Discover how to enhance the reflectivity of an object to match the ambience of its environment in this week’s Deke’s Techniques. Deke shows how to enhance the sunglasses of a model posed in White Sands National Monument, New Mexico, using Adobe Photoshop paths, masks, and layer effects.
The technique in this week’s member-exclusive Pixel Playground with Bert Monroy is a simple but efficient way to fill an empty glass with a liquid.
Sometimes the easiest way to simulate reality is to composite part of one photograph onto another. This week, Bert uses the Pen tool in Adobe Photoshop to quickly select the liquid from one glass and place it in another. Next, he shapes the liquid to fit the shape of the new container using the Transform command. To finish the effect, he changes the color by making a series of adjustments in curves.
Interested in more?
• Start a 7-day free trial to lynda.com today
• The entire Pixel Playground with Bert Monroy series
Adobe and Photoshop are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or countries.
The Place and Link feature of Adobe InDesign is amazing. If you select any object in your layout, you can go to the Edit menu, choose Place and Link, and it’s as though you were placing something that you imported from an external file. The benefit to Place and Link is that, unlike simply copying an object, the parent element and its children are linked; any change to the parent ripples down to all the other children when you update the link. This can be a huge timesaver when you need to reuse artwork or text multiple times in multiple places.
However, there’s also a way to keep the formatting of child objects in place. In this week’s InDesign Secrets video, Anne-Marie Concepción shows you how to create multiple copies of linked text that retain their own formatting.
Shooting with a limited amount of natural light at a high ISO can result in a lot of noise in your photos—like the image below that Deke shot in Carlsbad Caverns, 800 feet below ground. But if you have a high enough number of pixels, you can rescue the photo and smooth it into a print-worthy image with the assistance of Adobe Camera Raw.
Take a 10-minute recess every week to join Bert Monroy in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, the playground of digital artists. Every Friday Bert will walk you through a fun, self-contained project that tests your skills and challenges the imagination. Photoshop isn’t just an image editor; it’s a sandbox for creativity and experimentation. Take a spin through its carousel of tools and get reinspired each and every week.
Animating falling snow with Photoshop
This week’s technique adds a new dimension to an otherwise flat image. Bert starts with a winter scene and—with some help from the noise filter, levels, and a simple animation—he ends up with an incredible falling-snow effect. Follow along with Bert and see just how easy it is to create this effect with your own images.
Adobe, Illustrator, and Photoshop are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or countries.
Interested in more?
• Start a 7-day free trial to lynda.com today
• The entire Pixel Playground with Bert Monroy series
When it comes to graphic effects, sometimes your most impressive creative work isn’t visible on the page—it’s in the technique that made what’s on the page possible. That’s the case with this week’s FX video on using the Adobe InDesign animation tools.
In the video, I show how to make it look like one object is revolving around another. It’s a simple example with a red circle that crosses in front of a black rectangle, then reverses direction and goes behind the rectangle.
You may have noticed that over the last few weeks we’ve been releasing a variety of courses about book design, including:
• Designing a Book by Nigel French
• Designing a Photo Book by Nigel French
• Distributing and Marketing Ebooks by David Wogahn
Now that these courses are finished, we’re proud to share a complete Book Design playlist that will take you from starting the design of a book to publishing it online, while inspiring you along the way. Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll learn.
A side effect of shooting underwater is that colors are filtered away by the water between your lens and the subject. A flash can help, but there will still be some color loss. You can bring back the full-color glory of sea life, though, by using the tools in Photoshop. In this movie, Deke McClelland shows you how.
To get the best results from this technique, you need to make sure you have enough color information in your image. But you can’t gauge this with the naked eye. Instead, go to the Channels panel in Photoshop and isolate the Red channel. If the channel appears too dark, this technique probably won’t work, but if your image detail is still clear, you can proceed.
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