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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Image Variations with Photoshop Gradient Maps

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Michael Hoffman

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If you look in Photoshop’s Adjustments Panel, right at the very bottom, in the last position, there is the really technical sounding “Gradient Map.” If you haven’t seen this adjustment in action, or known what it can do, you’d be entirely likely to pass right over it – it sounds complicated. But, it isn't  Gradient Maps are one of the simplest ways of toning or tinting an image. In fact, if you like to tinker with your image, searching for a certain “look,” the Gradient Map can provide a seemingly endless train of color variations, all with a few clicks. Let’s see how it works.

 We’ll start with the image above, and very quickly, we can open the Adjustments Panel and click Gradient Map (Or, if you prefer menus, Image > Adjustments > Gradient Map… will get you there). The adjustment layer is added, and the Property Panel opens, showing the gradient picker and controls:

 

At this point, the default gradient is applied to your image, in a very predictable way. Looking at the gradient from left to right, the colors on the left are applied to the darkest tones in your image, and the colors on the right are applied to the lightest tones – with the tones in the gradient “mapped” to the highlights and shadows of the image. With the default black and white gradient, this gives us a black and white image, like so:

 

 Now, this in itself isn’t really amazing or surprising – after all, there are dozens of ways to get a grayscale image within Photoshop. No, the variations come as we change the gradient, which is mapped to the image tones. We can click the drop down arrow next to the gradient and pick a different gradient (such as Copper), which is mapped onto the image tones the same way:

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Cutting the fringe – Selective Colour in Photoshop

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Scot Baston

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I encountered a little problem the other day while creating something in Photoshop.. not my usual photography but pulling some low resolution text from a black background. Normally the route would be to create a selection and to use refine mask to remove any stray edges of the background. In this case the text was so small and with the compression on the original file, the refine edge option was not working for me, especially when you add in the complexity of the shape. Below is an example of what I had to work with..

my final image would be on a white background, so lets try the normal route first
 
As you can see, selecting the black background and using refine edge did not create the best result when shown on a white background. I'm sure better could be achieved by taking the time, zooming in to the text and using the refine edge brush around each of the letters.. but who has time for that? First steps first.. lets select the text from the black background. Using the Magic Wand tool (W), set the tolerance to around 10 and uncheck the contiguous checkbox.. then select the black background

   

 With the Background selected, create an inverted layer mask by holding down the Alt key and clicking the 'add layer mask' button at the bottom of the layer mask panel.

 

 Adding a simple white background layer underneath the cut out layer shows our current text with accompanying black fringe.

 

 So how to get rid of the horrible black fringe without losing the feel of the text and without spending ages refining the mask. My solution was to use the Selective Colour Adjustment Layer...

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Lightroom 4 Adjustment Brush Tricks

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Michael Hoffman

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Lightroom 4 brings all the same capabilities you'll find in Camera Raw for the Adjustment Brush, as well as the Graduated Filter. Add multiple effects, control your image non-destructively. Plus, Lightroom adds some nifty controls all its own to make your editing more efficient.


   

Symmetry with Photoshop

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Gavin Hoey

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As a photographer symmetry is one of the hardest types of composition you can find. Nature has a habit of avoiding symmetry most of the time. You’ll never walk through a forest and find two identical trees and you’ll never see the left side of the sky perfectly matching the right. However it is dead easy to create symmetrical images using Photoshop, the knack is disguising the fact that you used Photoshop at all. In this video I’ll show you how to mirror an image and then apply a few tweaks to complete the perfect symmetric photo.

Photoshop Clipping Masks

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Eric Renno

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In this video I take a look at Clipping masks. They are really easy to create and have a whole host of applications. This video was made in response to a question in the Google Plus Community; Photoshop and Lightroom Users where I’m one of the moderators. i think it goes without saying, I’d love to see and chat to you there!

From The TipSquirrel.com Archive : Shooting Tethered in Lightroom

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : Scot Baston

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One of the fantastic things about Lightroom is the way it can streamline a photographer's workflow. Lightroom allows the creating of presets and applying them over a complete shoot, even applying those presets on import ( see my previous tutorial). These can save hours of boring, time consuming, repetitive post production that benefits neither the client or the photographer. Recently I had to shoot a series of product shots for a client, each shot would be set up exactly the same and would require the same post processing. Now using presets I could shoot all of the images, import them into Lightroom and apply a preset to all of the images, but the finished images could not be reviewed until the shoot was complete. This might mean going back and reshooting which would be time consuming and expensive. Shooting Tethered A better way would be to shoot tethered in Lightroom. For those that don't know, shooting tethered is having your computer (and Lightroom) connected directly to your camera during the shoot. No more looking at the back of the camera and trying to figure out if the images are in focus, no more massive upload at the end of a shoot, and much less guesswork as to the look of the final image. Most DLSR's today have the ability to shoot tethered using a simple USB cable connected to both the camera and your computer. In my example I had my camera set up on a tripod directly above my studio setup and a USB cable connecting the camera to my laptop & Lightroom.

Setting up Lightroom for shooting tethered

 

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