Photoshop

How do you slim someone down in Photoshop you ask?

This was a challenge that was posed to me the other day, and I wasn’t sure of the answer myself. I hadn’t ever tried to take a photo of someone with clothes on, in a group of other people, and make them look a little less fat. The camera adds 10 lbs and all that rot.

Well, I did some searching. Tutorials in Photoshop on “slim”, “fat”, and “weight”. I found a tutorial that spoke about making someone look more fat, but the principal was the same. They suggested a lot of patience, some skill, and use the liquify tool.

The liquify tool is under the “Filter” menu in Photoshop. You can also access it by this shortcut;

Ctrl + Shift + X = Liquify Tool

The idea is to drag the existing person’s boundaries inwards to make them smaller. Now, my subject was on a darker background, with darker clothes. So, I think I got lucky with this challenge. The darker colors would mask more inconsistencies and “drag” lines when working with this tool.

But basically, make the brush size large enough to try to avoid getting blurring drag lines and start pushing pixels in.

Here is a snippet of that other tutorial that I found. It is a multipage document…

A good place to start is the face. The best tool for enlarging the contours of a face is the liquify tool. The brush size is important. A larger brush will create less ‘drag lines’ but naturally will give you less control than a smaller one. You’ll have to experiment a bit here to choose the right size for your job but my rule of thumb is to use the largest size brush that will still give you the control you need.

Set the brush just inside the outer line of the flesh contour and carefully pull the flesh outward to the amount desired. You’ll have to repeat that around the entire area you want to enlarge and adjust brush sizes accordingly. Patience and care are virtues here.

If you want to find the full tutorial, I am not going to provide a full link, but search on Worth1000.com for a tutorial called “Fattening Folks” and you should find some more pages of walk through as well as visual examples of what you may get when slimming or adding fat to people in Photoshop.

I had a friend of mine ask me the other day how to rotate through a grouping of Photoshop tools without having to use their mouse every time.

This is pretty easy, and it can save you a lot of time.  Let’s take the  Dodge, Burn, and Sponge tool grouping within the Tools  palette.

The shortcut to start using the last selected tool from from that group is the “O” key.  Now, let’s say you hit the “O” key, and up came the dodge tool, but you need the burn tool.  To rotate through the grouping of tools using a shortcut, just hold the modifier key, in this case “Shift” which hitting “O”.

So, rotate through a grouping of tools is easy.  Hit the shortcut key to get to the group first, and then hold “Shift” with the key to rotate through them, in this case “Shift + O”.

Everyone can use this tip. Or least, it is good to know about, and then when you purchase Adobe Photoshop and stop screwing around with all that crappy free software, you will know how to use this.

Digital Cameras are about as cheap as a car payment these days, and everyone has got one. There is a whole new business cropping up for organizing, printing, and sharing these photos in online services and software. Never before have we had instant photos like this, and now that we have it, we want more, and want to know the best way to organize them.

The place to start is to change the crappy names that the camera gives them, something like DSC0000317 or whatever combo of letter and numbers your camera abitrarily decides to name your photos.

In steps Adobe Photoshop CS. Until now, I didn’t get the point of the Adobe File Browser, which is now a whole seperate program in Adobe CS2 called Bridge. In the File Browser in Photoshop, you can batch process rename all of your images to whatever you want. If you don’t know what a batch process is, it’s basically an automated little mini program you make to do a repetitive task for you, and making your life easier in the process.

Let’s get started.

In the photo below, you will notice that I took a screenshot of the file browser in Photoshop, in one of the thumbnail modes for a series of photos I took with my cheap digital camera. As you can see, they are named terribly, and I would like to name them better to help me search for the more easily later on.

These are some photos I took at the IU vs. Purdue football game blowout last year. Let’s start to rename them now that you have seen a little snapshot of the file browser.

Step 1: Go up to your menus in the upper left, and choose Automate > Batch Rename

Step 2: You will see the below screen. The default option that you first see is to Rename in same folder. You also have the option to choose Move to new folder, with a browse button to find that destination. I am going to keep them in the same folder, and so should you for this example.

Step 3: Here is the scariest screen. This is very pragmatic if you have a technical kind of brain. Fortunately, Adobe steps you through this process fairly easily. As you change options here, you will see what your file will rename to.

In this case, I want my files to be named 05_IU_Purdue and I want them to increment with a two digit serial number. You will see each box has a dropdown of scary options. But don’t worry, over time you will adjust to these.

I happen to like underscores for my files, for Unix server type reasons, so in the second box I add an underscore to seperate my serial number incrementation, and then I end my file in a lowercase extension. The extension used will be the same as the type of file you have currently.

Take a look at my screenshot now with all of my information filled in.

Step 4: After you have all of your own appropriate information filled in, hit “OK’ in the upper right and watch Photoshop work.

Now, I am aware that this option in some form was already available in Photoshop under File > Automate. But what I like about this, is that it cuts out one step. You will go to the folder you want to edit your images in, instead of selecting it from a file finder in the old way. This makes it much more visible and that is easier for me.

It would take me a lot longer to explain every option in the drop down menus, but most of them are pretty tell tale. Serial number is for just a regular number, and when you see one of the options in uppercase, that means that your output will also be in uppercase. Just watch your naming strategy at the top of the drop downs if you aren’t sure.

So now get busy, and take this power to rename all those old photos that are laying around, cluttering up your desktop.

Although I have never really cared before today, I did learn that you can change that ever so dull gray color that is around a image when you are working on it in Photoshop. If you don’t know what I am talking about, look at the image below, and that huge gray sea surrounding my working area.

To change this, follow these two simple steps;

Step 1: Grab your paint bucket tool and change the color in the color squares from white to whatever you want the gray color to be instead.

Step 2: Zoom out so you can see plenty of gray space. Shift Click anywhere in the gray space to dump the new color in there instead. I am going to use a blue color to illustrate my purpose.

Normally, with the paint bucket all you have to do is click, the shift click is like a safety for you, the user, so that you don’t change the color accidentally.

I assume you know a little bit about Photoshop, but if you don’t know where your paint bucket and color selector tools are in your toolbar, I have circled them for you in the final example.

This is a really simple task that you may find yourself doing when you upgrade your version of Photoshop. Unlike brushes and other custom settings, you actually have to import custom actions after you place them in the correct folder on your hard drive.

To preserve your actions, these are the steps you take. Let’s first export them out of your old version of Photoshop.

Step 1: Open Photoshop, and make sure that your “Actions” pallette is open. Window > Actions. Or by default the shortcut is setup to Alt + F9.

Step 2: Click on the folder that has your actions you want to save. You should see a little triangle up in the upper right of the pallette, click that, and scroll down until you see “Save Actions…”.

Step 3: Save actions. Also, you may want to note what folder they are located in. You can either save them in the default folder with the rest of your actions, and if you are like me, you will then copy those to a different location to be backed up later in case you lose your system.

Here is a small illustration showing you what the actions pallette looks like, the small triangle I was talking about, and your save and load options.

My actions are located in this directory. You will want to note the structure, because you will be copying these actions into a similar directory for your new version of Photoshop. Program Files > Adobe > Photoshop 7.0 > Presets > Photoshop Actions.

Ok. Now let’s import them back into the same, or a different version of Photoshop.

Step 1: Open Photoshop again, and again, make sure that your “Actions” pallette is open. Window > Actions.

Step 2: Click that small triangle in the upper right like you did before, and choose “Load Actions”.

Step 3: Navigate to find the file we just saved out (It should be a file you named with a .atn Photoshop extension on it), and choose “Load”.

You should now see your actions in your pallette available for use in your new version of Photoshop.

I brought over the two tutorials I had from my opinion section written by guest columnists on Rothecreations.com.

Someone at work came to me with a problem yesterday where they were getting an error message in Illustrator about not being able to read a 16-Bit image.

I had never had this error message, and when I hopped into Photoshop, I found that this .tif image was set to 16-Bit color. I changed it to 8-Bit Color Channel and everything seemed to work just fine.

16 Bit Color Channels are basically more information per channel. For example, for RGB, that would mean you would have a 16-Bit greyscale and then 48-Bit Color RGB Image (16 per Channel of Red Green and Blue x 3). It is more information and if I would have to guess without doing too much research, is something similar to RAW. It contains more data than most users need, but at least they can utilize it if need be.

Photoshop can edit in 16-Bit image mode to some degree. None of the layers options work, but most of the basic tools do. So, you may want to work in 8-Bit until you have the image where you need it then convert it to 16-Bit Channel.

Temporary Functions

There is also a set of shortcuts that perform temporary functions. That is, you can be using any tool, hit a temporary shortcut, perform the function, let go of the keys and you’re back to using your original tool. (These won’t work if you are typing text using the type tool. You’ll have to get out of the tool first and then use them.)

Space Bar -
Holding this down gives you the hand tool temporarily.

Command-Space -
This lets you use the zoom tool. It’s really useful when you’re doing some heavy-duty clone-stamp work or detailed brush-work. You can have the tool set at whatever configuration, hold down Command-Space, zoom to a part you need to focus on, then let go and you still have your brush or stamp or whatever.

Command -
Temporarily changes whatever tool you’re using to the move tool.

Command-Option -
Still gives you the move tool, but when you drag whatever you’re dragging, you’ll make a copy of it instead.

Command + or -
Zooms in and out without changing tools. You probably knew this one.

Brush Adjustments

If you use any brush or brush-like tools in Photoshop (clone stamp, burning/dodging, eraser, etc…), these shortcuts can save you many fractions-of-seconds that add up to a lot of saved time.

[ or ]
– Will make your brush tool smaller or bigger, respectively.

Shift
[ or ] – This adjusts the hardness of your
selected brush in 25% increments.

Any number key
– When using a brush tool, hitting the number keys will affect the tool’s opacity. If you hit 3, the opacity will be 30%. 0 is 100%. If you type two numbers in succession, like 3 and 8, the opacity will then be that number (in our case 38%).

Option key
– This temporarily turns the brush tool to a source-tool. Like when using the paint brush, it turns into an eye-dropper that affects the foreground color.

X
– Alternates the background and foreground colors. This is really useful when doing complex selections in quick mask mode or using layer masks.

D – Sets the foreground color to black and background color to white. Another shortcut that is really useful for quick masks and layer masks.

One final master trade secret that isn’t a key press…

I think I’m starting to take up way too much of Jeff’s site, so I better wrap it up. However I have one last, super-juicy tip-

It’s not a shortcut per se, but it is a simple procedure that can save a lot of time in a fairly common Photoshop problem. Whenever you scan
something, like a photo or a drawing, there is almost always a bit of a tilt. You can sit there going to Image>Rotate and enter in micro-increments to try to get it just right- but that takes way too much time. Here is a real cool tip for just that situation.

Under the eyedropper tool, two tools deep, is the measuring tool. (For those of you paying attention, you would have to tap the I (eye) key three times to access it without using the toolbox itself.) You can use it to measure angles with a click, drag and second click.

Using the measuring tool, draw a line on an edge in your graphic that you would want to be leveled out horizontally or vertically, but is just a bit off (like the bottom edge of a scanned photo). It will probably give you a measurement of 2.38 degrees or something funky like that. If you go to Image>Rotate>Arbitrary now, Photoshop will automatically put the value in that box to ‘right’ the measured angle. In our example, -2.38 degrees. Hit OK, and poof- a level photo without the guess work!

In closing, I’d like to say that this is by no stretch of the imagination an exhaustive list. Deke McClelland has a 42 page appendix on shortcuts in his Photoshop Bible. These were simply the ones that I found most useful in my work, and figured other people would find them helpful as well.

~final

Guest Columnist!!

I enticed another one of my good friends to speak his piece. This is really old, but to let everyone know if you don’t already, Chip and I met in orientation and this is how it went.

He said, “Hey, I ran cross country” and then our tag along friend Brian Wilson said, “Hey, it’s not cheating if it’s your dog”. We looked at each other and laughed, as we ostracized Brian like an annoying ex-girlfriend and realized that it was the best of times.

On to the article already you bozo.

If you are heavy into Photoshop, this article will be for you. I learned three news tips in this short article, and most of the stuff he mentions on part two is stuff I have learned in the last month and a half. Needless to say, it is a great article and without further adu and pools of freshman, at his first girls volleyball game, drool….

“The Shortest Way to Photoshop World Domination”

In the last column, our friend Jen Beyer told all of us good kiddies how to make a super-nifty contact sheet using an automated-yet-obscure feature of Adobe’s flagship product, Photoshop. So when I was asked to contribute a column, I wanted to help readers use Photoshop in a better, more efficient way. So how do I do that?

The answer: Shortcuts.

That is, the useful little tricks that save you a second here, a half second there, or two seconds somewhere else. If you work in the application heavily, or foresee yourself doing so sometime down the line, these are things that can add up to a lot of time saved.

Also, the quicker you can get something to execute, or to switch a setting, or choose a new tool- the more Photoshop takes on the usefulness of a true art tool. You think of a change and it’s done. If you are a Photoshop veteran, some of this will seem quite obvious. I still encourage you to read it through, there might be something mentioned you didn’t know about.

(Let me first thank Ben Willmore and Deke McClelland, whose fine books have taught me a lot of this.)

–Note to user–

These have all been learned and tested using Photoshop versions 6 & 7 on the Macintosh platform. If you use Windows, simply substitute
these keys in the instructions:

Command (aka open-Apple) -> Control
Option -> Alt

Tool Selection-

Do you still have that folded piece of shiny card stock that came with Photoshop? It had pictures of the tools pallette with alphabet
letters notations. Didn’t think so. (Arrrr… There be pirates on the ‘net there be, arrr…)

When working in Photoshop, one can switch between tools by just typing one key on their keyboard, and save themselves the small amount of
time it takes to select the tool with their mouse. You can find out what each of them are by just hovering the mouse over any tool, and after a
few seconds the tool will appear with a letter in parenthesis next to it. That letter is the shortcut to that tool or the group of tools in that
toolbox slot.

Some of the most useful are:
M - Marquee
V - Move
L - Lasso
W - Magic Wand
C - Crop
B - Brush
E - Eraser
S - Clone Stamp
T - Type
I - Eye Dropper

There are others, but in my experience these are the ones used the most. Most of these tools have other tools associated with them
(like the elliptical marquee tool under the marquee tool).

If you go to Edit>Preferences (or Photoshop>Preferences in Photoshop 7 in Mac OS X), and under General, un-check the box that
says “Use Shift Key for Tool Switch”. Now, to switch through various sub-tools, you just have to repeatedly hit a tool’s
key (e.g. tapping the M key twice to access the elliptical marquee).

Continue to Part 2…..