Easy Folded Banner Vector Shape in Photoshop

First published at TipSquirrel.com by Eric Renno

The folded banner is a popular feature at the moment so it was no surprise that I was asked if I could come up with an easy way to create one. The result is not only easy but is created entirely with vectors which means its scalable while remaining  completely editable. Don't panic if you're not used to using vectors, there's nothing that a beginner won't be able to handle here, yes I use the Pen tool but to make just a single click. The circular 'Coffee' logo here is the result of another tutorial, Text on a Circular Path which you can find here. This tutorial was produced in response to a reader question. If you have a question you can email, comment or use the contact page to drop us a note.

Pen Tool in Photoshop - Path Fundamentals

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com 

Photoshop Nut : Michael Hoffman 

The pen tool is one of the most powerful means of creating precise selections. In this series of videos, we are going to work our way from the basics to pen tool mastery, but we need to start with the fundamentals. In fact, in this video, I’m not even going to use the pen tool. Instead, we’ll spend our time understanding how paths work in Photoshop, so that when we do start using the pen tool, we’ll be on familiar ground.

 

See more from this series at TipSquirrel.com

Selecting Hair in Photoshop Touch

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com 
Photoshop Nut : Eric Renno


Selecting hair is one of the more challenging Photoshop skills if you want to start doing compositing. Photoshop Touch makes it very easy to do, on the go, using a couple of tools and a filter. In this video I take the photo of Paige and extract her, fly away hair included, and put her on a grungy background.    

Conditional Actions in Photoshop

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Richard Hales

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The latest update to Photoshop (only available to Creative Cloud users, don’t blame me talk to Adobe, but I probably agree with you) included something called Conditional Actions.  Conditional Actions are a way of adding a clause to an action that will cause another action to run if the clause is applicable or another to run if it isn’t.  Clear?  No, probably not, so I’ll create a real world example to explain more clearly (hopefully).   One thing I end up doing a lot is preparing images for tutorials, this involves using the Save For Web function in Photoshop, in-putting size and quality settings, selecting a place to save the image and then close without saving.  I have two actions to do this for me, one for landscape and square images (the square action works with portrait images too), which means running a Batch command for several images would have been a fiddle and a faff. What Conditional Actions allow me to do is to create a new action that selects which of my two existing actions to run depending on whether the image is landscape or square/portrait.   To do this, open the Actions palette and create a new action (press the new icon at the bottom of the palette or use the palette's pop out menu)

    

Name it as you wish but make sure that you save the action the set where the actions you are going to use are located.  Don’t worry about pressing record as you do not need to be recording to create a Conditional.   Go back to the pop out menu and click on “Insert Conditional…”   opens the Conditional Action dialogue box

 

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From The TipSquirrel.com Archive : Building an ebook in Lightroom

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Scot Baston

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Today I thought I would try something a little different.. How about creating a book in Adobe Lightroom 4, converting it to an ebook and publishing it to the Apple iTunes (and Blurb book store). Does that sound different enough? The finished ebook will be available in the epub format used by Apple iPad and iPhone and should look something like this.. [caption id="attachment_14869" align="aligncenter" width="600"] free ebook created using Lightroom 4 and Blurb[/caption] So lets get started.. Select the images you would like to use in your ebook and go to the Book module As you can see above, all my images are showing in the bottom panel ready for placement. Before that, we need to set the defaults for our ebook. Do not be put off by the price in the screenshot above.. Lightroom only understands physical books at the moment and in this example we can create an ebook for free! I have chosen a square format book for this example, although the Standard Portrait might be a better option for creating an iPad ebook. So lets get started and create our front and back page.. Select the first page and click the little arrow in the Page panel on the right. This will bring up the pre-formatted options. As I want both the front and back covers to be full page photos I choose the 1st option. [caption id="attachment_14872" align="aligncenter" width="599"] Drag and Drop the image onto the page[/caption] Now, select an image from the film strip and drag it into place on your page. Using this multi page view is very handy for getting the overall order of your images in your ebook, but to fine tune how the page looks it is best to switch to either the double or single spread views With the Double Page Spread view selected I can position my cover image by dragging the image and changing the zoom settings. Now we can create a title for our cover page by ticking the Page Caption box in the Caption panel. There are many formatting options that allow placement and styling of the text. One thing to consider if, as in this example, we are creating for the iPad is the choice of Fonts. Blurb advise that you use one the following fonts to prevent formatting errors when converting to iPad format. Helvetica, Century Schoolbook, Futura, Verdana, Courier, Arial, Garamond, Trebuchet, Georgia and Times. I have not used fonts from the selection in this example but Blurb allows you to alter this during the conversion process. Adding pages could not be easier.. Keep adding and populating your pages until you have a completed book. Now Save the book by clicking the Create Saved Book button in the top right.. The book is now ready to send to Blurb to be converted to an ebook. This will bring up a loading page for Blurb.. do not be put off by the price as we use this book to create an ebook. Be aware that this uploading process may take a while.. make some tea, maybe even lunch and supper while you are at it. When it is finally complete, a web page will automatically open at the blurb website. As you can see there is a link to automatically convert you Lightroom created Book into an ebook. Click the link. Click continue and you will be asked to convert any non standard fonts The Blurb website will then notify you of any formatting issues and help you to correct them Click the page number to take you to the page (Page 1 in this case).. The warning tells us that the text overflows the text box. This is simple to fix by either changing the font size or in this case, making the text box a little bigger. Once you have fixed any minor problems with formatting, click the Complete and Publish button in the bottom right. Test your new ebook by downloading it to an iPad or iPhone to make sure that the formatting looks fine. When you are happy with your downloaded ebook, you can now add it to the Blurb bookstore and submit it to Apple iBookstore (if you want your ebook on iTunes). The submission to Apple can take up to 2 weeks, although can happen much quicker. Now everything is done! You can preview your ebook in the blurb bookstore and others can download it for their own viewing pleasure. and for those who want to see the finished result.. Download the ebook from Blurb or     I hope you managed to stick with me through this process, it is easier to do than explain! If you would like to find out more about Blurb and Adobe Lightroom 4 book creation.. Please check out Richard Curtis' upcoming webinar on creating extraordinary blurb books in Lightroom    As always, please ask questions or comments below and feel free to share the knowledge.