Photoshop Tutorials

You suck at Photoshop!

2009-10-20T03:13:44Z

I just wanted to share with everyone a great Photoshop tutorial. For those of you that have not seen it, it's a series called 'You suck at Photoshop'. The link for the playlist is here, enjoy!

Digital make-up and hairdo

2009-08-09T05:28:36Z

In this tutorial we'll show how to use Photoshop to add make up a celebrity. We'll take a photo of a celebrity without make up then add some effects to make her look great. The methods used here will help you use Photoshop effectively and creatively. After this tutorial you will have a better understanding on how to take a photo and make it look totally different. We'll use blurring, layering, tools and even direct painting to achieve the effect we are looking for. Let's get started and see what we can do.

Blur / Patch Tool

As you can see we have a photo that doesn't look great. Her skin is oily and needs to be smoothed out. Let's copy the layer by hitting CTRL+J. Now lets blur it by clicking Filter, Blur then Gaussian Blur set it to 1.2 and hit OK. Now we have the image blurred a little to hide the skin problems. However we don't want her eyes blurred out so let's use the eraser tool and use it on her eyes. This will allow her eyes to shine through. Now let's use the patch tool. What we want to do here is hold the mouse button down near a skin blimish. Draw a circle around the blimish then release. Next click inside of the circle you just created and drag to another area of the skin that looks similiar. This will take some of the clicked area and blend with the source. The result is normally great and is a fast easy way to remove skin problems. You should now have something as shown below.

Desaturate

Now let's copy the lay we were just working. What we are going to do is desaturate by clicking Image, Adjustments, Desaturate. This will take our layer and make it grey. Now change the mode from Normal to Overlay, change Opacity to 72% and Fill to 44%. This will overlay the grey image on top of our celebrity and bring out the darker tones. It really makes a big difference. What I also did was erase the area behind her so it was not effected.

Time for a hair color change

Ok, looking better. Now let's change that hair, it looks awful. What I did was make a new layer and select a light color and paint all over her hair. Change the mode to Color Burn and notice the difference. Her hair now has more of a contrast. I'll leave the mode Normal on the below image so you can see. I then zoomed in on the eyes and painted a lighter color of blue in a new layer. Then I made that layer 53% opacity and 45% fill. In another layer I painted her pupils black, opacity and fill was not changed.

Make up!

Now let's add some makeup! This is very similar to the way we colored her hair. I made another layer and painted a lighter color of her face. Color all over, don't worry if you go too far - you can erase later. I'll then change the opacity to 50% to make it blend in. In the below example I left it at 100% so you could see how it looks. Now I noticed it was a little too bright so I added another layer on top with a slightly darker color and changed to 49%. Now for the final touch, let's go back to our original layer and select the burn tool. Use this tool around the sides of her face and under the eyes. This will darker these areas and make it more organic and not just one solid color. I also like to go back to our blur layer and erase around the hair. Now we have our hair layer on top anyway removing the blur around the hair really brings out the detail and shine with the new color. The resulting image shown as the last image.

Download the source PSD file

]]>

Photomerge Tutorial - Create a panorama easily

2009-07-29T03:12:05Z

A while back I was thinking of selling my house. I knew I would have to take a bunch of photos for the house, something that would really show off what the house looks like. I ended up taking a bunch of pictures with my digital camera. After I looked at them I noticed, they looked horrible. Every picture was so zoomed in, it was hard to get a good photo of the entire room no matter what I would do. Good news - there's an app for that - Photoshop! Basically you can take a bunch of small photos that you took of the room and combine them to look something like this:

The best part about this tutorial is just how amazingly easy it is.

]]> Step 1

Before you take the photos, let me give you a few tips. What I like to do is turn off all the lights in the room - make it as dark as possible. Then take a photo of one part of the room (with flash). Now without moving your feet, turn and take a picture of the next part of the room.

Step 2

Ok so now you have a bunch of photos of your room, upload them into a folder on your computer. With the light dark and the flash on, you should have some very bright photos. But now what? All we have is random photos, how are we gonna fit all them together? Thankfully it's really easy. Fire up Photoshop (I'm using CS3 but all the same on CS4), click on File, Automate, then Photomerge. Your screen should look like this:

Step 3

Now let's click on Browse and select all the photos you took.

Step 4

Select the layout, I chose perspective to make it look more 3D. This layout seems to work really well when photographing a room. If you photomerging an outdoor area you may want to keep it on auto or try perspective.

Once you select OK, Photoshop will begin to photomerge all your photos together and lay them out in a great perspective! The way it works is Photoshop will index the edges of your images and try to put them together. The result is very quick and looks great. In my final image I touched it up a little to make it look a little brighter in some areas.

Hopefully this video tutorial was helpful. Now you now how to take a bunch of photos and easily turn them into a panorama style view. Like I said before the best part of this tutorial is just how easy it is and useful. I have used photomerge in many situations where I need to properly show how big something is in a tight area. Rooms are notorious for this because its very hard to 'zoom out' and give the viewer the full size of the room. Below is the final product.

Changing the color of a car

2009-07-27T12:08:55Z

Today we'll talk about a quick easy Photoshop tutorial. This is a very simple tutorial that goes over how to change the color of a car. We'll be using the color replace tool and the paint brush tool. We have a Chevy Camaro that is yellow and we want to change it to a different color. So let's get it started.

]]> Using Replace Color

First thing first we'll open a picture of a car. I chose the Chevy Camaro. Once we have it open lets click on Image, then Adjustments then Replace Color.

With the tool open hold the shift key down on your keyboard and click on all of the red on the vehicle. It's important to get the highs and the lows of the red on the car. We are sampling the colors that we will soon replace. Now lets click on on the result color. What we are going to select now is a new color that we want to replace our sampled colors with. The great thing about this tool is that it will take all of the highs and lows that we just sampled and replace them with their equals with our new color. We hit ok then we are done. Pretty easy huh? Let's take a look at another way.

Paint Brush Tool

This next way is even easier. All you do is select the paint brush tool then change the mode from Normal to Color. Give it a try, try painting a section of the car as you normally would. What you will find is that Photoshop will color the car but not totally over write it as it would if the mode was normal. You can see its actually very easy to change the color of pretty much anything with Photoshop! This example was really basic but hopefully it gives you insight on how easy it is to use Photoshop to get some really cool results.

Watch the video on YouTube

Using vanishing point

2009-02-27T13:24:17Z

This is a fun and fast little tutorial for using a neat Photoshop tool called vanishing point. Photoshop is a great tool and has a ton of great effects that you may not even be familiar with. Vanishing point is a way you can place an 2D image into a 2D document and have it perfectly match the perspective of the existing document. How does it work? Well thats what this tutorial is all about. The vanishing point is a very easy tool to use and we'll go over it step by step. Lets take a look.

]]> Get the source image

In my case I got a great Linux penguin! Really quickly I used the magic wand tool to remove the background. This is done by selecting the magic wand tool, click the white background then cut it out (CTRL+X). While that is still selected click on Select then Inverse, now we have just the penguin selected. Now lets hit CTRL+C to copy him, we'll need him in just a second.

Open the building picture

Alrighty moving on, here in the video I opened the brick building picture. First things first, lets click on layers (if it isn't already open) and click on the little icon to create a new layer. This way we don't mess up our original image and we have a clean place to work with. Once that is up lets go into our vanishing point tool.

Vanishing Point

Lets now click on Filter, then Vanishing Point (Or just hit ALT+CTRL+V), this will bring up the vanishing point tool. Now what we do here is just click an upper left hand point, then we'll do another point further down the picture which is further down in the prespective in the lower right hand corner as show in the image below.

Drawing the first line

Here I highlighted the first line in red so you can see how we start to define the grid. Now make a 3rd mark below the 2nd mark, finally make the 4th mark back to the left under the 1st mark. The result should be something simliar as the below image.

Finishing the grid

Here we have our completed grid, you can see the perspective from the left to the right. Now lets adjust it so it has a higher height.

Adjusting the height of the grid

This is done by selecting the top middle white box, holding down the shift key and dragging the grid upwards as show in the above picture. Now we'll do the same thing do the lower white box but this time dragging it down.

Inserting the penguin

Now hit CTRL+V to paste our penguin, move him into the grid and immediately you will see him snap into the prepective of the grid. Try moving him around you will see how the prespective changes from close to far away - it automatically readjusts. Pretty damn cool! You can even hit CTRL+T to transform the penguin if you want to put him on an angle or resize him. Once you have him where you want him lets hit OK to close the vanishing point tool.

Making it look real

Ok so now the penguin is there lets go back to our layers and change the mode from normal to hard light. This changes the mode so the background image is partially visible. Wow look at the difference that makes. Go ahead and zoom in a little to see the detail. That's it!

Conclusion

Hopefully that was a nice tutorial for everyone to check out. Photoshop has a ton of great tools and this is just one of them. Vanishing point can be used for many more purposes and can be much more involved, perhaps in the future we'll come back to this tool to see the other uses.

If you enjoyed this tutorial please take the time to Digg it or StumbleIt, we'd greatly appreicate it!