Welcome to the In second volume of Photoshop Mini tutorial series, which is a series I started specifically for Photoshop beginner – to help them understand various aspect of Photoshop by designing something simple but cool.

In the tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this glowing  Floral Pattern in Photoshop. This effect looks cool but the steps are in fact very simple, great for beginners :)

Here is a preview of the final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

PSD File Download

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You will need the following stock to complete this tutorial:

Floral Brushset (Pick one from the list)

Cloud Brushset

Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

Create a new document sized 600px * 600px, fill the background with black colour. Create a new layer called “Cloud” with around 40% opacity, use the cloud brush you downloaded, and paint some cloud onto it:

Create a new layer called “background light”,  grab a big soft brush with white colour, and paint as shown below:

As you can see, by doing so you immediately created a nice background to work on.

Step 2

Create a new layer called “floral pattern”, use the brush you downloaded, paint a floral pattern onto it:

Apply the following layer blending options to this layer:

Drop Shadow

Bevel and Emboss

and you can see now we created some light and shadow effect for the floral pattern:

Step 3

Now we can add a glowing effect to the floral pattern. To do this, simply duplicate the orginal floral layer once, apply the following Gaussian Blur settings to it:

and you will see a glowing edge appear around the floral pattern:

Step 4

Now let’s add some colour to the image. The Color Balance image adjustment layer will do the job. Personally I think it’s a quick and easy way to add colour to an image, without having to use brush and the colour picker.

I chose a golden colour mix: (Settings as shown below)

and you will have the following effect:

Please note that there is no need to use the exact same colour as I used, you’re free the experiment any colour scheme you prefer.

Step 5

Now let’s flatten the image (save a layered copy before you do so). Duplicate the background layer, and apply the following Smart Sharpen filter to it:

As you can, we now have a darkened edge around the floral pattern, also the overall image becomes more crispy and detailed:

Now let’s get on with the bokeh creation. We can do this with brush dynamics (F5).

Create a new layer called “bokeh” on top of all previous layers, grab a around brush with 90% hardness, apply the following brush settings to it:

Shape Dynamics

Scattering

Transfer (Other Dynamics)

Tick the Airbrush and Smoothing option:

and you will have the following effect:

Step 6

Duplicate the bokeh layer once, and apply the following Smart Sharpen Filter Settings to the duplicated layer:

Drop the opacity of the duplicated layer to around 80%, you will see now we have a highlighted edge appear around the bokeh:

Note: I personally prefer using Smart Sharpen filter to add the edge, other than using the “Stroke” layer blending option. The former produces a clearer, more detailed result in my opinion.

Create a new layer on top of all previous layer called “highlight”, set the layer blending mode to “soft light”, and grab a soft white brush, do a few single-clicks around the floral pattern as shown below:

Finally, add a levels adjustment layer on top, with the following settings: (this will alter the contrast and give the image more depth)

Mask on the levels adjustment layer:

and you will have the following final effect:

That’s it for this beginner-level mini Photoshop tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful. Until next time, have a great day!

After some thoughts about future articles/tutorials on PSD Vault, I decided to start a new series: Mini PS tutorial. In this series, I will include some very simple Photoshop tutorials designed for Photoshop beginners. The aim of those mini-tutorials are simple: to familiarise you with a variety of Photoshop tools and show you how to combine them to produce great effect for your design.

The effect are mostly abstract, and you can apply them to a wide range of design works you might have, to spice things up :)

In this first volume of Photoshop Mini tutorial series, I will show you the steps I took to create this Simple Abstract Shining Wave Line in Photoshop in just 5 steps. Have a try!

Here is a preview of the final effect we will be creating:

Alternative version:

PSD File Download

You can download the PSD File for this tutorial via the VIP Members Area for only $4.95/Month (or less)! You will not only get this PSD File, but also 40+ other PSD Files + Extra Goodies + Exclusive Photoshop tutorial there. Signup now and get exclusive! Find out more about the VIP Members Areas

No Stock image is required for this tutorial. This tutorial is best for Photoshop CS2 or +.

Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

Create a new document sized 470px * 330px, fill the background with black color. Create a new layer called “baseline” and grab a big white brush with 0% hardness, do a single-click on this new layer:

Hit Ctrl + T and enable the free tranform tool:

Compress this dot with the free transform tool, make sure you hold the “Alt” key while drag the top edge:

Reduce the layer opacity of this baseline layer to around 60%, you will have the following effect:

Step 2

Duplicate this baseline layer once. On the duplicated layer, again we use the free-tranform tool to scale it to a smaller size, and position it to the place as shown below:

Grab a smaller soft white brush, and do a few single-clicks along the baseline for some variety:

Step 3

Ok let’s make a new brushset. Hit “F5″ and bring up the brush window, apply the following brush presets:

Shape Dynamics

Other dynamics:

Make sure to tick the “airbrush”, “smoothing” and “protect texture” settings. Save the brushset if you wish.

Then use the Pen Tool, draw a work path as shown below:

Hit “Ctrl + Shift + N” and create a new layer called “abstract lines”, right-click and choose “Stroke Path”:

Make sure you tick the “Simulate Pressure” on the new window:

and here is the effect you will have:

Step 4

On this abstract line layer, apply the following “Motion Blur” settings:

Hit “Ctrl + F” and re-apply this blur effect a few more times, and you will have following effect:

Use the free transform tool to scale it as shown below:

For variety, we can duplicate this abstract line layer a few more times, and scatter them around the baseline:

We can also add some highlights to the abstract line by duplicate the baseline layer a few times, and drag the duplicated layers to the top, resize each of them to smaller sizes and rotate them 90 degree clockwise: (increase the opacity to around 90% for the duplicated layers)

Step 5

To fine-tune the image, we can add the following adjustment layers to the image:

Curves

Color Balance

Levels

To add some particle effect around the lines, we can use the smart sharpen filter: (settings shown below, make sure you flatten the layers first)

and this is the final effect I have for this tutorial:

You can also experiment different colour scheme, here is an alternative version for this tutorial:

That’s it for this beginner-level mini Photoshop tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful. Until next time, have a great day!

Photoshop is an amazing tool that can do almost everything you can think of with an image – but it is also very tricky to learn from scratch if you’re beginner. Therefore, it’s vitally important to form a few good habits right from the start and as a result, you will find yourself better positioned for any future Photoshop work you may encounter.

In this post, I will show you 5 Good Photoshop Habits You Must Form Right from the Start. Personally I think it will be quite beneficial for you to try and adopt those good practices, especially if you consider using Photoshop as a working tool and be professional with it.

The version of Photoshop I use here is CS4, but the points mentioned here should apply well for older version, too.

Habit 1: Get Your Workspace Setup Right, and Memorise Keyboard Shortcuts

Have a comfortable workspace setup for your Photoshop can make your life much easier in terms of the various task you’re trying to achieve in Photoshop. Have the right arrangement window position, layer palette layer, brush panel setup can get you a long way.

In the case of CS4, you will find a list of pre-defined workspace in window > workspace:

You can also drag and drop windows to your desired position:

and save them as your own favourite workspace setup for future use:

Give your workspace a name:

Another feature is Keyboard shortcuts – you can define them here:

this will bring up a list of shortcuts and you can make changes there:

You can also summarise them by pressing the “Summarize” button:

This will ouput a .htm file – I suggest you print this out and hang them somewhere easy to see:

I don’t have to mention the benefit of using shortcuts – after all, they are “shortcuts” to the art of Photoshop.

Habit 2: Don’t be lazy, Name Your Layers

OK, everybody is lazy in some way. But no matter how lazy you’re, name those layers you created in Photoshop! It has two major benefits:

• You will remeber what you did to your design, 15 days ago. Because the layers are named and structured.
• It will help others to understand your design better, and avoid abusive comments (especially if you work in a collaborative environment)

For instance, the screenshot below doesn’t make any sense:

We can give the layer some meanful names:

The named layer will help you remember what you did in the past, and help others understand your layer structure better.

Habit 3: Use Layer Blending Options Wisely

Layer Blending Option are used quite frequently by designers. It is quite a powerful feature where you can apply lots of effects to one layer:

Obviously, as a beginner, you tend to add on as many blending options as possible to make your design “POP”:

Sometimes, it is better keep things simple:

and the result may be better:

So use those blending options wisely :)

Habit 4: Learn Pen Tool, and Master it

Yes, Pen Tool is probably one of the trickiest tool in Photoshop to learn. I’m sure some people may choose to ignore it and use other tools instead.

I’m not sure how many people here have used Pen Tool (the icon with a little pen) in Photoshop before, but personally I think it is quite a useful tool when it comes to outlining and creating custom shapes.

In the beginning the Pen Tool can be a bit awkward to use, but once you practice and get used to it it will become a very handy tool for you, especially when you are trying to outline objects with complex lighting and backgrounds.

Here are some tutorials I found on the web covering the use of Pen Tool in Photoshop:

How to Use the Pen Tool in Photoshop: A Tutorial on Outlining Objects

Pen Tool Tutorial – Creating Selections With Photoshop’s Pen Tool

Photoshop Pen Tool (Video Tutorial)

You may find once you master the Pen Tool, you can use it to create a lot of elegant effects and make precise selection for your objects. Definitely worth the trouble.

Habit 5: Use Layer Mask More Often

That’s begin this part with a scenario:

You have an image (a flying bird in this case), and you decide to erase some parts of the bird so it looks like something else. But after a few hundred steps later, you found you probably overdid the image a bit:

Naturally, you seek help from the history window, try to reverse a few actions:

But often you find the list isn’t long enough to record your messiness, even if you go to the very top:

And you may have to start over again from the original image:

Worse still, you have a bunch of unnamed layers and objects mixing together, and you don’t even know where to begin:

So, to avoid the above frustrations, add a layer mask to the layer you want to modify – in case, you’re erasing some parts off the bird:

And you realise you made a mistake and erased the wrong part, or change your mind, you can simply right-click the mask and delete it:

And you can have your bird back just like that:

Put it simply: layer mask gives you extra protection against accidental mess-ups and save your time by not having to go back to the very beginning.

That’s it for this post! I hope this would help beginner learn something useful and try and form those habits before it’s too late. After all, you will be the one who benefits from it, eventually.

Till next time, have a great day!

When you first started with Photoshop, you might be overwhelmed by the amount of features and functionalities built for various graphic design tasks and basically don’t know where to begin. So what can we do to overcome this initial difficulty? Just like learning every other thing in life, we start with the easiest part.

In this post, I will provide 5 Simple, Yet Useful Photoshop “How-to”s for Absolute Beginners. Take a look and hopefully you will see after all, Photoshop is not that hard to start with!

Before we start, please note that this tutorial is made in Windows with Adobe Photoshop CS3 and CS4, options may vary in version and OS platform.

How to Draw a Perfect Circle/Square

This might be the first question every beginner would ask. So let’s take a look at the toolbox and find the set of drawing tools as shown below: (to expand, left-click on the rectangular tool and hold)

and You can use those tools to draw rectangule or oval shapes, as shown below:

Now here is the trick: if you would like to draw a PERFECT circle or a square, you must hold down the Shift Key while dragging your mouse:

How to Adjust Brush Opacity and Flow

This is an interest topic – it may seem to be really simple, but the amount of emails and comments I received in regards to this question made me think to include it here.

The options are in fact quite easy to find – if you select the brush tool first, on the option bar above you will the opacity and flow adjustment right there, as shown below:

How to Load Custom Brushsets into Photoshop

These days there are many free Photoshop brushsets you can download from the net, but how to load those beautiful brushset into Photoshop? Here are the steps:

Click on the Brush Tool in the toolbox and click on the drop down arrow next to the brush shape symbol, as shown below”

Next, click on the right arrow on the right hand side of the brush pallette:

You will see a list of options appearing, select the “Load Brushes” option from the list:

and a window will pop up, choose the brushset from the folder and click on “load”:

and that’s it! You will see the newly loaded brushsets in the brush panel:

How to Draw Paths with Pen Tool

Pen Tool can be use to create paths – however, it’s not enabled by default. If you select Pen Tool and straight away to use it, you will see Shapes instead of Paths, as shown below:

So to change it to Path, follow the steps below:

Click onthe Pen Tool in the toolbox and you will a bunch of options appearing on the top bar, click on the second symbol as shown below to change it to Paths:

and that’s it, you can now draw pure paths on your canvas as shown below:

How to Quickly Create Guides in Photoshop

Personally I think this is a rather important and useful function in Photoshop. When you design interfaces (eg. website mockups), you will need to create a sets of guides to ensure precision. But exactly how do we do this?

Here are the steps:

Firstly, if you haven’t turn the Ruler option on, Press Ctrl + R to turn it on, you will see the rulers appearing on top and right of the canvas:

Now if you move your mouse over on the ruler, then left-click and drag, you will see the guides appears on the canvas, as shown below:

and if you would like to clear the guides, simply go to View > Clear Guides

One extra tip with guides: if you right-click on the ruler, you will see a list of options to change the measurements, as shown below:

That’s it for this post! Hope you find it helpful and if you have any further question, just drop me a comment below and I will try my best to assist.

Cheers and have a great day!

Previously I published a post named “5 Useful Little Photoshop Tricks to Add Extra Elegance For Your Design” and it turns out to be quite a popular tutorial here. (Had about 35,000 hits so far). So I guess you guys (especially Photoshop beginners) would probably like another similar post.  So here we go :)

In this post, I will show you yet another 5 Interesting Little Photoshop Tricks to Add Extra Elegance to Your Design. These techniques are just little things that I found useful in Photoshop, and I think they’re quite beneficial to learn if you’re a PS beginner. So go ahead and have a try!

The 5 topics I will cover in this post:

1. Create 3D Stripes
2. Make Your Text Look Clearer with Stroke
3. Use Smart Sharpen Filter to add final touches
4. A Quick Way of Enhancing Lighting Contrast to Your Image
5. The Use of Highpass Filter – Another Way of Sharpen Your Image

Create 3D Stripes

Create a new document sized 800 x 600px, fill the background layer with a light colour as shown below:

Create a new layer on top of the background layer and set its blending mode to “soft light”, grab a big soft white brush and do a single click here:

Create a new layer called “stripe upper” and fill it with dark brown colour:

Apply the following gradient overlay settings to this layer:

Duplicate this layer once and rename the duplicated layer “stripe lower”, resize it and fill it with a light green colour:

Apply the following layer blending options to this layer:

and you will have the following effect:

Create a new group called “stripes” and put those two layer into it, duplicate the group and use the free transform tool to distort the whole group as shown below:

Hint: first resize it to a narrower size, then distort.

Duplicate the original stripe group once more, and put the duplicated group on the top, drag it to the left as shown below:

Now there is the intersting bit – because the light source is from the right, so we need to reduce the brightness of the middle distorted part. To do this, simply merge the two stripes layers of the centre bit, apply the following brightness and contrast adjustment to it:

and you will see the following effect:

and here is the overall effect: (click to enlarge)

That’s it! Hopefully this will be use to you when it comes to adding depth to your web design.

Make Your Text Look Clearer with Stroke

Making your text look more attractive is always a great way to focus user’s attention (especially on websites). But apart from adding all sorts of drop shadow, inner shadow, bevel and emboss effect, have you considered just to use the “Stroke” blending option?

Now create a new document size 250 x 120px, fill the background layer with a light blue to dark blue gradient, as shown below:

Download a copy of this font and type some text onto it: (or you can try out differernt font if you like)

Now go to the blending options of this text layer, apply the following “Stroke” settings to it:

Hint: with the colour, choose a darker blue.

You will have the following effect:

You can the text looks better and clearer. The trick is that when you choose the colour of the stroke, always choose one that is slightly darker than the background colour.

I guess this is epecially great way to increase the clarity of the text when it comes to making web graphics.

Use Smart Sharpen Filter to add final touches

Download a copy of this model image and load it into Photoshop. As you can see this stock looks great originally, however you can probably sense that there is still thing you can do to improve it a bit.

Now let’s pretend this is a photo you have already done the majority of the retouch, and you feel there is something short. So go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen and apply this following settings:

Please make sure you choose “Advanced” instead of the default “Basic”.

Sharpen

Shadow

Highlight

And once you apply the smart sharpen shettings, you will see we brought that extra bit of detail out of the image. Belows are screenshots pointing out the areas which we can see improvements:

And here is a before and after comparison of the image:

Before

After (click to enlarge)

Of course the above smart sharpen settings are not applicable to every image, you will have to adjust them to suit your need in different cases. Experiment with them :)

A Quick Way of Enhancing Lighting Contrast to Your Image

Now we continue from the previous step – sometimes you will find although the light in the image looks quite good, you feel there is still area that you want to add more contrast to it. Here is a simple way to do it:

Create a new layer on top of every other layer, grab a soft brush (0% hardness) with black colour, do a few clicks in the areas you would like to enhance the lighting contrast:

Change the blending mode of the new layer to “overlay” or “soft light”, you will have the following effect: (click to enlarge)

You can use this method to add lighting contrast to lots of occasions, but make sure not to overdo it :)

The Use of Highpass Filter – Another Way of Sharpen Your Image

Here is a clever use of the highpass filter (which I guess most of you haven’t really use if much before) – use it to sharpen your image!

Downlaod a copy of this image and load it into Photoshop. Duplicate the background layer once and go to Filter > Other > High Pass and apply the following settings:

Change the blending mode of this layer to “Hard Light” and reduce its opacity to around 20%. Here is a before and after comparison:

Before

After (click to enlarge)

One thing I like about using this method is that the sharpen can be undone, due to the fact that the seperate layer was created. And the effect can be controlled by adjusting the layer opacity.

OK that’s it for this post! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful!

Until next time, have a great day!

In this tutorial, I will show you 5 very simple, however very important techniques for Photoshop beginners when it comes to photo retouch. You will discover how easy it is to add more contrast and depths to the image to make it look better. This tutorial is really simple but effective, Have a try!

We will take a random image and apply those 5 techniques to enhance the overall effect of the photo. Here is a summary of the five topics we will cover in this tutorial:

1. Remove Black Spots with Spot Healing Brush
2. Make Your Eyes Look More Obvious
3. Use Surface Blur to Smooth Skin, instead of Gaussian Blur
4. Make Her Lips Look Even More Delicious
5. Add Colour Depth and Lighting Contrast to Hair

This is a before and after preview of the final result:

Before

After

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

Ok Let’s get started!

In this tutorial, I use the following stock for demonstration purpose – Self 16. by ~The1stGrape-stock

The reason I chose this particular image is that it doesn’t look too bad from the beginning, however there are still things can be improved, perfect for beginners to get some practices on.

Remove Black Spots with Spot Healing Brush

Firstly if we take a look at the photo, we can see there are several black dots on her skin, as shown below:

To fix these, we can use the Spot Healing Brush tool, as shown below in the toolbox:

Simply grab the Spot Healing Brush, adjust the size of the brush to be slightly large than the black spot, and do a single-click on it:

You can see after the single-click, the black spot disappers:

Basically, what happen is that with the Spot Healing Brush tool, it takes samples of the surrounding skin colour pixels and use them to replace the black spot colour pixel. Magical, isn’t it?

Let’s use the same method to remove all black spots on her face, here is the effect so far:

Make Your Eyes Look More Obvious

Now let’s pay attention to her eyes, which are beautiful even without any retouching :) but, we can give them a bit more depth, here is how:

Duplicate the background layer once, set the blending mode as “Soft Light” for the duplicated layer, you will have the following effect:

You can see by doing so we in fact darken the whole image. However here we only want to add depth the eyes, so we need to hide the rest of the layer. To do so, go to layer > layer mask > hide all, then on the layer mask, use a White Brush to paint inside the eyes, as shown below:

By doing so we reveal the eyes portion of the layer only. Here is the effect after the painting:

Use Surface Blur to Smooth Skin, instead of Gaussian Blur

Now let’s make her skin go smoother a bit. To do so, we use Surface Blur. The reason I chose Surface Blur is because unlike Gaussian Blur (which blurs the whole image), Surface Blur retains the edge details. This eliminate the needs of adding a layer mask on the duplicated layer to reveal the edges.

So let’s duplicate the orginal background layer once, and apply the following Surface Blur settings to it:

Drop the opacity of the duplicated layer to around 70%, and you will have the following effect:

Make Her Lips Look Even More Delicious

To do so, we use the Lasso Tool to make a rough selection of the lips as shown below:

Hit Ctrl + J twice to make two duplicates of the selection, change the blending mode of the first copy to “Multiply“, with 100% opacity. Change the blending mode of the second duplicated layer to “Linear Light“, with 55% opacity.

Use a soft, round eraser to gently erase the edge of the lips, you will have the following effect:

Add another layer on top of all other layers, grab a soft round brush with White colour, gently paint around the lower lip to add some extra light:

Hint: set brush flow and opacity to both around 40%, this way we can gradually apply the brush effect.

Add Colour Depth and Lighting Contrast to Hair

Lastly, we can add some more depth to this girl’s hair. To do this, we can simply add a Curves Adjustment layer with the following settings:

Add the following layer mask to the Curves adjustment layer:

Here is our final effect: (You can see by adding the layer mask, we leave only the hair portion highlighted)

Optionally we add duplicate the orginal background layer and set the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “overlay”, reduce the opacity to 45%, you will have the following final effect: (click to enlarge)

That’s for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

I remembered when I first started learning Photoshop many years ago, there are many features I never knew how to use, or just don’t bother use them at all. Well, I was wrong, and I have since realised everything has their uses and they’re there for a purpose :)

In this tutorial, I will show you 5 Highly Applicable, Yet Easily Ignored Features in Photoshop -  and How to Best Use Them. Hopefully they’re of use to you as a starter, thus make your life as a photoshopper a bit easier right from the beginning.

Meanwhile, I guess even if you’re an experienced Photoshopper already, it nevers hurt to have a read :) Perhaps you’d like to share some tips and tricks too? Just drop me a comment below :)

Ok enough talk, let’s get started!

Turn on the Alignment Options in Move Tool

Let’s face this: you create a new document, copy and paste a new image onto the canvas, and try to position it to the center. If you’re a beginner, you may try to judge the center point by your eyes (I did it once). But believe me, your eyes don’t always tell the truth!

That’s when the alignment options come in handy. Simply click on the Move Tool (V), then you will see the alignment options appears on the top:

And let’s say you want to position an object in the center of the canvas, simply Ctrl + A to select the whole canvas, and you will see some alignment option become clickable:

And then you simply click “Align vertical centers” and “Align horizontal centers”, you will see the object is now positioned in the center of the canvas:

Also if you wish to align your object to a different spot, simply change the selection range instead of the whole canvas.

Image > Trim…

Ok, there will be time that you will face the following situation: you will have image sitting on top of a transparent or a single solid colour background, and you will want to get rid of all the background and leave just the image object.

Naturally you will want to use the Crop tool, however that can sometimes be tricky. So the Trim function can come in handy. (Image > Trim…)

What trim function does is that it lets you instantly crop your document’s canvas to the outer border of your image and clear out the rest of the image, as along as you have a transparent background or a solid colour background. Here is a demo: (I have a solid white background)

Before Trim

After Trim

Isn’t this much easier than cropping?

Unlock the Background Layer

Trust me, there will be time comes that you will want to unlock the background layer, for whatever purpose. To do so, simply double-click the background layer on the layer pallette, as shown below:

You will then be prompted with a new window, simply click “OK”:

And you will now see the lock on the background layer is gone, that means the background layer is now unlocked:

You can now drag this background layer up and down, just like all other unlocked layers.

An even quicker to unlock the background layer: (Thanks to dietoself86)

Actually the quickest way to unlock the background layer is to alt-double click on the layer.

Convert to Smart Object

Since Photoshop CS2, there is a new feather called Smart Object being introduced. We may know it’s there, however many of us may never use it until now.

This feature is available when you right-click the image layer on the layer palette, as show below:

I won’t go into great detail about the use of smart object here, however what I would like to talk about is that by converting your image into smart object, you can overcome the issue whan resize the image, it becomes blurred when enlarge back to the original size. Below is the screenshot of comparison:

Without converting to smart object, after resizing back to original size:

Converted to smart object, after resizing back to original size:

You can see by converting the image to smart object, it preserves the details and no matter how many times you resize it, it won’t go blurry.

More smart object options are available under Layer > Smart Object, as shown below:

Further Readings about Smart Object:

Photoshop Smarter: Smart Objects

Photoshop How-To: Get Smart About Smart Objects

A Word of Caution for using Smart Object: (Thanks to B. Moore for commenting this)

Using smart objects will increase the file size by a large amount. It all depends on size of the original piece thats was turned into a smart object. Using lots of high rez smart objects will make a HUGE increase to file size.

The Info Window

As a photoshop beginner, every now and then you will need extra information about the image you’re working on. And you may ask: How do I work out the size, colour and see extra information about the tools I’m using?

That’s when the info window come in real handy. To bring it up, simply go to Window > Info or press F8:

Once you have the info window open, it display some real handy information about the tool you’re using, and the size of the selection you’re drawing, etc.

Here is a example info window I have when I draw a rectangular marquee selection on a white canvas:

As you can see, it displays information about the rectangluar marquee tool I’m using, the size of the selection (in pixel) I’m drawing, the X/Y position of the selection, and the colour mode stats.

Those information would be quite useful especially when you need precise measurement, such as web graphic, prints, etc.

Ok that’s all for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find those information useful. Cheers and have a great day!

Recently I have been focusing on providing some simple, beginner-leveled Photoshop tutorials here on psdvault.com, aiming to helping Photoshop starters to learn some basic, but useful things towards their design. After all, I do get lots of emails from beginners wanting to learn from the basics.

Therefore, I made a few mini Photoshop tutorials and compiled them into one, big tutorial with some tricks I learnt and discovered in the past.

In this post, I will show you 5 Useful Little Photoshop Tricks to Bring Out That bit of Extra Elegance for Your Design. I think those techniques would be quite useful for a Photoshop beginner, as they give you a good starting and/or finishing point for whatever things you design. Once you learn those skills, you can apply them to a wide range of occasions. Have a try!

The topics I will be focusing on in the post include:

1. Give Your Text A Bit More Depth
2. The Light From the Top (Highlight Specific Area)
3. Clever Use of Motion Blur
4. The Cloud and Warp Tool
5. Distort Your Way into 3D

Give Your Text A Bit More Depth

Here is the problem – You typed some text onto the canvas, but somehow it looks just boring, like this text below:

(Font: Myriad Pro)

Here is how you can easily add some more depth and lighting contrast to the text itself – on the text layer, apply the following layer blending options:

Drop Shadow

Inner Shadow

Bevel and Emboss

Contour

Gradient Overlay

And here is the effect after those blending options applied:

You can see just by adding those very simple layer blending options, you can make you text looks more attractive and contains more lighting depths.

The Light From the Top (Highlight Specific Area)

If you want to bring out some more extra elegance for the text above, you can add some light from the top.

To do this, simply create a new layer on top of the text layer, keep the blending mode as “Normal”, grab a big soft round brush with White colour, do a single click on the position as shown below:

And you will have the following effect: (can reduce the layer opacity to around 80% if you think the light is too bright)

This method can be used widely in lots of different occasions, for anything you want to highlight.

Clever Use of Motion Blur

Sometimes you see a display like this:

and you wonder how this nice shadow is created. Well, simple!

Basically you grab a soft round brush with a dark colour, do a single-click on a spot:

Go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and apply the following settings:

Hit Ctrl + F several times to re-apply motion blur several times, then use the free transform tool (Ctrl + T) to reduce the height if necessary. You will have the following effect:

That’s it! If you want to make a dark shadow, just use a darker brush in the beginning.

The Cloud and Warp Tool

Have you ever thought of combining the cloud rendering filter and the Warp Tool together? If not, have a try with those two now, you will be surprised what effect that brings you.

The steps are quite simple: create a new document with black background, use the Lasso Tool with a 50px feather and draw a circle, render some cloud inside it by going to it Filter > Render > Cloud: (with White as Foreground colour, Black as Background colour)

Then Hit Ctrl + T and bring up the Free Transform Tool, right-click on the cloud and choose “Warp”:

Then expriement! Use the warp tool to tweak the cloud into whatever shape you like:

Here is my effect after the warping:

Try out different angles, you will get lots of different effect as a result.

Distort Your Way into 3D

This is a really quick way of making a 3D look with the Distort option available in the Free Transform Tool.

So create a new document with White background and make some rectangular shape filled with different colour on it: (The size of the rectangular shapes are roughly half of the height the canvas)

Duplicate this shape layer, drag the duplicated shapes beneath the original shapes, resize it to fit the canvas:

On the duplicated layer, right-click and choose “Distort”:

Hold down the “Shift” key, click and drag both bottom corner of the shape until you reach the following effect:

For Lighting Contrast, simply add a new layer with blending mode set to “Color Burn”, grab a soft round brush with a dark colour and paint over the desired area:

That’s all for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find those little tricks useful and inspirational! Cheers and have a great day!