psychopyko » photoshop

luncar eclipse this tuesday!

pyko — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 10:45:00 +0000

Well, the weekend is nearly over, tomorrow is Monday the start of another week...but there is something special next week As you've probably guessed from the title (or read in the news) there will be a total lunar eclipse on Tuesday 28th, and Australians will have the "box seat for this rare cosmic event". So when will it happen? According to Australian Astronomy...

The Moon starts moving into the Earth's shadow at 6:51 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST) and is full immersed in the shadow at 7:52 pm. Totality is over at 9:23 pm and the eclipse ends at 10:24 pm.

Pity I'll be in class during 6pm-8pm on Tuesday but I'm still going to see if I can get a few shots at the moon - hopefully it won't be too cloudy!

In regards to the weekend, it wasn't exactly eventful nor productive - but I did learn a thing or two. Firstly, I learnt how amazingly powerful Adobe Illustrator is! When I first learnt about vectors/paths in Photoshop I was amazed...now I'm blown away by what Illustrator can do - though it's rather annoying that Photoshop and Illustrator don't really share similar interfaces Keep trying to use Photoshop shortcuts and they don't work or end up doing something weird in Illustrator.

The other thing (which I learnt the hard way) was that for Optus pre-paid plans you don't always get the SMS that reminds you to recharge. Found out on Saturday that I had $0 credit - lost something like $30+, 30+ min free time, 100+ min myTime and 50+ SMS When I phoned up support to ask, they said that the system randomly chooses people and send reminders - so you're not guaranteed to receive the reminder SMS! I bet they do that so that you'll be tricked into thinking they will remind you each time and then one time you will randomly not get the SMS and lose all your credit. So I guess we should set our own reminders and not trust big profit hungry companies!

photoshop shortcuts

pyko — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 06:58:14 +0000

Recently I've been photoshop-ing a fair bit as I'm making posters/website for an upcoming event for a student society. By accident, I found a shortcut that did exactly what I wanted! The elusive shortcut ctrl+alt+shift+e creates a new layer of whatever you see on the screen right now (or 'stamp visible' in photoshop terminology).

So after the amazing discovery, decided to put up a few photoshop shortcuts that I feel are essential. I'm no photoshop guru, but these are the shortcuts that I probably can't live without. I'm using Photoshop CS2, but most these shortcuts should probably work with most versions of photoshop. Seems like Adobe likes multi-keyed shortcuts, so organised them into the number of keys on the keyboard you need to press - wonder if there are any more than 4!

Single key shortcuts

v - changes to 'move' mode. So if you have a layer selected, you can now drag it with your mouse or nudge it.
m - changes to 'marquee' mode.
a - changes to 'direct selection' mode. If you have an active vector path, you can now go 'right click -> make selection' and then you can fill the selection with colours etc.
x - switches the foreground/background colours
d - resets the palette to the default of foreground/background colours to black/white respectively
[ & ] - decreases & increases (respectively) your brush size

Double key shortcuts

alt+backspace - fills the layer with foreground colour
ctrl+backspace - fills the layer with background colour
ctrl+d - deselects your selection. Handy if you are horrible at selecting stuff like me.
ctrl+e - merges your current layer with the layer below it
ctrl+g - groups the layer(s) you have currently selected into a folder

Triple key shortcuts

ctrl+alt+z - goes back through the history undo-ing the previous actions (find ctrl+z useless as it just undoes the last step)

Quadruple key shortcuts!

ctrl+alt+shift+s - opens the 'save for web' dialogue where you can choose to save as jpg, gif, png etc.
ctrl+alt+shift+e - creates a new layer and puts in that single layer whatever you see on the screen right now

Mouse+keyboard combination
(not exactly a shortcut, but just as useful!)

shift - when creating a selection, holding down 'shift' while dragging the selection keeps the proportion. Nice when you need a perfect circle/square, or if you're dragging in a logo/image
space - when creating a selection, holding down 'space' will let you move the location of your selection. Always found it hard to know where to create the selection so it is exactly where I need it to be.
ctrl - if you ctrl+click on a layer, it will select the outline of the image on that layer.

nice borders

pyko — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 01:32:46 +0000

After setting up my blog, and having made the decision to post more regularly and with more useful content I spent yesterday thinking...what should I post about? Well, thanks to airewindel who asked me a question on deviantArt I got it!

If you visit my gallery you will notice that the more recent photos all have a border around them. The question was "how do you get the [border] and sig in everytime, the same?" I'll write about the borders first, and then the sig - as the border one is much easier

Firstly, I'm using Photoshop CS, so if you use another image editor, the instructions will probably not match exactly - but I'm sure most image editors will have similar functionality.

Open the photo/image in Photoshop
Make sure the layer is not locked, otherwise the below steps won't work as nicely.
In the top menu go to "Image -> Canvas Size"
A new window showing details about the Current Size of your image should appear. In the same window there is the option to choose a New Size.
In the New Size section, check the Relative option.
The width/height values should now be 0.
Change it so the width/height is now 6 pixels. Leave the Anchor (white box) in the middle.
This will expand the canvas 3px each way (top, right, bottom, left).
After clicking OK, you'll notice that there is a very tiny extra transparent border around your image. Create a new layer, drag it below your image and fill that layer with white. You've now got a 3px white border!
Repeat steps 2~5 for the black border. Except this time, use a larger value (eg. 40px), fill the new layer with black and drag it below the white layer. Your layers should look something like this (you can ignore 'fuzzly' layer - that's my sig):

That's it! Nice and simple borders. You can experiment with different thickness, colours etc. or even multi-bordered borders. I find that some pictures look better with just a white border (for some reason I feel white borders don't work that well with a small black border inside).

Your final product will look something like this...
:thumb61997264:300: