Photoshop Articles

Cheat Sheet / Updated 08-07-2024

Photoshop CS6 retains all it had in previous versions —, and provides new features to help you with your tasks, such as a darker, more immersive, User Interface, true vector Shape layers, the Oil Paint filter, Adaptive Wide Angle correction, Content-Aware Move tool, new brush tips, and more. None of it is hard to learn, and all of it will help enhance both your productivity and creativity.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 11-01-2023

As you edit images in Photoshop Elements, you need to know your way around the editor workspace and the tools panel — especially the selection tools. Check out the visual reference to the photo editor and the tools panel keyboard shortcuts, as well as the table of Photoshop Elements selection tricks. Having these references by your side will help you edit images in Elements quickly and easily.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 11-17-2022

As you edit images in Photoshop Elements, you need to know your way around the editor workspace and the tools panel — especially the selection tools. Check out the visual reference to the photo editor and the tools panel keyboard shortcuts, as well as the table of Photoshop Elements selection tricks. Having these references by your side will help you edit images in Elements quickly and easily.

Article / Updated 08-16-2022

In Photoshop Elements, you can use the Albums panel to create an album to organize your photos. You might want to organize an album for sharing photos with others on Photoshop online, assemble an album and rate each photo with a range from one to five stars, create a slide show, or just use the Albums panel to further segregate images within different categories. You can create an album with photos that share a keyword tag. For example, you might have a catalog with a number of photos taken on a European vacation. You can create keyword tags for files according to the country visited. You then might rate the best pictures you took on your trip. The highest-rated images could then be assembled in an album and viewed as a slide show. Rating images Rating photos is handled in the Properties panel. To assign a star rating to a file, right-click a photo and select Properties from that menu. The Properties - General panel opens. Click a star to rate the photo. Alternatively, click a photo, choose Edit→Ratings, and choose a star rating. Rating photos with stars in the Properties panel. When you select the Details check box on the Shortcuts bar, all your rated photos appear with the number of stars according to the rating you provided. You can easily sort files according to ratings by choosing the Edit→Ratings command and select a star rating from the submenu. When the Details check box is selected, all rated photos appear with stars. Adding rated files to an album You might want to rate images with star ratings and then add all your images to an album. Within the album, you can still choose to view your pictures according to star ratings. Creating an album With albums and star ratings, you can break down a collection into groups that you might want to mark for printing, sharing, or onscreen slide shows. To create an album, follow these steps: Click the plus sign (+) icon on the Albums panel and choose New Album from the drop-down menu. The Albums panel expands to show the Album Details. Name the new album. Type a name for the album in the Album Name text box. Drag photos from the Organizer to the items window in the Album Content panel. Alternatively, you can select photos in the Organizer and click the plus sign (+) icon to add them to the album. Drag photos to the Items area in the Album Contents panel. Click Done at the bottom of the panel. Your new album now appears listed in the Albums panel. You can isolate all the photos within a given album by clicking the album name in the Albums panel. Creating a Smart Album You can perform a search based on a number of different criteria. The Smart Album feature enables you to save the search results in an album. After you have all the files shown in the Organizer based on the searches you perform, you can create a Smart Album as follows: Open the New menu on the Albums panel and choose New Smart Album. The New Smart Album dialog box opens. Type a name for your new Smart Album. Make selections for the search criteria below the Name text box. You can search using multiple criteria by clicking the Plus (+) icon in the New Smart Album dialog box. Click the icon, and a new line appears. Click OK. The Smart Album is listed above the albums in the Albums panel. Type a name for your new Smart Album, add the search criteria, and click OK to add the album to the Albums panel. Creating an Album Category The Albums panel contains all the albums and Smart Albums you create in an organized list. By default, the albums are listed in alphabetical order. If you add many albums to the panel, the list can be long, making it difficult to find the album you want to use for a given editing session. An Album Category is no more than a divider shown in the Albums panel. You don’t add photos to the group. You nest albums within a group in a hierarchical manner. To understand how to create an Album Category, follow these steps: Create several albums. To begin, you should have two or more albums added to the Albums panel. Create an Album Category by clicking the New menu on the Albums panel and choosing New Album Category. The Create Album Category dialog box opens. Type a name for the group in the Album Category Name text box and then click OK. You new Album Category is added to the Albums panel. Click and drag an album onto the Album Category name in the Albums panel. The albums you drag to the Album Category are nested within the group. Albums are nested below an Album Category.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-25-2022

This Cheat Sheet is handy to keep nearby when you're working in Photoshop as a quick reference to selection tricks, layer-merging tricks, filter gallery colors, and troubleshooting tips.

Article / Updated 03-08-2022

When cleaning up photos in Photoshop CC, large challenges sometime require drastic measures, such as duplicate layers and layer masks. Take a look at the following figure. At the top left, you see the “before” photo: at the top right, the “after” image. Below are images from three key steps in the process. Here are the steps taken to remove the boy from the group photo: Decide what needs to go and how best to cover it. In this case, the young man is no longer welcome in the group photo. The easiest way to remove him (without using scissors and leaving an empty hole) is to move the two young women on the right over to the left. Make a selection of the area that you’ll use to cover. A large rectangular selection is used, which included everything to the right of the young man. Be careful to include everything you’ll need in the altered image. In this case, the girl’s hair is on the boy’s shirt. Remember you can always make a rough selection with one tool and then press and hold Shift to add to the selection with another tool, or press Option/Alt to remove part of the selection. Copy the selection to a new layer. Use the keyboard shortcut Command+J/Ctrl+J to copy the selection to a new layer. Position the new layer. Use the Move tool to slide the new layer over the top of the area you want to remove. Add a layer mask. Click the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the Layers panel and then paint with black in the layer mask to hide areas of the upper layer. As you can see in the lower left in the figure, the upper layer covers areas of the lower layer that need to show (such as the man’s head), creating an unnatural shadow pattern. The layer mask in the lower-center image exposes as much of the lower layer as possible, leaving the upper layer visible only where necessary to show the two young women and their shadows as well as to hide the people on the lower layer. Look for and adjust anomalies. In the lower center of the figure, you see that one woman’s foot should be in the man’s shadow. A new layer is added, and a selection is made of the area that should be in shadow, which is filled with the color of the toes that are already in shadow. Then use the Multiply blending mode and the Opacity slider to match the original shadow. (See the lower-right image in the figure.) Crop. Glancing again at the lower-center image in the figure, you see the area that needs to be cropped, off to the right. Using the rectangular Marquee tool, make a selection of everything you want to save. Then use the Image→Crop command, and the alteration is complete. Save the image.I suggest you save the image with a different name in case you ever need the unaltered image again.

Article / Updated 01-07-2022

Sometimes in Photoshop CC you need to copy/paste over something that needs to be removed from a photo. The Clone Stamp tool is usually faster and easier than working with selection. One of the keys to using the Clone Stamp tool is keeping an eye on your work. Zoom in close so you can work precisely, but choose Window→Arrange→New Window for [filename]. Choose Window→Arrange→Tile All Vertically and keep that second window zoomed out and off to the side so you can monitor your progress while you work. Keep a copy of the original image open for reference. You can make a copy of the file with the Image→Duplicate command or by clicking the left button at the bottom of the History panel. As you make changes to the original image, refer to the duplicate (the original filename appended with copy). If you're not happy with the previous change, you can undo it. Here are some tips for working effectively with the Clone Stamp tool: Work on a separate layer. Before cloning, click the New Layer button at the bottom of the Layers panel and set the Sample menu to All Layers in the Options bar. By cloning to the new layer, you protect yourself from irreversible errors (you can always erase part of the upper layer or delete it), and you can show/hide your work layer to check progress. If the image already has multiple layers and you want to clone from only one, hide the other layers in the Layers panel by clicking the eyeball icons in the left column. If a color or pattern is uniform, choose a source near the area you want to clone. Option+click /Alt+click the area in the image you want to clone. If, for example, you’re removing a power line in a beautiful blue sky, clone from right above and below the power line so that you get the best possible color match. For delicate jobs or larger items, you can clone by halves — clone half from one side and the other half from the other side. To avoid a recognizable pattern, choose a source that's far from the area you want to clone. You can clone from a variety of places to avoid creating any recognizable replicas of nearby flowers or rocks. You should, however, try to clone from areas that are approximately the same distance from the lens as the area over which you’re cloning. If you clone from the far distance into the foreground, you’ll have a recognizable size mismatch and perhaps a focal difference, as well. To copy areas or objects, use Aligned. By using the Aligned option, the relationship between the point from which you sample and the point to which you clone remains constant when you release the mouse button. To pick a new source point, Option+click/Alt+click elsewhere in the image. To repeat a pattern or texture, don’t use Aligned. If you have a specific object, texture, or pattern that you want to replicate in more than one area, you can clear the Aligned check box on the Options bar. Every time you release the mouse button, the source point returns to the exact spot where you Option+clicked/Alt+clicked. You can copy the same part of the image into as many different places as you choose. You can vary the tool’s opacity and blending mode. Generally speaking, when you want to hide something in the image, use the Normal blending mode and 100% opacity. However, you can also clone with other blending modes and reduce opacity to subdue rather than hide and, of course, for fun special effects. Adjust your brush size on the fly. Pressing the left and right brackets keys (to the right of P on the standard English keyboard) decreases and increases the brush diameter without having to open the Brushes panel. Check the brush’s hardness and spacing settings. To get the smoothest result for general cloning, reduce the brush’s Hardness setting to about 25%, allowing edges to blend. There are times, however, when you’ll need a more distinct edge to the brush, but you’ll rarely need to clone with a brush set harder than perhaps 90%. In the full-size Brushes panel, you can generally set the Spacing (in Brush Tip Shape) to 1% for cloning to ensure the edge is as smooth as possible. The Spot Healing Brush works much like the Healing Brush to repair and replace texture. However, instead of designating a source point by Option+clicking/Alt+clicking, the Spot Healing Brush samples from the immediate surrounding area, which makes it perfect for repairing little irregularities in an area of rather consistent texture. You can also clone from another image. Open two images and tile them vertically (Window Arrange Tile All Vertically). Option+click/Alt-click the image you want to clone (the source) and drag inside the image you want to clone the pixels to.

Article / Updated 01-06-2022

The Brush Settings panel in Photoshop CC, like the Layer Style dialog box, has a column on the left that lists options. Like the Layer Style dialog box, you mark the check box to activate the feature, but you have to click the name to open that pane in the panel. As you can see in this figure, the Brush Settings panel menu offers very few commands, whereas the Brush panel menu includes variations in how to display the panel content, some housekeeping commands for resetting/loading/saving brushes, and a list of brush sets in the bottom half of the menu. Don’t overlook those little lock icons to the right of the various pane names in the Brush panel. Click the lock to preserve the settings in that pane while you switch among brush tip presets. Any unlocked attributes revert to those with which the brush tip was created. Locking, for example, Shape Dynamics retains those settings even if you switch to a totally different brush tip. Here, in order, are the Brush panel panes and the options in those panes to which you should pay attention: Brushes: This button (just above the names of the panes) opens the Brush panel, where you pick the basic brush tip shape from the brushes loaded in the panel. You can also resize the brush tip, but that’s it. (Note that you can also select a brush tip in the Brush Tip Shape panel of the Brush Settings panel.) Brush Tip Shape: Without a check box to the left or a lock icon to the right, Brush Tip Shape is the pane in which you can select and customize a brush tip. (Refer to the Brush Tip Shape pane in the figure) This is perhaps the most important part of the Brush panel. In this pane, you can select a brush tip, change its size, alter the angle at which it’s applied, change the height-width relationship (Roundness) of the tip, and adjust the Spacing setting. Shape Dynamics: Dynamics in the Brush panel add variation as you drag a tool. Say you’re working with a round brush tip and choose Size Jitter. As you drag the brush tip, the brush tip instances (the individual marks left by the brush as you drag) will vary in diameter. The Shape Dynamics pane offers Size Jitter, Angle Jitter, and Roundness Jitter. Each of the “jitters” can be set to fade after a certain number of brush tip instances or can be controlled with the stylus that you use with a tablet and stylus. Angle can also be set to Direction, which forces the brush tip to adjust the direction that you drag or the direction of the selection or path you stroke. Use Shape Dynamics to add some variation and randomness to your painting, as shown in this image: Scattering: Scattering varies the number of brush tip instances as you drag as well as their placement along the path you drag. Like Shape Dynamics, Scattering can be set to fade or can be controlled with a Wacom tablet. Texture: Use the Texture pane to add a pattern to the brush tip, as shown. You can select from among the same patterns that you use to fill a selection. Texture is most evident when Spacing for the brush tip is set to at least 50%. Dual Brush: Using a blending mode you select, the Dual Brush option overlays a second brush tip. You could, for example, add an irregular scatter brush to a round brush tip to break up the outline as you paint. Color Dynamics: Using the Color Dynamics pane, you can vary the color of your stroke as you drag. This comes in most handy for painting images and scenes rather than, say, working on an alpha channel. Just as you might add jitter to the size, shape, and placement of a grass brush while creating a meadow, you might also want to add some differences in color as you drag. You could pick different shades of green for the foreground and background colors and then also add jitter to the hue, saturation, and brightness values as the foreground and background colors are mixed while you drag, as shown in the previous figure. Transfer: Think of this pane as Opacity and Flow Jitter. You can add variation to the opacity and flow settings from the Options bar to change the way paint “builds up” in your artwork. Brush Pose: When working with a tablet and stylus, this panel enables you to ensure precision by overriding certain stylus-controlled variations in a stroke. If, for example, you want to ensure that the brush tip size doesn’t change, regardless of how hard you press on the tablet, open Brush Pose, set Pressure to 100%, and select the Override Pressure check box. You can also override the stylus's rotation and tilt as you paint, setting any value from -100 to +100 for both tilt axis values and 0 to 360 degrees for rotation. Other Options: At the bottom of the left column are five brush options that don’t have separate panes in the Brush panel. They’re take-it-or-leave-it options — either activated or not. Noise: Adding Noise to the brush stroke helps produce some texture and breaks up solid areas of color in your stroke. Wet Edges: Wet Edges simulates paint building up along the edges of your stroke. Build-up: The Build-up check box simply activates the Airbrush button on the Options bar. Smoothing: Smoothing helps reduce sharp angles as you drag your mouse or stylus. If the stroke you’re painting should indeed have jagged turns and angles, disable Smoothing. Protect Texture: The Protect Texture option ensures that all the brushes with a defined texture use the same texture. Use this option when you want to simulate painting on canvas, for example. When creating a dashed line or stroking a path with a nonround brush tip, go to the Shape Dynamics pane of the Brush panel and set the Angle Jitter’s Control pop-up menu to Direction. That enables the brush tip to rotate as necessary to follow the twists and turns of the selection or path that it's stroking. (You'll generally want to leave Angle Jitter set to 0 percent so the stroke follows the selection or path precisely.)

Article / Updated 01-06-2022

Painting certainly has a place in your arsenal of Photoshop skills, even if you never create an image from scratch. Painting. The word evokes images of brushes and palettes and color being precisely applied to canvas. Or, perhaps, images of drop cloths, ladders, rollers, and buckets — color being slopped on a wall and spread around. It doesn’t generally bring to mind digital image editing. In addition to painting landscapes and portraits (which you certainly can do in Photoshop, if you have the talent and training), you can use Photoshop’s painting tools for a variety of other tasks. For example, you can paint to create masks and layer masks, adjust tonality or sharpness in specific areas, repair blemishes and other damage in an image — even to create graphic elements and special effects. Add color with the Pencil tool The Pencil tool differs from the Brush tool in one major respect: Regardless of the Hardness setting in the Brush panel, the Pencil tool always uses a hardness value of 100%. With the Pencil tool active, the Options bar offers the miniature Brush panel, a choice of blending mode and opacity, the somewhat-misnamed Auto Erase option, and a symmetry option, which enables you to mirror your pencil stroke with one of several presets such as Vertical, Horizontal, Wavy and much more. When you choose the Symmetry option, you choose a preset, and then adjust it to create the type of symmetry you need for the lines you’re drawing with the Pencil tool. When selected, Auto Erase doesn't actually erase, but rather lets you paint over areas of the current foreground color using the current background color. Click an area of the foreground color, and the Pencil applies the background color. Click any color other than the foreground color, and the Pencil applies the foreground color. Remove color with the Eraser tool The fourth of your primary painting tools is the Eraser. On a layer that supports transparency, the Eraser tool makes the pixels transparent. On a layer named Background, the Eraser paints with the background color. On the Options bar, the Eraser tool's Mode menu doesn't offer blending modes, but rather three behavior choices. When you select Brush (the default), the Options bar offers you the same Opacity, Flow, and Airbrush options as the Brush tool. You can also select Pencil, which offers an Opacity slider, but no Flow or Airbrush option (comparable to the actual Pencil tool). When Mode is set to Block, you have a square Eraser tool that erases at the size of the cursor. (When you click or drag, the number of pixels erased is tied to the current zoom factor.) Regardless of which mode is selected, the Options bar offers one more important choice: To the right of the Airbrush button, you’ll find the Erase to History check box. When selected, the Eraser tool paints over the pixels like the History Brush, restoring the pixels to their appearance at the selected state in the History panel. A couple of variations on the Eraser tool are tucked away with it in the Toolbox, too. The Background Eraser tool can, in fact, be used to remove a background from your image. However, it’s not limited to something in your image that appears to be a background. Remember that digital images don’t really have backgrounds and foregrounds or subjects — they just have collections of tiny, colored squares. What does this mean for using the Background Eraser? You can click and drag on any color in the image to erase areas of that color. You can also elect to erase only the current background color and designate the foreground color as protected so that it won’t be erased even if you drag over it. The Magic Eraser, like the Magic Wand selection tool, isn’t a brush-using tool, but this is a logical place to tell you about it. Click a color with the Magic Eraser tool, and that color is erased, either in a contiguous area or throughout the image, depending on whether you have selected the Contiguous option in the Options bar. And, like the Magic Wand, you can set the tool to work on the active layer or all layers in the Options bar, and you can also set a specific level of sensitivity (Tolerance). Here is the one difference between the two: The Magic Eraser is, in fact, a painting tool in that you can set an opacity percentage, which partially erases the selected pixels.

Article / Updated 01-06-2022

The custom shapes already available in Photoshop cover a wide range, but they might not fill all your needs. You can purchase commercial collections of custom shapes from a couple of sources. You can create custom paths and define shapes from them, too. But you’ve already got bunches of custom shapes on your computer, just waiting for you to use them. Select Photoshop’s Type tool and take a look in your Font menu. Check out the fonts already there with names like Wingdings, Webdings, Symbol, and Dingbats. (Your font list may vary.) These are all examples of symbol fonts, which are fonts that have shapes and symbols rather than letters and numbers. Many more typical fonts also have special characters available when you use the Shift key, the Option/Alt key, and the Shift key in combination with the Option/Alt key. Here’s how you can define a custom shape from a symbol: Choose File→New to open a new document. The document can be virtually any size and can be either grayscale or color. Select the Type tool and pick a font. With the Type tool active, choose a symbol font from either the Options bar or the Character panel. The font size doesn’t matter much because you’re creating a vector-based shape that you can easily scale. The foreground color doesn’t matter either because shape tools rely on the foreground color active at the time you create the shape. Type a single symbol and then end the editing session. Click the check mark button to the right on the Options bar, switch tools in the Toolbox, or press Cmd+Return (Mac) or Ctrl+Enter (Windows) to end the editing session. (The symbol visible in the figure below can be produced by pressing the Q key when using the Wingdings font.) Convert the type character to a shape layer. With the type layer active in the Layers panel, use the menu command Type→Convert to Shape. Select the Custom Shape tool. If you do not select the Custom Shape tool, the Define Custom Shape command is not available. Define a custom shape. Choose Edit→Define Custom Shape, give your new shape a name in the Shape Name dialog box, and save it. Your new shape is added to the Custom Shape picker, ready to use. Remember that your custom shapes aren’t truly saved until you use the Custom Shape picker menu command to Export Shapes. Until you take this step, the shapes exist only in Photoshop’s Preferences file. If the Preferences become corrupt, you could lose all your custom shapes unless you export your custom shapes. When exporting custom shapes export them to a folder outside the Photoshop folder. That prevents accidental loss should you ever need to (gasp!) reinstall Photoshop. The figure shows one possible folder structure for saving and organizing your custom bits and pieces. Also, you can use the Shape Picker Import Shapes command to add shapes you've exported.