Photoshop Resources : Photoshop Mosaic

Photoshop Mosaic is a new site dedicated to Photoshop tutorials, brushes, plugins and lots more. It has tons of great links to all things Photoshop. I found some brushes there that I really like. You can check it out here.

Photoshop : Tutorial - Using the Metallic Gradients

You’re probably well aware of the “regular” gradients that come with Photoshop but did you know that there are lots of other gradients that come with the program that are just waiting for you to load them up. In this short tutorial, I’m going to show you how to add extra gradients into the Gradient Picker and how to make a super quick “silver” pipe.

1. Open a new RGB document, 300 x 300 pixels.

2. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool from the toolbox and draw a long skinny rectangle, similar to the one I’ve drawn below.



In the toolbar, select the Gradient Tool .



3. On the tool options bar, click on the down triangle next to the Gradient thumbnail to open up the Gradient Picker. In the right-corner, click on the triangle to open up the Gradient Picker pop-up menu. At the bottom of the menu you’ll see a list of all the other gradients that come as presets with Photoshop. Cool or what?



4. Choose Metals from the list . Photoshop will ask you if you want to replace your current gradients with the new set or if you want to append (or add) them to your current set. I usually choose Append.

5. Now that the new gradients are added, you can run your mouse over them and you will see that they have names such as Silver, Gold, Brass, Steel Blue and so on.



6. To make the Silver pipe, choose the Silver gradient , then using the gradient tool, click and drag from one side of the rectangular marquee to the other.


7. Ta Da! You now should have one nice looking “silver” pipe, made literally in seconds. Press Ctrl + D (Windows) or Cmd + D (Mac) to deselect the new pipe.

As well as the "metallic" gradients there are quite a few more to choose from so take a look at those ones too.

Design News : Kate Moss - The Font

Some of you font lovers may be interested (or horrified) to hear that Kate Moss now has a new brand. Created in conjunction with typographer Paul Barnes, it looks like this:



You can read more about Brand Moss here on creative review.

Photoshop Quick Tip: How come my Colour Picker looks funny?

This morning one of my trainees was having a problem with the Colour Picker in Photoshop. Normally, when you click on the Foreground or Background Colour Swatch (at the bottom of the Toolbox) it looks like this:



However, this morning it seems like the Photoshop elves had been at the whiskey and the colour picker looked like this instead:

If this happens to you, you can get your normal Photoshop colour picker pop-up back by pressing Ctrl + K (Windows) or Cmd + K (Mac) to open up the General Preferences dialog box. To make sure you get the one you want, under the Color Picker pop-up menu, set the chosen Picker to "Adobe."

Photoshop : Tutorial - Using "Lock Transparent Pixels"

Changing the colour of an object that is semi-transparent or has faded edges in Photoshop is easy when you know how! In this short tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use the “Lock Transparent Pixels” button on the layers palette to do just that.

Let’s start off with a yellow blob. As you can see from the image below, it is definitely yellow in the middle but then it starts to fade out at the edges.

If you try to use the Paint Bucket tool on this faded edge, you will just end up with a circle with very rough edges, as seen below.

To get over this problem, click on the “Lock Transparent Pixels” button near the top of the layers palette in Photoshop.

Note that you cannot use this on the background layer only on layers with transparency.

By locking the transparent pixels, we can now only manipulate the opaque areas of the layer.

Now when I use the Paint Bucket on the yellow blob, the fade is preserved.

Obviously this is a very simple example, but as you can imagine this would be extremely useful when you are designing things like t-shirts or print work where you may need to change an objects fade colour.

Photoshop : Tutorial - Using Filters and a Quick Mask to Create A Border

In this Photoshop tutorial, I’ll show you how to make a border using a quick mask and a couple of filters. It’s quick and easy and you can get all kinds of cool results by using different filters.

1. Open up the image that you want to apply a border to.



2. Using the lasso tool , draw a rectangular(ish) marquee around the area of the image that you want to keep. It doesn’t matter if the edges look a bit rough, that all adds to the, ahem, “character” of the piece.



3. Press Q on the keyboard, or click on the Quick Mask mode button on the Photoshop toolbar.



4. Now we’re going to apply some filters to the area we have Quick Masked. You can play around here and try out several filters to get different effects. For this example, I chose Filter > Brush Stokes > Sprayed Strokes. This opens the Sprayed Filter dialog box.



Here I set the stroke length to 18, the stroke radius to 14 and the stroke direction to left diagonal. Click OK to close this filter.

5. At this point you might like to use this jagged edge as your border or you can go on and try out more filters. Again, I chose Filters > Distort > Glass.



6. The settings used here were Distortion of 7, Smoothness of 3 and Texture set to Frosted. Click OK when you’re happy with the effect.

7. The Quick Masked area will now look quite different than when you first selected it. Press Q on the keyboard to return to Standard Mode. You’ll see the dancing ants indicating the selected area.

8. Invert the selection by choosing Select > Inverse.




9. Create a new layer and make sure that it is selected. Set the foreground colour to white and then using the Paint Bucket tool, click anywhere on the selection to fill the area. Your border should now look something like this:




By adding the white border on a new layer, you haven’t damaged your original image. Now save your masterpiece and impress friends and loved ones with your new found border-making skills.

Free Photoshop Brushes : High Resolution Tattoo Style

I've created five high resolution Photoshop brushes for your viewing pleasure! They are in Tribal Tattoo style and were created in Illustrator and then brought into Photoshop to become the fine upstanding brushes you see today. The brushes are all about 2500 pixels wide or high and have nice smooth lines. You can download them as a zip file below.



Download Zipped Brushes

I'd be delighted to hear from you if you find them useful or like them.