Subscribe via Visual Guide to Layer Blending Modes in Photoshop
The most essential feature in Photoshop is the ability to work with layers. Mastering the blending modes is key for every designer/graphic artist. There are quite a few articles on the web explaining how the different blending modes work. That is all very nice and interesting, however they always only show one example. From experience I know that the blending modes depend very much on the images you use. Hence I decided to showcase the different blending modes in action using 3 different images as overlay. You’ll notice the differences.
Self-Blending:
The first series shows the effect of the blending modes when you use it on the same image as the background. All you have to do is duplicate the background layer and change the modes of the top layer image. Here’s the results. You can click on the images to view them in original size.
Mac Tip: Reverse Screen Colours
At first I though it was just a little fun thing they added to Mac OSX, but today I discovered that it actually feeds a purpose. I was reading an interview on a dark website and half way through my eyes started to hurt. So I used the shortcut to reverse my screen colours which allowed me to read black text on a white background which really helped getting through it. Below are screenshots of what it looks like. I used this site as an example. Read more
Mac Tip: Master the Screencap Function
Every once in a while you need the screen capture function, maybe it’s because you can’t download an image from flickr but still want it in your library or you need to record your workflow for a tutorial. Whatever the reason, Mac OSX offers two simple shortcuts to grab a screenshot. The first one makes a simple fullscreen shot. Just use the combination “apple+shift+3“. It should save it as png on your desktop. At least those were my default settings. It even makes a nice shutter sound.
The second shortcut is what makes it interesting. Clicking “apple+shift+4” gives you a little crosshair which lets you draw a rectangle of the screen portion you want grab. It works exactly like the Marquee tool in Photoshop. Once you’ve started your selection you can release the keys (not the mouse click) and
- hold ALT to draw from center
- hold SHIFT to constrain height or width (depending on your next mouse movement)
- hold SPACE to move the current selection
Once you’ve released the mouse you’ve got a perfectly cropped picture. This technique saved me already quite some time and we all know how precious time is in a designer’s life.
Tutorial: How to extract a colour scheme from a photograph
Today I picked up on a neat little trick on how to extract a colour palette from a photograph. Imagine you stumble upon a gorgeous photo (or piece of digital art) which has this special colour scheme. You could use the eyedropper tool to extract each colour individually but there’s a slicker way of doing it. This tutorial teaches you how to convert a photo into a fully functional colour swatch palette using photoshop and illustrator.
this is the photograph I got from flickr with nice warm colours which I want to use in a vector design. The first step is to open it in Photoshop. Read more
Photoshop Tip: Delete Brush Shortcut
By pure accident I found out how to quickly delete a Photoshop brush from the preset list. This comes in very handy when you’re trying to save a custom brush set and don’t want any superfluous brushes to be in your .abr file. There’s a tedious way, which means right-clicking on each brush and selecting delete. There’s the obvious one by clicking the thrash icon in the brush palette. Finally there’s a hidden, much simpler, quicker way: Read more
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