Photoshop Quickies

Motion blur is one of the cool specialized blurring filters available in Adobe Photoshop. You can find it under Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. You are able to specify a direction for this type of blur, so look what kind of technique that feature makes possible:

Grab a portion of an image that you would like give the illusion of speed to. This portion can butt right up against other portions of the image, doesn’t matter. In fact, it gives the image a more convincing effect.

Now “Float” this selection by pressing Command-J. Sometimes it is appropriate to cut and paste the selection, but in this case, we don’t want white showing through where the blur creates transparency, so we will leave image underneath.

Now apply the motion blur, changing the angle to a vertical(ish) angle.

This is just a quick example, but you can see in this case how the shovel looks like it is being jabbed right into the earth with speed.

In Adobe Illustrator, there is only one place to set the corner radius for your rounded rectangles, and it’s not as obvious as you might think. You access this elusive option by selecting the rounded rectangle tool the single-clicking on your illustration to bring up this dialog box:

Changing it here will not only change this setting for the rounded rectangle you are about to create, but the value entered here becomes the default for any future rounded rectangles.

There are a few ways to make an existing rectangle into an rounded rectangle. Both are filters. One is Filters > Convert to Shape > Rounded Rectangle. The other is Effect > Stylize > Round Corners. Both are useful tools.

I just got my hands on a Wacom Bamboo tablet, and I’m loving it! Right now I have mine set up for clipping paths, check it out:

The lower left button is set up to be the Space Bar, for easy panning around. You do a lot of panning when cutting clipping paths because you need to be zoomed in pretty far to do a good job usually. The top left is the Option key for manipulating handles on the fly, the top right is the Command key for moving points around on the fly, and the bottom right I didn’t really need specifically for clipping paths so it’s just set up to be a “Back” button (like in web browsers).

It’s been working out really well. I’d say I’m even a little bit faster at cutting paths already and I’ve only been using it a few weeks. It’s kind of funny getting hand cramps while using it though. I’m sure a traditional drawing artist could use this thing all day long and get cramps when trying to use the mouse.

A common technique in Illustrator is to place images on a layer and lower the opacity so you can use trace shapes. Illustrator has a built-in feature to help you with this.

1. Place and arrange all the images you wish to trace on a single layer in Illustrator.
2. Select the layer in the Layers palette, open the fly-out menu in that palette and select “Options for Layer 1″.
   
3. Check the “Dim images to:” checkbox and enter a value, like 50%
4. Now all images on this layer will be transparent to a value of 50%. Lock this layer, create a new layer above it, and trace away!

Say that 10 times fast.

From Dr. WooHoo comes this awesome new color inspiration widget for Adobe Illustrator. It’s just a little script that you drop into the Preset > Scripts directory of your Adobe Illustrator application folder. Then, with an illustration open, you go to File > Scripts > InTheMod_beta to run it.

The widget will pop up and allow you to search Flickr by tag for images. Just choose one of the images to see a cool visualization of the colors used. Just click that area and it will load them all as swatches into your swatch palette. Yes!

[VIA]

Brown Thoughts had a pretty nice round up of some free brushes. I’ve been planning to do a post like this for a while, but why reinvent the wheel?

My favorites?

• Grunge
  
• Bubbles
  
  
• Mystcart
  

The Info palette in Adobe Photoshop is capable of showing you the “Total Ink” of any given area of your document. If your palette isn’t showing this, click on the little eyedropper on one of the areas and pick it from the drop down.

Total Ink is a simple yet extremely useful tool. It tells you %C + %Y + %M + %K = Total Ink. Why should you care? Because different presses and different papers can only handle so much ink because of something called “dot gain”. Dot gain is how much the little halftone dots “grow” when they hit the paper, much like the ring of wetness on a napkin around your cold water glass. Too much of this going on, dots will start pooling into each other, and you will get nasty dark muddy areas with loss of detail.

The “rule of thumb” with total ink is 300%. This is why the default mix for rich black in Photoshop is 75/68/67/90 (Add that all up and you get 300).

As they say, rules are meant to be broken. If you are printing on really cheap uncoated stock (like newsprint), your total ink is going to need to be a lot lower, closer to 200. You might be able to go over 300 on a really nice press with really nice paper. Talk to your printer, they should be able to tell you all about this and what your limitations will be.

What can you do if your Total Ink is too high?

Total ink is your responsibility and is something you will need to look at on individual images. There is no simple technique, like just having InDesign knock down those values on final output. It is just as well though, you will want full control over this process anyway.

Pulling down the saturation is one way to reduce the ink load, but be careful to not wash out images that you don’t need to. Changing saturation will change the entire image. A better way is to use curves. Look through your channels and see if there is large concentrations of ink at the high end, like so:

You can grab the top end of that line and pull it down. In this example, anything that was 100% Magenta before will now be 95% Magenta, pulling 5% right off the top of any really dense area. This will likely be a big improvement and help out dense areas without affecting too much. Who knows, if the image leaned a little red, this might help improve the look of the entire image! Do be careful though, and watch the results of each step you take.

If you are working on a photo, go to pull down your Filters menu and find that many of them are “grayed out”, you may just be in a color mode that doesn’t support those particular filters. To make sure all possible filters are available to you, your image needs to be in RGB mode (Image > Mode > RGB Color). Be aware that converting your image to RGB (and back for that matter) will have an affect on it’s color and needs to be watched carefully.

Sometimes when you’ve been working in a program for a long time it’s nice to sit back and watch someone else work in it for a while. Undoubtedly they will have a different working style than you and you will pick up little things that they do that are interesting or just plain more efficient. This is how I picked up this little trick on making the stoke and fill the same color.

Just click and drag one on top of the other right inside the tool bar!

Have you ever had an Illustrator EPS file that used absolutely no fonts whatsover, but every time you opened the file it would bring up the Find Font dialog box like it was missing a font?

This is an object-level corruption, as even copying and pasting the illustration into a brand new document and saving will not solve this problem. This is believed to be a leftover from converting an older version of a native Illustrator EPS to a new version of an Illustrator EPS that has an object in it that was converted-to-outlines text.

One solution is to save it as an Illustrator (.ai) file. This will stop the dialog box from opening when you open the file, but it does not correct the corruption, because as soon as you save it back to an EPS the problem crops up.

Fortunately this is just an annoyance and doesn’t hurt anything. If you absolutely need to fix it, your best bet is re-creating the illustration in the most current version of illustrator and just getting rid of the old file.