bird. Everything works nicely down here. And then paint around, under the tail feathers, and that works nicely as well. And of course, always bear in mind that the Quick Selection Tool is automatically set up to add to an existing selection. The problem is, as soon as paint above the feathers, end up selecting into that entire wing.And again, it can be quite mystifying what this tool is up to at times, but what can assure you is that this approach is not going to work. So, just go ahead and press Ctrl-Z, or Cmd-Z on the Mac, to undo that change. And now, just go ahead and zoom in on this wing region here, so that we can see it a little better onscreen, and switch from the Quick Selection Tool to the Magic Wand Tool. could also do that by pressing Shift-W. Now, by default, the Magic Wand Tool is set up to create a new selection outline. If you want to add to the existing selection, press the Shift key, so you can see a little plus sign next to the cursor, and click.Alright, now double-click in order to complete that selection and we end up with this effect here. So, at this point, selected just about all of the background. The bird, of course, is deselected, and then we have some garbage over here on the left-hand side, which we will fix in the very next movie, in the Quick Mask Mode. But for now, that's how you combine the best of the three automated selection tools, the Quick Selection Tool, which sees the big edges, the Magic Wand Tool, which sees differences in luminance levels, of course on a channel-by-channel basis, and then finally, the Magnetic Lasso Tool, which is great for fine edges.
- The fastest way to save a selection
.to save a selection is to go up to the "Select" menu and choose the "Save Selection" command.And when you do you're going to generate a new channel here inside the Channels panel. But, if only for the sake of variety,just go ahead and cancel out of that dialog box. The easier way to save a selection is to go to the Channels panel and then click on this icon down here at the bottom, the one that says "Save selection as channel." And when you do, Photoshop will go ahead and automatically create a new channel and it'll auto-name it as well. I'd say, though, that you want to name the channel, at which point you can go ahead and double-click on that channel's name and then give it some other name instead.But let's say you don't want to do that, you want to name the channel as you make it. Well in that case, just go ahead and drag that channel down to the trash icon in order to get rid of it, and instead of clicking on this icon, press and hold the "alt" key, or the "opt" key and click. And that will display the "New Channel" dialog box. And I'll just go ahead and call this guy "rough selection," like so, and then click "OK." And now managed to save off my work. The thing is really saved it until go up to the "File" menu and choose the "Save" command, at which point Photoshop will prompt me to use a different file format because, after all, the current format, which is JPEG, does not accommodate alpha channels.The best format if you're working with a flat image, that is, no layers, with one or more alpha channels is the TIFF format right here. So the native Photoshop format is going to do just fine, but TIFF is going to afford you better compression, so you're going to get a smaller file size. And I'm just going to go ahead and call this guy "Rough selection" once again, and then make sure that the "Alpha Channels" check box is turned on, that's very important, and that "As a Copy" is off. And now I might as well turn on the Thumbnail here and click "Save," and then inside this dialog box make sure that LZW Compression is turned on. That's the best way to reduce the size of your mask. It is entirely lossless compression, by the way, so it's not going to hurt a darned thing. Pixel Order you leave alone, Byte Order you can do whatever you want with. You don't want the Image Pyramid so you just want to go ahead and click "OK" at this point to save that selection. And so remember, whenever you're spending more than about five minutes on a selection outline, be sure to go ahead and save it here inside the Channels panel, just by clicking on this second icon in, down here at the bottom of the panel, the one that reads "Save selection as channel," or, if you want to name the channel as you make it, go ahead and "alt" or "opt" click that icon.
- Reversing a mask with invert
. convert it to an independent layer by switching back to the Layers panel and then double-clicking on the Background item and that'll bring up the New Layer dialog box.At which point just go ahead and name this layer bird and click OK. Alright, now we need to convert the selection to a layer mask by dropping down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and clicking on it. At which point, of course, realize my mistake, which is I never got around to selecting the bird, I just selected its background. So go ahead and press control + Z, or command + Z on the Mac, to undo that change. I could just go up to the Select menu and choose the Inverse command, or press control + shift + I, or command + shift + I on a Mac, but I want to show you how things work in the quick mask mode.So go ahead and switch over to the quick mask mode by clicking on this icon down here at the bottom of the toolbox or can press the Q key like so. At which point see sure enough he is deselected because of the Rubylith overlay and the background is selected. Now to inverse that all we have to do is invert the image. And here's why. go ahead and switch over to the Channels panel and you can see if turn off the RGB image the problem is that the bird is black, representing an area of deselection and the background is white, which translates to selection. Now incidentally can turn the RGB composite on and off when working inside the quick mask mode just by clicking in this column of eyeballs or can press the ~ key. And the ~ key is the one that's in the upper left corner between the escape and tab keys on an American keyboard. So you press the tilde key to turn RGB back on, you press the tilde key to turn it back off. going to go ahead and turn it back on because want you to see that the way to reverse a selection once again in the quick mask mode is to go up to the Image menu, choose Adjustments, and choose Invert, which has a keyboard shortcut of ctrl + I, or cmd + I on the Mac.And now if you go ahead and switch to that image you'll see your wonderfully selected bird against its new background. And notice that even those blurry wings look absolutely great. But if for some reason you're not altogether happy with them you can just go ahead and select that layer mask by clicking on its thumbnail here inside the Layers panel, and then you can once again go ahead and select the Smudge Tool from the Blur Tool flyout menu, you can increase the size of your cursor like crazy, and then you can just basically smear that mask back and forth as much as you like.smear the top of the wing back and forth a little bit as well and maybe even do so with the smaller cursor in order to produce that effect there. And that's how you introduce your wonderfully quick masked image into a new background, as well as how you reverse a mask using the Invert command and either show or hide the RGB composite by pressing tilde.
-Expanding and contracting a selection
. to the Select menu and not choosing Grow, even though you would think that that's the way to work, but you may recall from the previous chapter, grow is actually going to expand the selection according to the magic wand tolerance value.So Expand is going to make the selection outline larger by a specific number of pixels, Contract is going to make it smaller by a certain number of pixels. So if were to choose the Contract command for example, and notice that one of the downsides of this command is it has no preview, but let's say decided to contract the selection by just a single pixel, and then click OK, that selection outlines become thinner than they were before, which of course is the opposite of what looking for, so just go ahead and press ctrl + z or cmd + z on the Mac to undo that effect. eturn to the Select menu, choose Modify, and choose Expand, and will once again enter a value of just one pixel. Incidentally, you don't need to worry about this checkbox because we're nowhere near the boundaries of the canvas and then click OK, and notice now the selection outlines have grown to cover up all of the black. So we won't be having that problem we did at the end of the previous movie. Alright now, go up to the Layer menu, choose New Fill Layer, and choose Solid Color, we'll go ahead and once again call this layer lead, click OK, make sure the hue and saturation values are zero, and then take the brightness value up to 50%, and click OK.And notice we have now completely covered up the black in the background. Alright, now we need to add some shading in the form of an effect known as bevel and emboss. And you get to it by dropping down to the fx icon at the bottom of the layers panel and then choose Bevel Emboss, and the default settings are pretty much what we're looking for but let me walk you through these really quick. Style should be set to Inner Bevel so that we're seeing the shading on the inside. Technique is smooth, a depth of 100% is just fine, direction should be up, the size value may be a little different than the default.set it to five pixels, we want soften set to zero, angle and altitude should be 135 and 30, respectively, we're not worried about the gloss contour, the highlight mode should be screen, the shadow mode should be multiply, after all, screen is the bright mode and multiply is the dark mode. have the colors set to white and black respectively and both opacity values are 75%. In which case, you will get the effect you're seeing on-screen as soon as you click OK in order to accept that effect.Alright, now go ahead and zoom out by pressing ctrl + 0 or cmd + 0 on the Mac, and will turn off that layer of white in order to expose that cheerful background. Alright now, believe it or not, there's just a couple of changes left here. going to turn off the effect layer for a moment so that you can see the original bird in the background. Go ahead and click on that bird. Now, he should be translucent so that we can see the clouds, for example, in back of him, but if were to just press the "5" key to reduce the opacity to 50%, as you can see in the upper right corner of the layers panel, we would be able to see through to him, but it's not the right effect.It just ends up making the hummingbird look kind of dingy, so go ahead and take that value back up to 100% by pressing the "0" key. What we want to do is darken the background as if we're seeing through glass. And you can achieve that effect using the preeminent darkening mode inside Photoshop, which is multiply. And that will produce this effect right here. Alright, now we want to integrate the colors from that effect layer, so just go ahead and turn that effect layer on, then click on it to make it active. And then, select the foremost contrast mode, which is Overlay, in order to produce this very colorful effect here.And then the last thing did was turned on this string group that contains three layers of string that created in advance. And now as you can see, have a different effect than showed you at the outset, and you're going to have a different effect too because every time you apply stained glass inside Photoshop you get a random result. But with any luck, it looks every bit as good as mine. Alright, now going to press shift + f in order to switch to the fullscreen mode and going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit as well and maybe scroll up so that we can see the top of the bird's wing.And that's how you turn a fakey stained glass effect into something more closely resembling the real thing using a combination of selection techniques that revolve around the quick mask mode.
more accurate and details notes / information at lynda.com
Monday, 27 February 2017
7&8 brief notes
Lesson 7
* 3 auto commands
- Choose a command and it does its thing. If you like the result you keep it, if you don't you press control z and try something else.Made the darkest pixels as dark as it can get and the brightest pixels as bright as it can get without changing one channel differently than another. Which means that this command never affects the color cast. So if you like the color cast of the image and you just want to increase the contrast then auto contrast is the way to go. Alright finally going to scroll down to auto color which is the most complicated of the bunch. And go ahead and click on the auto color layer as well here inside the layers panel.Go up the the image menu and choose auto color. This time what Photoshop has done is it's located the darkest pixel in the composite image and turned it a neutral black. Then it located the brightest color in the composite image and turned it a neutral white and then it did it's best to locate the most representative mid-tone pixel and it turned it a neutral gray. This isn't always the way it turns out but in the case of our money we have some neutral shadow lines, we have these neutral highlights in the paper, and we have neutral gray values throughout except in those areas where we had an awful lot of color as in the case of this treasury stamp, the serial number, and these large digits down here in the lower right corner.Alright so I'll just go ahead and press control 0 or command 0 on the Mac to zoom out so that you can see all four of the bills. The unmodified one in the upper left corner, the auto tone modification in the lower left, the auto contrast in the upper right, and the auto color down here in the lower right. Of the three, auto contrast ends up producing the best result where this particular image is concerned. But as we'll see in the next movie, things can work differently with a continuous tone photograph. And that's my overview of the three auto functions auto tone, auto contrast, and auto color here inside Photoshop.
*Automatic brightness / contrast
- Start with the top layer selected Auto Tone and then go up to the image menu and choose the Auto Tone command. Now remember that Auto Tone is correcting each and every channel independently and as a result, it has a habit of introducing color cast. And in our case, we have a kind of greenish goulish cast going on. Alright, go and turn that layer off, click on the Auto Contrast layer, go up to the image menu and choose Auto Contrast and we end up with this much better balanced image here.not always the case but if all your image needs is more contrast, it doesn't need any color reconfiguring then this command stands a chance of working fine. Alright, now go ahead and click on the Auto Color layer. Turn the Auto Contrast layer off and go up to the image menu and choose Auto Color. Recall that this is the one that tries to find the darkest pixel and make it a neutral black. It finds the brightest pixel and makes it a neutral white and then it tries to find a representative mid-tone pixel and make it a neutral gray.Go up to the image menu and choose Auto Tone which is a command that pretty much wrecked the $100 bill but it does a great job of bringing out the colors inside this image. And then finally, just to make sure the image is looking its best, revisit the image menu, choose adjustments and then choose Brightness/Contrast and a click on the Auto button and sit here and wait for it 'cause it does take a moment or two for this command to work but in due time, will see a brightness value of -4 and a contrast value of 36 and just to make sure like whatsee,turn the preview checkbox off for a moment and then turn it back on and you can see that we are gaining just a little bit of extra contrast.At which point go ahead and click okay to accept that change. Then press Shift + F to switch to the full screen mode and zoom on into turtle. And just so we can see the difference, this is the original version of that photograph. Exactly as captured it with a consumer grade underwater camera and this is what it looks like now. Thanks to the application of the Auto Tone command working together with the Auto button inside the Brightness/Contrast dialog box here inside Photoshop.
*Custom brightness / contrast
- Go up to the Image menu, choose Adjustments, and then choose Brightness Contrast to bring up the Brightness Contrast dialog box. And then you presumably want to go ahead and start by clicking on the Auto button to see what Photoshop comes up with all by itself. Which is not half bad, by the way. If turn off the Preview checkbox, you can see that previously the image was dark and murky and now if turn Preview back on, it's bright, high contrast, and it looks pretty great. But that doesn't mean it need to stick with these values. Decide that Photoshop is adding too much contrast, in which case, take that Contrast value down. It might also decide that the image isn't quite bright enough, in which case increase the Brightness value. Or if it's too dark, can decrease that Brightness value. Now something to know about Brightness Contrast, is that these days it's incapable of clipping pixels. And by that mean that it doesn't allow you to clip your shadows to black or your highlights to white. Now a lot of folks still steer clear of this command because back in the old days it always clipped pixels. Press Shift along with the Up or Down Arrow keys in order to move that value in increments of 10. So this is what happens if press Shift+Down Arrow and this is what happens if press Shift+Up Arrow. And then finally, another way to work, in case you're interested, is you can scrub directly on the word Brightness, or the word Contrast in order to modify that value on the fly. And if you want to change this value in increments of 10, then go ahead and press this Shift key as you scrub. Go with a Brightness value of 50 and a Contrast of 10, at which point go ahead and click Okay to accept the change. And now press Shift+F to switch to the full-screen mode. And just so we can see the difference we've been able to make,press Ctrl+Z. This is that original hawksbill turtle that captured in front of the shipwreck on a recent dive. It's a great shot because managed to get it, but it looks pretty murky, and this is how it looks after a quick and easy application of the Brightness Contrast command.
* Reducing contrast with shadows / Highlights
- Change that Channel setting to Luminosity, and notice, if go ahead and update the histogram, that we have a very spiky histogram indeed, with an awful lot of shadows running against the left-hand side of the graph, and a ton of highlights running into the right side of the graph, and then we have this big dip in the midtones. The sign of a hot, high-contrast image. And so one thing we could do is bring up the Adjustments panel by clicking on that black and white circle, and then, Alt + click or Option + click on the Brightness/Contrast icon, and go ahead and call this guy contrast down, for example, and then,reduce the Contrast value to its absolute minimum of negative 50. And that does virtually nothing, it makes a slight contribution, but nothing like what we need. To take this Colors value right here, down to zero, because otherwise you're going to increase the intensity of the colors inside your image, and you really don't want to do that. And now, you can go ahead and set the amount values to whatever seems appropriate. G o to keep things simple, by setting both the Shadows amount, and the Highlights amount, to 50%, like so. And now, see the histogram again. Notice the top is still shaved off, but as soon as go ahead and click OK, in order to accept that change, we get a much better contoured histogram.Click on the Update button, you can see that it looks to be in pretty darn good shape. So notice that we now have these tapering shadows, as well as these mostly tapering highlights. We still have some spiky action right there at the end, and there's not really anything we can do about these so-called specular highlights right here, that are dancing off the surface of the water. But we now have a ton of midtones, which is a really great thing. So, just to give you a sense of the difference here, go ahead and press Shift + F to switch directly to the full screen mode, and then zoom in on image, and if press Control or Command + Z, this is how the image looked when first opened it, and then if press Control or Command + Z again, this is how it looks now, thanks to our ability to settle down the highlights and open up the shadows in an extremely high-contrast image here inside Photoshop.
Lesson 8
* Identifying the color cast of a photo
- First step is to make sure your Color panel is up on screen. If it isn't, go to the Window menu and choose the Color command. And then you want to go ahead and select the Eyedropper Tool. And if you're seeing some other tool in the slot, then just go ahead and click and hold on it and choose the Eyedropper Tool from the fly out menu. You also have a keyboard shortcut of "i" for Eyedropper. Have a white balance card or a gray card sitting in the shot. However, this is just a candid snapshot. So go to look for something that ought to be, either white or gray. You're going to see this color ring with the old foreground color down at the bottom and the new foreground color at the top. You're also going to see the color identified here inside the Color panel and you can see based on the predominant color inside this field right here that we are looking at a green cast. Set the primary colors of red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta which are industry standard color names. Go ahead and set those primary colors in larger type than the secondary colors of orange, lime, turquoise and so forth. And now also gone ahead and labeled every 15 degree location as well although obviously, these are subjective color names. In any event, we've now manged to identify that the color cast for this image right here falls somewhere in the neighborhood between yellow and full on green and you may recall that the value for the teeth was 140 degrees which is getting into cyan territory.
* Correcting a color cast automatically
- An average an area five pixels wide by five pixels tall, so 25 pixels at a time. And now notice if click, once again inside that brick, now get a slightly different hue value of 77 degrees. Now let's walk through what these values mean here. H stands for hue, which is the core color of the image, as identified in this color wheel, starting at zero degrees for red and wrapping all the way back to 360 degrees, which again, is red. Intensity of the color, we have B for brightness, which goes from zero, which is black, all the way up to 100% which is the brightest version of any given color. Now the saturation value is perhaps the best indicator of the color cast of an image. And that's because it tells us how intense the color cast is. If we see a neutral element inside the image has a very low saturation value of let's say 3%, that's a very good sign. ultimately a blue color cast, but we have a much lower saturation value as well, of just 4%, which is pretty darn neutral, which means that we at least got the brick looking pretty neutral, the teeth however, if go ahead and click and hold inside of them, with the eye dropper tool, you can see that we now have a hue value of 236 degrees, which is blue by the way, and you may recall from the previous movie that formerly we had a hue value of 140 degrees which is green, but our saturation value has gone up to 10%. So it's very possible that what we've done here is change what was formerly a green color cast to what is now a blue color cast . it looks like a closer match for the actual scene. Now, while Auto Color happened to work great for this image, Auto Tone might work better for another image, or just as likely neither command will make a positive difference, in which case we have to make a manual color adjustment.
* Manually adjusting colors with color balance
- Start by trying the Auto commands, but notice if go up to the image menu that Auto Tone through Auto Color are dimmed and that's because currently have an adjustment layer active. Those commands are only applicable to pixel-based layers. So go ahead and click on the background to make it active and then go up to the Image menu and start with Auto Color since it worked so well in the previous movie and that just actually sort of depletes some of the color from the image. So press Control + Z to undo that change and then return to the Image menu and try Auto Tone, which does a pretty good job but not really good enough.Go ahead and press Control + Z . Now, it turns out there's a lot of ways to correct color balance inside of Photoshop, but generally a good place to start is color balance and to add a color balance adjustment layer you go ahead and click on the black and white circle at the bottom of the Layers panel and then you choose the Color Balance command. Or if you want to name the layer as you create it, go ahead and bring up the Adjustments panel by clicking on its icon and then go ahead and Alt + click or Option + click on the second icon in the second row, the one that looks like a little pair of scales.Go ahead and switch back over to the image at hand and change the Tone option to Shadows. And then went ahead and took the magenta green control up to plus 20 and took the yellow blue control down to negative five. And making these modifications using the arrow keys so you can either press just the up or down arrow key or you can press Shift along with an arrow key to modify a value in increments of 10. And then finally went ahead and switched the Tone option to Highlights and clicked in this yellow blue setting right there and pressed Shift + up arrow a total of three times in order to increase that value to plus 30. Go ahead and turn that layer off. That is the original color cast of the image and then if turn the adjustment layer back on we see the new colors inside the image. And again, it's a subjective modification. You might very well come up with different settings, but that is at least one way to manually adjust the color cast of an image using a color balance adjustment layer here inside Photoshop.
* Making even more color with vibrance
- double-click on its thumbnail in order to bring up the Properties panel. And then click in the Saturation value, and press Shift-down arrow a couple of times in order to reduce the color noise, as we're seeing here. Now, of course, that doesn't totally get rid of it, but it makes a big huge difference. Now, go ahead and select the Vibrance layer once again, and take its saturation value down to +70, let's say. And then go ahead and zoom out from the image by pressing Control-0 or Command-0 on the Mac, and select the Vibrance value, which can do, of course, by pressing Shift-enter, here on the PC, or Shift-return on the Mac, and go ahead and crank it up to its maximum, and then press Shift-down arrow a couple of times in order to reduce that value to +80. Saturation value of +70, and then, where Hue/Saturation is concerned, we have a saturation value of +60. At which point, go ahead and hide the properties panel, so that we can better see the image on screen. also want you to see what's going on with the channels, so go up to the Window menu and choose the Channels command in order to bring up my Channels panel. And now, notice the differences between the Red channel, which we're seeing now, notice that it's quite noisy in this area of coral, and then, if switch to the Green channel, we have a very different-looking effect. Switch to the Blue channel, things are more different still, with a very bright sky and some very dark coral. And that is definitely quite different than what we were seeing in the Red channel . Now I'll go back to the Layers panel and Alt- or Option-click on the background. That is the image as it appeared at the beginning of the previous movie, and that's the image as it appears now, thanks to our ability to draw color out of even the most drab image, using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and then enhance those colors that much further using a Vibrance adjustment layer, here inside PhotoShop.
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* 3 auto commands
- Choose a command and it does its thing. If you like the result you keep it, if you don't you press control z and try something else.Made the darkest pixels as dark as it can get and the brightest pixels as bright as it can get without changing one channel differently than another. Which means that this command never affects the color cast. So if you like the color cast of the image and you just want to increase the contrast then auto contrast is the way to go. Alright finally going to scroll down to auto color which is the most complicated of the bunch. And go ahead and click on the auto color layer as well here inside the layers panel.Go up the the image menu and choose auto color. This time what Photoshop has done is it's located the darkest pixel in the composite image and turned it a neutral black. Then it located the brightest color in the composite image and turned it a neutral white and then it did it's best to locate the most representative mid-tone pixel and it turned it a neutral gray. This isn't always the way it turns out but in the case of our money we have some neutral shadow lines, we have these neutral highlights in the paper, and we have neutral gray values throughout except in those areas where we had an awful lot of color as in the case of this treasury stamp, the serial number, and these large digits down here in the lower right corner.Alright so I'll just go ahead and press control 0 or command 0 on the Mac to zoom out so that you can see all four of the bills. The unmodified one in the upper left corner, the auto tone modification in the lower left, the auto contrast in the upper right, and the auto color down here in the lower right. Of the three, auto contrast ends up producing the best result where this particular image is concerned. But as we'll see in the next movie, things can work differently with a continuous tone photograph. And that's my overview of the three auto functions auto tone, auto contrast, and auto color here inside Photoshop.
*Automatic brightness / contrast
- Start with the top layer selected Auto Tone and then go up to the image menu and choose the Auto Tone command. Now remember that Auto Tone is correcting each and every channel independently and as a result, it has a habit of introducing color cast. And in our case, we have a kind of greenish goulish cast going on. Alright, go and turn that layer off, click on the Auto Contrast layer, go up to the image menu and choose Auto Contrast and we end up with this much better balanced image here.not always the case but if all your image needs is more contrast, it doesn't need any color reconfiguring then this command stands a chance of working fine. Alright, now go ahead and click on the Auto Color layer. Turn the Auto Contrast layer off and go up to the image menu and choose Auto Color. Recall that this is the one that tries to find the darkest pixel and make it a neutral black. It finds the brightest pixel and makes it a neutral white and then it tries to find a representative mid-tone pixel and make it a neutral gray.Go up to the image menu and choose Auto Tone which is a command that pretty much wrecked the $100 bill but it does a great job of bringing out the colors inside this image. And then finally, just to make sure the image is looking its best, revisit the image menu, choose adjustments and then choose Brightness/Contrast and a click on the Auto button and sit here and wait for it 'cause it does take a moment or two for this command to work but in due time, will see a brightness value of -4 and a contrast value of 36 and just to make sure like whatsee,turn the preview checkbox off for a moment and then turn it back on and you can see that we are gaining just a little bit of extra contrast.At which point go ahead and click okay to accept that change. Then press Shift + F to switch to the full screen mode and zoom on into turtle. And just so we can see the difference, this is the original version of that photograph. Exactly as captured it with a consumer grade underwater camera and this is what it looks like now. Thanks to the application of the Auto Tone command working together with the Auto button inside the Brightness/Contrast dialog box here inside Photoshop.
*Custom brightness / contrast
- Go up to the Image menu, choose Adjustments, and then choose Brightness Contrast to bring up the Brightness Contrast dialog box. And then you presumably want to go ahead and start by clicking on the Auto button to see what Photoshop comes up with all by itself. Which is not half bad, by the way. If turn off the Preview checkbox, you can see that previously the image was dark and murky and now if turn Preview back on, it's bright, high contrast, and it looks pretty great. But that doesn't mean it need to stick with these values. Decide that Photoshop is adding too much contrast, in which case, take that Contrast value down. It might also decide that the image isn't quite bright enough, in which case increase the Brightness value. Or if it's too dark, can decrease that Brightness value. Now something to know about Brightness Contrast, is that these days it's incapable of clipping pixels. And by that mean that it doesn't allow you to clip your shadows to black or your highlights to white. Now a lot of folks still steer clear of this command because back in the old days it always clipped pixels. Press Shift along with the Up or Down Arrow keys in order to move that value in increments of 10. So this is what happens if press Shift+Down Arrow and this is what happens if press Shift+Up Arrow. And then finally, another way to work, in case you're interested, is you can scrub directly on the word Brightness, or the word Contrast in order to modify that value on the fly. And if you want to change this value in increments of 10, then go ahead and press this Shift key as you scrub. Go with a Brightness value of 50 and a Contrast of 10, at which point go ahead and click Okay to accept the change. And now press Shift+F to switch to the full-screen mode. And just so we can see the difference we've been able to make,press Ctrl+Z. This is that original hawksbill turtle that captured in front of the shipwreck on a recent dive. It's a great shot because managed to get it, but it looks pretty murky, and this is how it looks after a quick and easy application of the Brightness Contrast command.
* Reducing contrast with shadows / Highlights
- Change that Channel setting to Luminosity, and notice, if go ahead and update the histogram, that we have a very spiky histogram indeed, with an awful lot of shadows running against the left-hand side of the graph, and a ton of highlights running into the right side of the graph, and then we have this big dip in the midtones. The sign of a hot, high-contrast image. And so one thing we could do is bring up the Adjustments panel by clicking on that black and white circle, and then, Alt + click or Option + click on the Brightness/Contrast icon, and go ahead and call this guy contrast down, for example, and then,reduce the Contrast value to its absolute minimum of negative 50. And that does virtually nothing, it makes a slight contribution, but nothing like what we need. To take this Colors value right here, down to zero, because otherwise you're going to increase the intensity of the colors inside your image, and you really don't want to do that. And now, you can go ahead and set the amount values to whatever seems appropriate. G o to keep things simple, by setting both the Shadows amount, and the Highlights amount, to 50%, like so. And now, see the histogram again. Notice the top is still shaved off, but as soon as go ahead and click OK, in order to accept that change, we get a much better contoured histogram.Click on the Update button, you can see that it looks to be in pretty darn good shape. So notice that we now have these tapering shadows, as well as these mostly tapering highlights. We still have some spiky action right there at the end, and there's not really anything we can do about these so-called specular highlights right here, that are dancing off the surface of the water. But we now have a ton of midtones, which is a really great thing. So, just to give you a sense of the difference here, go ahead and press Shift + F to switch directly to the full screen mode, and then zoom in on image, and if press Control or Command + Z, this is how the image looked when first opened it, and then if press Control or Command + Z again, this is how it looks now, thanks to our ability to settle down the highlights and open up the shadows in an extremely high-contrast image here inside Photoshop.
Lesson 8
* Identifying the color cast of a photo
- First step is to make sure your Color panel is up on screen. If it isn't, go to the Window menu and choose the Color command. And then you want to go ahead and select the Eyedropper Tool. And if you're seeing some other tool in the slot, then just go ahead and click and hold on it and choose the Eyedropper Tool from the fly out menu. You also have a keyboard shortcut of "i" for Eyedropper. Have a white balance card or a gray card sitting in the shot. However, this is just a candid snapshot. So go to look for something that ought to be, either white or gray. You're going to see this color ring with the old foreground color down at the bottom and the new foreground color at the top. You're also going to see the color identified here inside the Color panel and you can see based on the predominant color inside this field right here that we are looking at a green cast. Set the primary colors of red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta which are industry standard color names. Go ahead and set those primary colors in larger type than the secondary colors of orange, lime, turquoise and so forth. And now also gone ahead and labeled every 15 degree location as well although obviously, these are subjective color names. In any event, we've now manged to identify that the color cast for this image right here falls somewhere in the neighborhood between yellow and full on green and you may recall that the value for the teeth was 140 degrees which is getting into cyan territory.
* Correcting a color cast automatically
- An average an area five pixels wide by five pixels tall, so 25 pixels at a time. And now notice if click, once again inside that brick, now get a slightly different hue value of 77 degrees. Now let's walk through what these values mean here. H stands for hue, which is the core color of the image, as identified in this color wheel, starting at zero degrees for red and wrapping all the way back to 360 degrees, which again, is red. Intensity of the color, we have B for brightness, which goes from zero, which is black, all the way up to 100% which is the brightest version of any given color. Now the saturation value is perhaps the best indicator of the color cast of an image. And that's because it tells us how intense the color cast is. If we see a neutral element inside the image has a very low saturation value of let's say 3%, that's a very good sign. ultimately a blue color cast, but we have a much lower saturation value as well, of just 4%, which is pretty darn neutral, which means that we at least got the brick looking pretty neutral, the teeth however, if go ahead and click and hold inside of them, with the eye dropper tool, you can see that we now have a hue value of 236 degrees, which is blue by the way, and you may recall from the previous movie that formerly we had a hue value of 140 degrees which is green, but our saturation value has gone up to 10%. So it's very possible that what we've done here is change what was formerly a green color cast to what is now a blue color cast . it looks like a closer match for the actual scene. Now, while Auto Color happened to work great for this image, Auto Tone might work better for another image, or just as likely neither command will make a positive difference, in which case we have to make a manual color adjustment.
* Manually adjusting colors with color balance
- Start by trying the Auto commands, but notice if go up to the image menu that Auto Tone through Auto Color are dimmed and that's because currently have an adjustment layer active. Those commands are only applicable to pixel-based layers. So go ahead and click on the background to make it active and then go up to the Image menu and start with Auto Color since it worked so well in the previous movie and that just actually sort of depletes some of the color from the image. So press Control + Z to undo that change and then return to the Image menu and try Auto Tone, which does a pretty good job but not really good enough.Go ahead and press Control + Z . Now, it turns out there's a lot of ways to correct color balance inside of Photoshop, but generally a good place to start is color balance and to add a color balance adjustment layer you go ahead and click on the black and white circle at the bottom of the Layers panel and then you choose the Color Balance command. Or if you want to name the layer as you create it, go ahead and bring up the Adjustments panel by clicking on its icon and then go ahead and Alt + click or Option + click on the second icon in the second row, the one that looks like a little pair of scales.Go ahead and switch back over to the image at hand and change the Tone option to Shadows. And then went ahead and took the magenta green control up to plus 20 and took the yellow blue control down to negative five. And making these modifications using the arrow keys so you can either press just the up or down arrow key or you can press Shift along with an arrow key to modify a value in increments of 10. And then finally went ahead and switched the Tone option to Highlights and clicked in this yellow blue setting right there and pressed Shift + up arrow a total of three times in order to increase that value to plus 30. Go ahead and turn that layer off. That is the original color cast of the image and then if turn the adjustment layer back on we see the new colors inside the image. And again, it's a subjective modification. You might very well come up with different settings, but that is at least one way to manually adjust the color cast of an image using a color balance adjustment layer here inside Photoshop.
* Making even more color with vibrance
- double-click on its thumbnail in order to bring up the Properties panel. And then click in the Saturation value, and press Shift-down arrow a couple of times in order to reduce the color noise, as we're seeing here. Now, of course, that doesn't totally get rid of it, but it makes a big huge difference. Now, go ahead and select the Vibrance layer once again, and take its saturation value down to +70, let's say. And then go ahead and zoom out from the image by pressing Control-0 or Command-0 on the Mac, and select the Vibrance value, which can do, of course, by pressing Shift-enter, here on the PC, or Shift-return on the Mac, and go ahead and crank it up to its maximum, and then press Shift-down arrow a couple of times in order to reduce that value to +80. Saturation value of +70, and then, where Hue/Saturation is concerned, we have a saturation value of +60. At which point, go ahead and hide the properties panel, so that we can better see the image on screen. also want you to see what's going on with the channels, so go up to the Window menu and choose the Channels command in order to bring up my Channels panel. And now, notice the differences between the Red channel, which we're seeing now, notice that it's quite noisy in this area of coral, and then, if switch to the Green channel, we have a very different-looking effect. Switch to the Blue channel, things are more different still, with a very bright sky and some very dark coral. And that is definitely quite different than what we were seeing in the Red channel . Now I'll go back to the Layers panel and Alt- or Option-click on the background. That is the image as it appeared at the beginning of the previous movie, and that's the image as it appears now, thanks to our ability to draw color out of even the most drab image, using a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and then enhance those colors that much further using a Vibrance adjustment layer, here inside PhotoShop.
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6 brief notes on saving
Lesson 6
* Saving layers to the native Psd format
- Go ahead and click on the "Don't Resolve" button, because, if you scroll up the list here, you can see that the one and only editable type layer is actually turned off, so it's not even visible at the moment. Let's say what wanted to do is get rid of all the hidden layers inside the image, so don't get that font warning again. In that case, would click on the Fly Out Menu icon in the upper right corner of the layers panel, and choose "Delete hidden layers" to get rid of them. And then, in response to the alert message, click on the "Yes" button in order to make those layers go away.Now you can see that have an asterisk outside the parentheses, which tells me that have unsaved changes. Which means that I could update my existing file by going to the File Menu and choosing the "Save" command, or you have that standard keyboard shortcut of "Control S", or if you wanted to save an independent copy then you would choose "Save As", which has a slightly different keyboard shortcut of "Control Shift S". But before you do, visit a preference setting. And to get to it, go to the Edit Menu here on the PC.
* Saving a flat print image to TIFF
- TIFF automatically goes ahead and saves a flat version of the image along with the layers, so it generates larger files then you get using the PSD format with maxAlso it's a matter of tradition. People who get TIFF files do not expect layers to be inside them, so it can really thrown for a loop and when you're passing off an image for print you generally want to keep it as small as possible. So let's a want to save a copy of this layered image in the TIFF format. It would go up to the file menu and choose the save as command. Or got that keyboard shortcut of control shift S or command shift S on a Mac. Just go ahead and call this guy pre-press cover let's say and then change the file format from PSD to TIFF which by the way stands for Tagged Image File Format.imize compatibility turned off. Now notice that for some reason Alpha Channels are turned off right here and as a result as a copy is turned on. If wanted to save Alpha Channels It would go ahead and turn Alpha channels back on and generally TIFF is great for Alpha Channels. So folks expect Alpha Channels to be in to TIFF files just so you know. They don't expect layers, so go to go ahead and turn the layers checkbox off at which point the as a copy checkbox will be turned on. Now what that means is we will not be changing the name of the file that we're working on and if we make some changes to it and then go to the file menu and choose a save command, we'll update the original PSD file because there will be no link between the TIFF file that were about to create and this document.
* Saving an interactive image to Png
- Step one is to go up to the window menu, and choose the Channels command in order to switch to the Channels panel. And what wanted to do is take what seeing and convert it to a selection outline.So in the world of masking inside Photoshop, anything that's white will become selected, and anything that's black will be deselected. And to convert what we're seeing to a selection, you just drop down to this little icon down here at the bottom of the panel, the Load Channel Selection icon, and you click on it, and that selects the background without selecting the horse. We actually want things to work the other way around. So go up to the Select menu and choose the Inverse command.Alright, now let's go ahead and open that file we just saved by going up to that File menu and choosing the Open command, or pressing control-O, or command-O on a Mac. There is the file right there, at which point go ahead and click on the Open button, and notice it appears as an independent layer. Now it does not retain its name, which is Fountain, as you may recall. And also, we don't have the layer mask. So this is the actual PSD file right here, complete with the layer name Fountain, and the layer mask. Whereas inside the PNG file, we just have a static layer.So in other words, everything outside the layer mask has been clipped away. Meanwhile, It can open the same image such as in this case, Chrome, at which point It can zoom in by clicking on the image in order to get this amazing degree of detail. And that's how you save an interactive image, whether for a device or for the web, as a PNG file, complete with transparency, inside Photoshop.
* Saving a flat photograph to Jepg
- JPEG does have its limitations. It is in no way, shape, or form capable of saving layers, nor does it support transparency, and it always relies on lossy compression, meaning that it has to rewrite the colors of pixels when it saves its files.But in return, you get much smaller file sizes. So, as you can see down here in the lower left corner of the window, this image takes up almost 43MB when flat, and then this value after the slash tells us it takes up 166MB in memory with layers. On disk, the native PSD file weighs in at 140MB, so a little smaller than a layered version in memory thanks to the PSD format's lossless compression, whereas the highest quality JPEG file takes up less than 9MB, or about 6% of the size of the layered PSD file.You want just standard, regular old JPEG. And then go and click on this file that going to replace, Yorkminster Facade. Now again, notice that all the options are dimmed, and As a copy is turned on because you do not have the option of saving Alpha Channels, or Spot Colors, or Layers or any of those things. You can save Path Outlines along with JPEG files, by the way, but that's about it. And so next, what going to do is click on the Save button in order to save that image, and click on the Yes button in order to replace the existing file.Baseline Optimized goes ahead and applies another helping of compression but this time lossless compression, which generally helps to get the file size ever-so-slightly smaller, and these days every thing that supports JPEG, supports Baseline Optimized. So, it's the way to go. Alright, now go ahead and click OK in order to save that file. Alright, now let's go ahead and open the file, either in Photoshop or in a web browser. Go ahead and switch over to Chrome here, and press Control O, to open an image file, and find that guy we just saved, yorkminsterfacade.jpg, and click on the Open button. go ahead and click on the image with the zoom tool to zoom on in, and we might as well zoom in on this location right there that's got all this detail here. And you can see that the image looks absolutely great. We're not seeing any vestige of those 8x8 squares whatsoever even though they are there. They're just a lot more subtle than they were when we were assigning low quality compression. And that's how you save a continuous tone photographic image as a flat JPEG file with no transparency whatsoever complete with lossy compression inside Photoshop.
* FULL EXPLANATION / NOTES ON LYNDA.COM
* Saving layers to the native Psd format
- Go ahead and click on the "Don't Resolve" button, because, if you scroll up the list here, you can see that the one and only editable type layer is actually turned off, so it's not even visible at the moment. Let's say what wanted to do is get rid of all the hidden layers inside the image, so don't get that font warning again. In that case, would click on the Fly Out Menu icon in the upper right corner of the layers panel, and choose "Delete hidden layers" to get rid of them. And then, in response to the alert message, click on the "Yes" button in order to make those layers go away.Now you can see that have an asterisk outside the parentheses, which tells me that have unsaved changes. Which means that I could update my existing file by going to the File Menu and choosing the "Save" command, or you have that standard keyboard shortcut of "Control S", or if you wanted to save an independent copy then you would choose "Save As", which has a slightly different keyboard shortcut of "Control Shift S". But before you do, visit a preference setting. And to get to it, go to the Edit Menu here on the PC.
* Saving a flat print image to TIFF
- TIFF automatically goes ahead and saves a flat version of the image along with the layers, so it generates larger files then you get using the PSD format with maxAlso it's a matter of tradition. People who get TIFF files do not expect layers to be inside them, so it can really thrown for a loop and when you're passing off an image for print you generally want to keep it as small as possible. So let's a want to save a copy of this layered image in the TIFF format. It would go up to the file menu and choose the save as command. Or got that keyboard shortcut of control shift S or command shift S on a Mac. Just go ahead and call this guy pre-press cover let's say and then change the file format from PSD to TIFF which by the way stands for Tagged Image File Format.imize compatibility turned off. Now notice that for some reason Alpha Channels are turned off right here and as a result as a copy is turned on. If wanted to save Alpha Channels It would go ahead and turn Alpha channels back on and generally TIFF is great for Alpha Channels. So folks expect Alpha Channels to be in to TIFF files just so you know. They don't expect layers, so go to go ahead and turn the layers checkbox off at which point the as a copy checkbox will be turned on. Now what that means is we will not be changing the name of the file that we're working on and if we make some changes to it and then go to the file menu and choose a save command, we'll update the original PSD file because there will be no link between the TIFF file that were about to create and this document.
* Saving an interactive image to Png
- Step one is to go up to the window menu, and choose the Channels command in order to switch to the Channels panel. And what wanted to do is take what seeing and convert it to a selection outline.So in the world of masking inside Photoshop, anything that's white will become selected, and anything that's black will be deselected. And to convert what we're seeing to a selection, you just drop down to this little icon down here at the bottom of the panel, the Load Channel Selection icon, and you click on it, and that selects the background without selecting the horse. We actually want things to work the other way around. So go up to the Select menu and choose the Inverse command.Alright, now let's go ahead and open that file we just saved by going up to that File menu and choosing the Open command, or pressing control-O, or command-O on a Mac. There is the file right there, at which point go ahead and click on the Open button, and notice it appears as an independent layer. Now it does not retain its name, which is Fountain, as you may recall. And also, we don't have the layer mask. So this is the actual PSD file right here, complete with the layer name Fountain, and the layer mask. Whereas inside the PNG file, we just have a static layer.So in other words, everything outside the layer mask has been clipped away. Meanwhile, It can open the same image such as in this case, Chrome, at which point It can zoom in by clicking on the image in order to get this amazing degree of detail. And that's how you save an interactive image, whether for a device or for the web, as a PNG file, complete with transparency, inside Photoshop.
* Saving a flat photograph to Jepg
- JPEG does have its limitations. It is in no way, shape, or form capable of saving layers, nor does it support transparency, and it always relies on lossy compression, meaning that it has to rewrite the colors of pixels when it saves its files.But in return, you get much smaller file sizes. So, as you can see down here in the lower left corner of the window, this image takes up almost 43MB when flat, and then this value after the slash tells us it takes up 166MB in memory with layers. On disk, the native PSD file weighs in at 140MB, so a little smaller than a layered version in memory thanks to the PSD format's lossless compression, whereas the highest quality JPEG file takes up less than 9MB, or about 6% of the size of the layered PSD file.You want just standard, regular old JPEG. And then go and click on this file that going to replace, Yorkminster Facade. Now again, notice that all the options are dimmed, and As a copy is turned on because you do not have the option of saving Alpha Channels, or Spot Colors, or Layers or any of those things. You can save Path Outlines along with JPEG files, by the way, but that's about it. And so next, what going to do is click on the Save button in order to save that image, and click on the Yes button in order to replace the existing file.Baseline Optimized goes ahead and applies another helping of compression but this time lossless compression, which generally helps to get the file size ever-so-slightly smaller, and these days every thing that supports JPEG, supports Baseline Optimized. So, it's the way to go. Alright, now go ahead and click OK in order to save that file. Alright, now let's go ahead and open the file, either in Photoshop or in a web browser. Go ahead and switch over to Chrome here, and press Control O, to open an image file, and find that guy we just saved, yorkminsterfacade.jpg, and click on the Open button. go ahead and click on the image with the zoom tool to zoom on in, and we might as well zoom in on this location right there that's got all this detail here. And you can see that the image looks absolutely great. We're not seeing any vestige of those 8x8 squares whatsoever even though they are there. They're just a lot more subtle than they were when we were assigning low quality compression. And that's how you save a continuous tone photographic image as a flat JPEG file with no transparency whatsoever complete with lossy compression inside Photoshop.
* FULL EXPLANATION / NOTES ON LYNDA.COM
4 & 5 very brief notes
Lesson 4
* Using the crop tool
- The first step is to select the Crop Tool which is located right here, and notice a tool tip shows a C in parentheses.That C is the keyboard shortcut, so you can either click on the tool to select it, or you can just press the C key, nothing more. And when you do you'll see this crop boundary surrounding the entire image. Now if you don't see the boundary, it's probably because you're too far zoomed in like so. In which case just press Control zero . And notice that this boundary has these implied handles right there , in the corners and along the top, bottom, and left and right sides.
* Rotating and other crop tool tricks
- Press the shift key as you drag a corner handle, like so. And if you drag far enough, you'll go ahead and swap the width and height. So instead of seeing a vertical image, you'll end up with a horizontal image instead, and then of course you can drag the image inside that boundary as much as you like. You can also establish a specific aspect ratio by going up here to the options bar, and clicking on the word ratio to bring up this popup menu of specific options, including different aspect ratios that do not include resolution, so in other words, they can contain any size image you like.
* Straightening a crooked image
- Switch over to this image,immediately seeing this vertical crop boundary here, and that's because my ratio is still set to seven by eight. To get rid of that, go ahead and click on the Clear button, but notice that that does not immediately restore the crop boundary. Press the Escape key, and then, click inside the image again to make the crop boundary as large as the image. Now notice that the image is crooked. So you can see that the horizon line is higher on the right than it is on the left, so obviously, this image needs to be straightened. And you can do so using this Straighten tool, that's located up here in the Options bar. And to get to it, just go ahead and click on the tool like so, and then drag inside the image. And you can, by the way, drag along a vertical element if you want to, but it's generally easier to drag along the horizon line.
* Filling in missing background details
- Switch over to the Ruler tool by selecting it from the Eyedropper tool fly out menu, once again, and then drag down along the axis of this shark. we don't have a heads-up display next to the cursor when we're using the Ruler tool, as we do with the Straighten tool, but, you can see the angle listed up here in the Options bar. And so, if I were to move one of these points, you can see that angle value change on the fly. , and then, go ahead and click on the Straighten Layer button, in order to straighten the image. And you can see that we end up with these transparent wedges in each of the four corners, which obviously is not something wanted.
* Using the perspective crop tool
- Click and hold on the Crop Tool to bring up this fly-out menu, and then choose the second option, Perspective Crop Tool. Now the thing you need to know about this tool, is that it always applies destructive modifications. In other words, there's no delete pixels check box that you can turn off up here in the options bar. Go ahead and drag inside the image in order to establish an initial rectangular crop boundary, and then you drag each of the corners like so, into the desired locations. Now what going to do is set things up pretty generally at first, and then going to zoom in on the image so can make sure doing a good job, because after all, this frame has a few filigree details that like to avoid. So, going to drag this corner handle up a little bit, and notice that we also have a shadow that's being cast along the top of the painting, which also want to crop out of this image.
Lesson 5
* Converting the flat background into a layer
- The move tool. the name of this image is gallopinghorse.jpeg. The jpeg format is well suited to saving photographic images, but it cannot accommodate layers. You always end up with a flat image which appears as this background item here inside the layers panel.And that image must be rectangular and it's limited to the four walls of the canvas. Compare that to the final layered file which has all shapes and sizes of layers inside of it. So down here at the bottom, we have a flat white background, but notice if turn it off reveal areas of checkerboard which indicate transparency. And that tells us that this horse layer for example, is actually smaller than the canvas which is why we have some checkerboard action at the top of this thumbnail. And so in order to achieve this effect we have to convert the horse to an independent layer. And so, go ahead and switch over to that flat image and take a look up here at the top of the tool box where we have the move tool. The move tool allows you to move layers and selections inside Photoshop. And so, for example, let's say armed with the rectangular marquee tool that just go ahead and select a portion of the horse's head. If I want to now move that selection don't drag the selection using the marquee tool because that's going to move the outline independent of the image. Instead, would press control z, or command z on the Mac to undo that movement and then would switch to the move tool up here at the top of the tool box.
* Customizing the transparency checkerboard
- Dial in a custom color if you like just by clicking on one of these swatches, so one swatch is one set of checkers, and the other swatch is the other one. It could click on the white one, and drag this circle around inside the color field all the way up to the upper right corner if want red, and then could click OK and now see this red and gray pattern at work in the background, which is a little garish, but at least it's obvious. Now you also have the option of changing the Grid Size, so you can make it larger if you want to, and again, that's going to update on the fly in the background, or you can go with Small if you want tiny checkers. You can even choose None, although that's going to give you a white background, which is pretty deceptive.
* Turning a color photo black and white
- Two categories, either you can change the brightness of an image, or you can change its colors. And adjustment layers are always non-destructive so you never permanently modify a single pixel inside the image, which is always a great thing because it means you can go back and change your mind anytime you like. So, go up to the window menu and choose the Channels command in order to reveal the RGB composite up here at the top of the stack, as well as each one of the independent channels that make up that composite, red, green and blue, hence RGB. Now, every digital photograph begins at some point as an RGB image, even if it later gets converted one way or other to CMYK and that's because digital cameras and scanners are RGB devices, that is to say, they have electrodes that are designed to capture red, green and blue light.Properties panel by clicking on that little double arrow icon or you can click on the Properties icon here inside this icon column. And either way, you'll be able to see your horse in all of its splendor. Now, as say, we're going to be talking about adjustment layers, lots more in the future, but I just want you to notice this. If turn that layer off, we restore the color image, so it's not harmed in the least, turn it back on and we've got a black and white image.
* Expanding the canvas to a layer
- Turn that layer back on and then zoom out by pressing control, minus, or command, minus on a Mac a couple of times. And then switch to the crop tool which as you may recall has a keyboard shortcut of C. Next, drag up on the top of the crop boundary like so. And incidentally, up here in the options bar, make sure that the Content Aware check box is turned off. If it's turned on, Photoshop will try to add more information up here at the top of the image. We want it to be blank. The setting for Delete Cropped Pixels doesn't really matter because we're not cropping the image, we're effectively uncropping it so we're not getting rid of anything.
* Employing a clipping mask
- So, with that wing #1 layer selected, go to the layer menu, chose New Adjustment Layer, and then, once again, choose Brightness/Contrast.Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask. That way, we're going to clip the new layer inside the wing layer so that only the wing layer is selected, and show you the difference between clipping and not clipping, before this movie is out. But for now, just go ahead and turn on the check box and click Okay. And now, go to go ahead and drag the brightness slider all the way up, but that's not really going to do the trick, even if we crank the contrast value up as well.some very dark grays inside the bird, and some very light grays outside of it. We want black on white. So again, you want to turn on the Use Legacy checkbox, and then crank the brightness up to its absolute maximum, which is now 100, and take the contrast value all the way up to 100, as well. And if you zoom in, you're going to see that that gives you some really jagged edges, so go ahead and click on the contrast value, and press the down arrow key to incrementally reduce that value, as you're seeing happen here, until we get down to 95, at which point we get some pretty smooth transitions, and then you can go ahead and hide the properties panel and press control + zero, to zoom out.affecting just a single layer here, because everything in back of this new layer is black and white as well, so going to just turn off the dark contrast layer, so that you can see the original tones in the horse, and also turn off the B&W layer here, so that we're seeing the horse in full color, and notice now that the bird is red, as opposed to black, which is interesting, but it's only that way because of this light contrast layer, so this is the original bird, if turn it off, and this is the crane as it appears now.
*3 ways to duplicate a layer
- Drag wing number two to the top of the stack and then reestablish the clip layers by Alt or Option clicking on the horizontal lines, first between light contrast and wing number one and then between paint away and light contrast. And that way, if turn the wing number two layer off, you can see that everything is back to the way it should be. So, that's one way to duplicate a layer. It can make a mess of things as we're seeing. Go ahead and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac, to get rid of that layer, and then click on wing number one again.Here is method number two, and this is most people's favorite method of working, by the way, even though it's a little wonky when you first see it. You go up to the Layer menu, you choose New, and then you choose Layer Via Copy, which is just the craziest command name. But what it means is you are going to copy the active layer. The cool thing, the reason everybody loves this, is because it has a keyboard shortcut of Control + J, which I've decided stands for jump. And of course that's Command + J on the Mac.And there you have, quickly and furiously, three different ways to duplicate layers. You can either choose the duplicate layer command, you can press Control + J, or Command + J on the Mac, to jump the layer, or you can Alt or Option drag the layer up and down inside the stack. Here, inside the seriously powerful world of Photoshop.
* Using the crop tool
- The first step is to select the Crop Tool which is located right here, and notice a tool tip shows a C in parentheses.That C is the keyboard shortcut, so you can either click on the tool to select it, or you can just press the C key, nothing more. And when you do you'll see this crop boundary surrounding the entire image. Now if you don't see the boundary, it's probably because you're too far zoomed in like so. In which case just press Control zero . And notice that this boundary has these implied handles right there , in the corners and along the top, bottom, and left and right sides.
* Rotating and other crop tool tricks
- Press the shift key as you drag a corner handle, like so. And if you drag far enough, you'll go ahead and swap the width and height. So instead of seeing a vertical image, you'll end up with a horizontal image instead, and then of course you can drag the image inside that boundary as much as you like. You can also establish a specific aspect ratio by going up here to the options bar, and clicking on the word ratio to bring up this popup menu of specific options, including different aspect ratios that do not include resolution, so in other words, they can contain any size image you like.
* Straightening a crooked image
- Switch over to this image,immediately seeing this vertical crop boundary here, and that's because my ratio is still set to seven by eight. To get rid of that, go ahead and click on the Clear button, but notice that that does not immediately restore the crop boundary. Press the Escape key, and then, click inside the image again to make the crop boundary as large as the image. Now notice that the image is crooked. So you can see that the horizon line is higher on the right than it is on the left, so obviously, this image needs to be straightened. And you can do so using this Straighten tool, that's located up here in the Options bar. And to get to it, just go ahead and click on the tool like so, and then drag inside the image. And you can, by the way, drag along a vertical element if you want to, but it's generally easier to drag along the horizon line.
* Filling in missing background details
- Switch over to the Ruler tool by selecting it from the Eyedropper tool fly out menu, once again, and then drag down along the axis of this shark. we don't have a heads-up display next to the cursor when we're using the Ruler tool, as we do with the Straighten tool, but, you can see the angle listed up here in the Options bar. And so, if I were to move one of these points, you can see that angle value change on the fly. , and then, go ahead and click on the Straighten Layer button, in order to straighten the image. And you can see that we end up with these transparent wedges in each of the four corners, which obviously is not something wanted.
* Using the perspective crop tool
- Click and hold on the Crop Tool to bring up this fly-out menu, and then choose the second option, Perspective Crop Tool. Now the thing you need to know about this tool, is that it always applies destructive modifications. In other words, there's no delete pixels check box that you can turn off up here in the options bar. Go ahead and drag inside the image in order to establish an initial rectangular crop boundary, and then you drag each of the corners like so, into the desired locations. Now what going to do is set things up pretty generally at first, and then going to zoom in on the image so can make sure doing a good job, because after all, this frame has a few filigree details that like to avoid. So, going to drag this corner handle up a little bit, and notice that we also have a shadow that's being cast along the top of the painting, which also want to crop out of this image.
Lesson 5
* Converting the flat background into a layer
- The move tool. the name of this image is gallopinghorse.jpeg. The jpeg format is well suited to saving photographic images, but it cannot accommodate layers. You always end up with a flat image which appears as this background item here inside the layers panel.And that image must be rectangular and it's limited to the four walls of the canvas. Compare that to the final layered file which has all shapes and sizes of layers inside of it. So down here at the bottom, we have a flat white background, but notice if turn it off reveal areas of checkerboard which indicate transparency. And that tells us that this horse layer for example, is actually smaller than the canvas which is why we have some checkerboard action at the top of this thumbnail. And so in order to achieve this effect we have to convert the horse to an independent layer. And so, go ahead and switch over to that flat image and take a look up here at the top of the tool box where we have the move tool. The move tool allows you to move layers and selections inside Photoshop. And so, for example, let's say armed with the rectangular marquee tool that just go ahead and select a portion of the horse's head. If I want to now move that selection don't drag the selection using the marquee tool because that's going to move the outline independent of the image. Instead, would press control z, or command z on the Mac to undo that movement and then would switch to the move tool up here at the top of the tool box.
* Customizing the transparency checkerboard
- Dial in a custom color if you like just by clicking on one of these swatches, so one swatch is one set of checkers, and the other swatch is the other one. It could click on the white one, and drag this circle around inside the color field all the way up to the upper right corner if want red, and then could click OK and now see this red and gray pattern at work in the background, which is a little garish, but at least it's obvious. Now you also have the option of changing the Grid Size, so you can make it larger if you want to, and again, that's going to update on the fly in the background, or you can go with Small if you want tiny checkers. You can even choose None, although that's going to give you a white background, which is pretty deceptive.
* Turning a color photo black and white
- Two categories, either you can change the brightness of an image, or you can change its colors. And adjustment layers are always non-destructive so you never permanently modify a single pixel inside the image, which is always a great thing because it means you can go back and change your mind anytime you like. So, go up to the window menu and choose the Channels command in order to reveal the RGB composite up here at the top of the stack, as well as each one of the independent channels that make up that composite, red, green and blue, hence RGB. Now, every digital photograph begins at some point as an RGB image, even if it later gets converted one way or other to CMYK and that's because digital cameras and scanners are RGB devices, that is to say, they have electrodes that are designed to capture red, green and blue light.Properties panel by clicking on that little double arrow icon or you can click on the Properties icon here inside this icon column. And either way, you'll be able to see your horse in all of its splendor. Now, as say, we're going to be talking about adjustment layers, lots more in the future, but I just want you to notice this. If turn that layer off, we restore the color image, so it's not harmed in the least, turn it back on and we've got a black and white image.
* Expanding the canvas to a layer
- Turn that layer back on and then zoom out by pressing control, minus, or command, minus on a Mac a couple of times. And then switch to the crop tool which as you may recall has a keyboard shortcut of C. Next, drag up on the top of the crop boundary like so. And incidentally, up here in the options bar, make sure that the Content Aware check box is turned off. If it's turned on, Photoshop will try to add more information up here at the top of the image. We want it to be blank. The setting for Delete Cropped Pixels doesn't really matter because we're not cropping the image, we're effectively uncropping it so we're not getting rid of anything.
* Employing a clipping mask
- So, with that wing #1 layer selected, go to the layer menu, chose New Adjustment Layer, and then, once again, choose Brightness/Contrast.Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask. That way, we're going to clip the new layer inside the wing layer so that only the wing layer is selected, and show you the difference between clipping and not clipping, before this movie is out. But for now, just go ahead and turn on the check box and click Okay. And now, go to go ahead and drag the brightness slider all the way up, but that's not really going to do the trick, even if we crank the contrast value up as well.some very dark grays inside the bird, and some very light grays outside of it. We want black on white. So again, you want to turn on the Use Legacy checkbox, and then crank the brightness up to its absolute maximum, which is now 100, and take the contrast value all the way up to 100, as well. And if you zoom in, you're going to see that that gives you some really jagged edges, so go ahead and click on the contrast value, and press the down arrow key to incrementally reduce that value, as you're seeing happen here, until we get down to 95, at which point we get some pretty smooth transitions, and then you can go ahead and hide the properties panel and press control + zero, to zoom out.affecting just a single layer here, because everything in back of this new layer is black and white as well, so going to just turn off the dark contrast layer, so that you can see the original tones in the horse, and also turn off the B&W layer here, so that we're seeing the horse in full color, and notice now that the bird is red, as opposed to black, which is interesting, but it's only that way because of this light contrast layer, so this is the original bird, if turn it off, and this is the crane as it appears now.
*3 ways to duplicate a layer
- Drag wing number two to the top of the stack and then reestablish the clip layers by Alt or Option clicking on the horizontal lines, first between light contrast and wing number one and then between paint away and light contrast. And that way, if turn the wing number two layer off, you can see that everything is back to the way it should be. So, that's one way to duplicate a layer. It can make a mess of things as we're seeing. Go ahead and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac, to get rid of that layer, and then click on wing number one again.Here is method number two, and this is most people's favorite method of working, by the way, even though it's a little wonky when you first see it. You go up to the Layer menu, you choose New, and then you choose Layer Via Copy, which is just the craziest command name. But what it means is you are going to copy the active layer. The cool thing, the reason everybody loves this, is because it has a keyboard shortcut of Control + J, which I've decided stands for jump. And of course that's Command + J on the Mac.And there you have, quickly and furiously, three different ways to duplicate layers. You can either choose the duplicate layer command, you can press Control + J, or Command + J on the Mac, to jump the layer, or you can Alt or Option drag the layer up and down inside the stack. Here, inside the seriously powerful world of Photoshop.
2 & 3 brief notes
Lesson 2
* Zoom in and out
- Press Control++ here on the PC , then you're going to zoom in one increment. zoomed from 25% to 33% meaning that I'm seeing one out of every three pixels horizontally and one out of every three pixels vertically. In other words, one out of every nine pixels inside the image. If press Control++ or Command++ again, zoom into 50% so I'm seeing one out of every two horizontally, one out of every two vertically and so one out of every four in total.Then if press Control++ or Command++ again, go to 66.7%. And then finally, if I press Control++ or Command++ one more time, looking at the image at the 100% zoom ratio. What that means is that I'm seeing one image pixel for every screen pixel. In other words, this is the most accurate view of the image possible. Even though I'm only seeing part of the image at a time. Now, if zoom in any farther than that, notice that I'm now zoomed in at 200%, and then 300%, 400%, 500% and so forth.
* Scrolling ( panning )
- PC are working with mice that have scroll wheels, in which case you can predictably scroll up or scroll down . If you want to scroll left or right,press the control key, and scroll up to move to the left, or keep that control key down and scroll to the right to move down. No matter what platform you're working on, the best way to work is to take advantage of the hand tool, and you can get the hand tool at any time inside PhotoShop by pressing and holding the space bar like so, and then you can just go ahead and drag the image across both axes, so in other words, we're not limited to scrolling exclusively up or to the left we can move in both directions at the same time.
* Switching between open images
- So this is a function of pressing control + tab on either platform. Now, there's also that shortcut that might be more familiar to you Macintosh users, which is command + ~. And the tilde key, by the way, is the one in the upper-left corner of an American keyboard. So Photoshop goes ahead and cycles you around. You can also press control + ~ here on the pc. Now, if you want to move backward through the images, then you add the shift key.
* Rotating and resetting the view
- To rotate your view, go ahead and drop down to the Hand tool, near the bottom of the toolbox. And notice that that tool has a little triangle in its bottom right corner. That tells you that if you click and hold on the tool, you're going to bring up a fly-out menu, which in our case contains the Hand tool and the Rotate View tool, which has a keyboard shortcut of R, which will become important in a moment.
* Cycling between screen modes
- Notice way down here at the bottom of the Toolbox we have this option that, once again, has a little triangle in its lower right corner. If you click and hold, you'll see a fly-out menu of screen modes, starting with the standard screen mode, which is currently active. If you switch to full screen mode with menu bar, you'll go ahead and hide the titles along the top of the image window, and you'll also hide the scroll bars that surround the image, which gives you more room to see the image onscreen.
* Using the Navigator panel
- If switch to the full screen mode by pressing the F key twice in a row, and by the way you can't just double-tap the F key, you have to just press it and then press it again 'cause otherwise Photoshop is going to ignore that second press, and then I want to fit the image on screen so I'll press control, zero or command .
Lesson 3
* Image size and resolution
- Press and hold the Z key in order to access the zoom tool on a fly and then drag to the right, like so, and notice, even before get to the 500 percent zoom ratio can see that got square pixels inside of this image.And then if zoom in farther going to see that pixel grid, so that got white lines surrounding each and every pixel. And that is always the way things are inside Photoshop whether you're dealing with a pixel-based layer or a vector-based layer, or editable text, or anything, you're ultimately always working in these square units known as pixels. Now, the number of pixels inside of an image is the image size and the number of pixels that are packed in a square inch when you print that image is the resolution.
* Common resolution standards
- The laser printer, which requires the least amount of resolution, a commercial prepress, that is, when you're taking an image into a commercial print house to get it professionally reproduced, and then finally, a consumer inkjet printer, which requires the most resolution. Switch over to this image , and this is showing how an image would reproduce either with the laser printer, or if you took it into a commercial printer. And the idea is that these types of printers use four inks, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. And then they mix the inks in order to create all the other colors that we're seeing right now. And they do so using halftone dots. And so, if I press Control + 1, to zoom into 100%, and then I scroll to this guy's right eye let's say, then you can see these halftone dots, they're all circles, and they just vary in size.
* Upsampling vs. real high-resolution
- Start with this low-resolution image here, and for the sake of comparison, go duplicate it, by going up to the Image menu, and choosing the Duplicate command.Upsampled Image, and then click OK in order to create the new image, press Control + or Command + in the Mac to zoom in, and go ahead and drag this title over to the left so it's next door to the very small original. Alright, now inside this upsampled image file, go up to the Image menu, and choose the Image Size command. Now, again, got a small dialog box, so go ahead and make it nice and big, and the reason the dialog box keeps showing up small, is because it have never clicked on the OK button throughout these movies.
* The six interpolation settings
-Go up to the Image menu and choose the Image Size command. Now, whenever the Resample check box is turned on, you have access to this pop-up menu, and these are the Interpolation options right here.By default, it's set to Automatic, but you can override that default setting by applying any of these other six options. To give you a sense of how they work, go ahead and click the Cancel button, and then switch over to this grid of squares right there. Now we're seeing the grid at the 250% zoom ratio just so you can get a sense of how things started off. Then took this pattern, and downsampled it to 72% using each one of the six interpolation settings in order to produce this diagram here.
* FULL EXPLANATION / NOTES WILL BE AT LYNDA.COM
* Zoom in and out
- Press Control++ here on the PC , then you're going to zoom in one increment. zoomed from 25% to 33% meaning that I'm seeing one out of every three pixels horizontally and one out of every three pixels vertically. In other words, one out of every nine pixels inside the image. If press Control++ or Command++ again, zoom into 50% so I'm seeing one out of every two horizontally, one out of every two vertically and so one out of every four in total.Then if press Control++ or Command++ again, go to 66.7%. And then finally, if I press Control++ or Command++ one more time, looking at the image at the 100% zoom ratio. What that means is that I'm seeing one image pixel for every screen pixel. In other words, this is the most accurate view of the image possible. Even though I'm only seeing part of the image at a time. Now, if zoom in any farther than that, notice that I'm now zoomed in at 200%, and then 300%, 400%, 500% and so forth.
* Scrolling ( panning )
- PC are working with mice that have scroll wheels, in which case you can predictably scroll up or scroll down . If you want to scroll left or right,press the control key, and scroll up to move to the left, or keep that control key down and scroll to the right to move down. No matter what platform you're working on, the best way to work is to take advantage of the hand tool, and you can get the hand tool at any time inside PhotoShop by pressing and holding the space bar like so, and then you can just go ahead and drag the image across both axes, so in other words, we're not limited to scrolling exclusively up or to the left we can move in both directions at the same time.
* Switching between open images
- So this is a function of pressing control + tab on either platform. Now, there's also that shortcut that might be more familiar to you Macintosh users, which is command + ~. And the tilde key, by the way, is the one in the upper-left corner of an American keyboard. So Photoshop goes ahead and cycles you around. You can also press control + ~ here on the pc. Now, if you want to move backward through the images, then you add the shift key.
* Rotating and resetting the view
- To rotate your view, go ahead and drop down to the Hand tool, near the bottom of the toolbox. And notice that that tool has a little triangle in its bottom right corner. That tells you that if you click and hold on the tool, you're going to bring up a fly-out menu, which in our case contains the Hand tool and the Rotate View tool, which has a keyboard shortcut of R, which will become important in a moment.
* Cycling between screen modes
- Notice way down here at the bottom of the Toolbox we have this option that, once again, has a little triangle in its lower right corner. If you click and hold, you'll see a fly-out menu of screen modes, starting with the standard screen mode, which is currently active. If you switch to full screen mode with menu bar, you'll go ahead and hide the titles along the top of the image window, and you'll also hide the scroll bars that surround the image, which gives you more room to see the image onscreen.
* Using the Navigator panel
- If switch to the full screen mode by pressing the F key twice in a row, and by the way you can't just double-tap the F key, you have to just press it and then press it again 'cause otherwise Photoshop is going to ignore that second press, and then I want to fit the image on screen so I'll press control, zero or command .
Lesson 3
* Image size and resolution
- Press and hold the Z key in order to access the zoom tool on a fly and then drag to the right, like so, and notice, even before get to the 500 percent zoom ratio can see that got square pixels inside of this image.And then if zoom in farther going to see that pixel grid, so that got white lines surrounding each and every pixel. And that is always the way things are inside Photoshop whether you're dealing with a pixel-based layer or a vector-based layer, or editable text, or anything, you're ultimately always working in these square units known as pixels. Now, the number of pixels inside of an image is the image size and the number of pixels that are packed in a square inch when you print that image is the resolution.
* Common resolution standards
- The laser printer, which requires the least amount of resolution, a commercial prepress, that is, when you're taking an image into a commercial print house to get it professionally reproduced, and then finally, a consumer inkjet printer, which requires the most resolution. Switch over to this image , and this is showing how an image would reproduce either with the laser printer, or if you took it into a commercial printer. And the idea is that these types of printers use four inks, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. And then they mix the inks in order to create all the other colors that we're seeing right now. And they do so using halftone dots. And so, if I press Control + 1, to zoom into 100%, and then I scroll to this guy's right eye let's say, then you can see these halftone dots, they're all circles, and they just vary in size.
* Upsampling vs. real high-resolution
- Start with this low-resolution image here, and for the sake of comparison, go duplicate it, by going up to the Image menu, and choosing the Duplicate command.Upsampled Image, and then click OK in order to create the new image, press Control + or Command + in the Mac to zoom in, and go ahead and drag this title over to the left so it's next door to the very small original. Alright, now inside this upsampled image file, go up to the Image menu, and choose the Image Size command. Now, again, got a small dialog box, so go ahead and make it nice and big, and the reason the dialog box keeps showing up small, is because it have never clicked on the OK button throughout these movies.
* The six interpolation settings
-Go up to the Image menu and choose the Image Size command. Now, whenever the Resample check box is turned on, you have access to this pop-up menu, and these are the Interpolation options right here.By default, it's set to Automatic, but you can override that default setting by applying any of these other six options. To give you a sense of how they work, go ahead and click the Cancel button, and then switch over to this grid of squares right there. Now we're seeing the grid at the 250% zoom ratio just so you can get a sense of how things started off. Then took this pattern, and downsampled it to 72% using each one of the six interpolation settings in order to produce this diagram here.
* FULL EXPLANATION / NOTES WILL BE AT LYNDA.COM
1 - Notes of the start of Ps
Lesson 1
- "Always use this this app to open .jpeg files," which is what we want. Then, click okay and that is going to open the image inside Photoshop and it's going to open all future .jpeg files in Photoshop as well. Going to go ahead and minimize Photoshop again so that we can check out this .ping file. And so, notice if I double click on it, this time it opens up in yet another utility, it's called Paint. While it does have a few editing functions, it's nowhere near as powerful as Photoshop.
- Right click on that .ping file, choose "Open With," choose that final command, locate the most recent version of Photoshop in the list, go ahead and select it, turn on the checkbox, click, "Okay," and that's going to open the .ping file in Photoshop. Alright, we have just one more file and so, go ahead and minimize Photoshop and note this guy right here, welcome.psd. .psd stands for the Photoshop document format. It is by far the most versatile format you can work with because it saves layers and all the other goodies that you can create inside Photoshop.
- Right click on that file, choose "Open With," and then choose this final command. In my case, it looks like this file is set to open in an older version of Photoshop CC, that's not what I want. I want the latest and greatest thing so just go ahead and select the most recent version of the software, turn on the checkbox, and click "Okay." It's very possible that you're going to see this Missing Fonts warning, and that's because I'm using a lot of specialty fonts including Brka, but I also have Aveneer, Futura, and Helvetica New, and so you may see a much longer list.
-Inside of another program, you would need to resolve these font conflicts because after all, you generally need the fonts installed in your system that you're using inside the document but in Photoshop, that's not actually the case. I'm just going to click on the "Don't resolve" button and then, over at my Zoom tool which is located toward the bottom of the toolbox over here on the left hand side of the screen, and then I'll click a few times on the word "Photoshop" up here at the top of the image until I zoom to a 100% as indicated by this title tab up here at the top of the screen.
-Notice my layers panel, which is located, by default, at the bottom right corner of the screen. Notice if scroll up this list, to this Photoshop layer right there, it has the yellow warning and if hover over it, it's telling me that a font is missing on the system and needs substitution. If this were some other application, that would be true. I would need to substitute that font but as you're seeing right here, the word "Photoshop" is beautifully rendered even though that font is missing and that's because Photoshop, very helpfully, includes a pixel level preview of every text layer that you create.
- Going up to the Photoshop CC menu here and choosing Hide Photoshop CC, which is going to take me back to the Finder. Now, notice what happens by contrast when double-click on this JPG file. It ends up opening in Preview, which is the utility that ships along with every Macintosh computer. And even though it does offer a few basic editing functions, it is not nearly as powerful as Photoshop. So go up to the Preview menu and choose Quit Preview in order to quit the application and then right-click on this JPG file and choose the Get Info command in order to bring up this basic dialog box here.
-If you want to go ahead and twirl open this Open With section by clicking on its triangle and then change the application from Preview or whatever it is for you to the most recent version of Photoshop CC. Next, you want to click on the Change All button in order to change all JPG files so that they open inside Photoshop CC. Then go ahead and click the Continue button and now you can close that info panel. After which point, if you double-click on that JPG file, it will now open inside Photoshop like so.
-Go up to the Photoshop CC menu and choose that Hide command and then double-click on the PNG file, which in my case ends up opening the image in the browser Google Chrome, which is of course not remotely what I want. So go up to the Chrome menu and choose the Quit command and then I will once again right-click on it and choose the Get Info command and next change Open With from Chrome in my case to the most recent version of Photoshop CC.
-And then you want to click on the Change All button followed by continue and that will go ahead and update all the PNG images. So now if I were to close that panel and double-click on the PNG file, it's going to open in Photoshop like so. Alright, just one more file to go. So return to the Photoshop CC menu and choose that Hide command and this time we have a PSD file. PSD stands for Photoshop Document and it is the most versatile of the file formats because it supports layers and all the other crazy stuff that Photoshop has going on.
-And so more than likely this file is going to just open up inside Photoshop when you double-click on it as it does for me, but as you can see here I'm confronted with a Missing Fonts warning and it's very likely that you will be as well if you're working along with me and that's because I used a bunch of specialty fonts including Birka, Futura, Helvetica New, and so forth. Now, in another application this would be a big problem. After all, you need to have the proper fonts open to edit a text layer.
* MORE ACCURATE NOTES CAN LOGIN TO LYNDA.COM
- "Always use this this app to open .jpeg files," which is what we want. Then, click okay and that is going to open the image inside Photoshop and it's going to open all future .jpeg files in Photoshop as well. Going to go ahead and minimize Photoshop again so that we can check out this .ping file. And so, notice if I double click on it, this time it opens up in yet another utility, it's called Paint. While it does have a few editing functions, it's nowhere near as powerful as Photoshop.
- Right click on that .ping file, choose "Open With," choose that final command, locate the most recent version of Photoshop in the list, go ahead and select it, turn on the checkbox, click, "Okay," and that's going to open the .ping file in Photoshop. Alright, we have just one more file and so, go ahead and minimize Photoshop and note this guy right here, welcome.psd. .psd stands for the Photoshop document format. It is by far the most versatile format you can work with because it saves layers and all the other goodies that you can create inside Photoshop.
- Right click on that file, choose "Open With," and then choose this final command. In my case, it looks like this file is set to open in an older version of Photoshop CC, that's not what I want. I want the latest and greatest thing so just go ahead and select the most recent version of the software, turn on the checkbox, and click "Okay." It's very possible that you're going to see this Missing Fonts warning, and that's because I'm using a lot of specialty fonts including Brka, but I also have Aveneer, Futura, and Helvetica New, and so you may see a much longer list.
-Inside of another program, you would need to resolve these font conflicts because after all, you generally need the fonts installed in your system that you're using inside the document but in Photoshop, that's not actually the case. I'm just going to click on the "Don't resolve" button and then, over at my Zoom tool which is located toward the bottom of the toolbox over here on the left hand side of the screen, and then I'll click a few times on the word "Photoshop" up here at the top of the image until I zoom to a 100% as indicated by this title tab up here at the top of the screen.
-Notice my layers panel, which is located, by default, at the bottom right corner of the screen. Notice if scroll up this list, to this Photoshop layer right there, it has the yellow warning and if hover over it, it's telling me that a font is missing on the system and needs substitution. If this were some other application, that would be true. I would need to substitute that font but as you're seeing right here, the word "Photoshop" is beautifully rendered even though that font is missing and that's because Photoshop, very helpfully, includes a pixel level preview of every text layer that you create.
- Going up to the Photoshop CC menu here and choosing Hide Photoshop CC, which is going to take me back to the Finder. Now, notice what happens by contrast when double-click on this JPG file. It ends up opening in Preview, which is the utility that ships along with every Macintosh computer. And even though it does offer a few basic editing functions, it is not nearly as powerful as Photoshop. So go up to the Preview menu and choose Quit Preview in order to quit the application and then right-click on this JPG file and choose the Get Info command in order to bring up this basic dialog box here.
-If you want to go ahead and twirl open this Open With section by clicking on its triangle and then change the application from Preview or whatever it is for you to the most recent version of Photoshop CC. Next, you want to click on the Change All button in order to change all JPG files so that they open inside Photoshop CC. Then go ahead and click the Continue button and now you can close that info panel. After which point, if you double-click on that JPG file, it will now open inside Photoshop like so.
-Go up to the Photoshop CC menu and choose that Hide command and then double-click on the PNG file, which in my case ends up opening the image in the browser Google Chrome, which is of course not remotely what I want. So go up to the Chrome menu and choose the Quit command and then I will once again right-click on it and choose the Get Info command and next change Open With from Chrome in my case to the most recent version of Photoshop CC.
-And then you want to click on the Change All button followed by continue and that will go ahead and update all the PNG images. So now if I were to close that panel and double-click on the PNG file, it's going to open in Photoshop like so. Alright, just one more file to go. So return to the Photoshop CC menu and choose that Hide command and this time we have a PSD file. PSD stands for Photoshop Document and it is the most versatile of the file formats because it supports layers and all the other crazy stuff that Photoshop has going on.
-And so more than likely this file is going to just open up inside Photoshop when you double-click on it as it does for me, but as you can see here I'm confronted with a Missing Fonts warning and it's very likely that you will be as well if you're working along with me and that's because I used a bunch of specialty fonts including Birka, Futura, Helvetica New, and so forth. Now, in another application this would be a big problem. After all, you need to have the proper fonts open to edit a text layer.
* MORE ACCURATE NOTES CAN LOGIN TO LYNDA.COM
Tuesday, 7 February 2017
2 ........
The third lesson , we starting to crop the item from a complicated and full of textile background. In the previous lesson , we was been teach to use magic wand tool , for this lesson we learning something new - quick selection tool . It is a quite easier and faster way to crop out the image . Then we do the same thing from last week lesson , make our item form in a circular shape . Somehow was like a revision .
The fourth lesson , was like a review / brief on our next week test .We also do learnt something new , this lesson was quite important for people like us who are weak and not good at computer . This is like a super brief tutor for us . We learn how to use brush to blend in two picture together , make it doesn't look like photo shop. I felt it is hard as it is hard to control the brush for me . Blending is fun, but it is hard for me to do professional work . We do revise on magic wand tool , select the area that we want and learn how to adjust the transparency of the image , by using the side bar , which indicate - multiply . By this , we will have our test on next week .
The fourth lesson , was like a review / brief on our next week test .We also do learnt something new , this lesson was quite important for people like us who are weak and not good at computer . This is like a super brief tutor for us . We learn how to use brush to blend in two picture together , make it doesn't look like photo shop. I felt it is hard as it is hard to control the brush for me . Blending is fun, but it is hard for me to do professional work . We do revise on magic wand tool , select the area that we want and learn how to adjust the transparency of the image , by using the side bar , which indicate - multiply . By this , we will have our test on next week .
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