Click on the Brustic to open the Brush Preset picker, and scroll down to see the default set of brushes. Towards the foot of the list of default brushes you’ll find a variety of unusually-shaped brush tips, including brushes shaped like stars and blobs. Click on the picker’s menu icon to access other, specialised sets of brushes. You can use the picker’s menu to display a thumbnail of the brush stroke, or set it to show the brush tip and name. The numerical value indicates the brush’s initial diameter in pixels. You can customise this to suit your requirements. When you select a new set of brushes, you can either replace the existing default set or append the new set to it so you can use both.
There are few things worse than having hundreds of cool brushes gone in an instant. It’s happened to me on one occasion where my hard drive fried out and I didn’t save all my customized Photoshop stuff. So I’m going to help you avoid any tragedies and tell you how to save your brushes. Once you’ve got an amount of brushes made (I personally like to create ‘sets’ of brushes that all kind of work together, or just happened to fit my mood that day!), go to ‘Edit’ then choose ‘Preset Manager’. A window with all your current brushes will pop up. You can click on each little square individually. What you’re going to want to do is shift+right click on the series of brushes you want to save. Once you’ve done that, click on ‘Save Set’, give the set a name and save it to your computer (of course these brush files are what you’re going to want to back up!). There, you’re done!
Whatever you’re trying to do in Photoshop, then, the chances are that your starting point will be either the toolbox or the menus. While the toolbox contains everyday tools such as selecting, filling and making shapes, the menus have more complicated functions like blurring, sharpening, and all the other effects Photoshop can achieve (mostly to be found under the Filter menu). When you have selected a tool from the toolbox, you can alter its settings using the toolbar – options from the menu will generally open a dialog box. Finally, when you want to go back and alter something that you already put on the image, you can use the palettes, although they have some other uses too, notably changing colors.
The problem with many of these applications is that they use pre designed templates which the user pieces together to form logos that really are not that original and sometimes appear a little generic. While these applications allow the user to quickly begin creating graphic designs and logos they often simply do not produce designs that are original and in demand by web design clients. If you take the time to learn adobe Photoshop there will be no limit to the logos and graphic designs you can put together. Although the interface can seem a little overwhelming at first, learning Photoshop is not difficult if you have the right tools and take the time to practice.
Adobe’s Photoshop is the number one choice digital photo editing software application among today’s professional photographers, graphic artists and web designers. It is not only the best but easier to work with than you might think. Many shy away from Photoshop because there are intimidated by the complexity. With the help of a good Photoshop tutorial you can begin to learn Photoshop within minutes and be on your way to restoring those old photographs and preserving your family’s memories for year to come. There are less expensive digital editing applications but the problem is that they often have very limited capabilities when it comes to doing high quality digital photo restoration. Those cheaper digital photo software packages often utilize a one size fits all approach to photo restoration and they just don’t have the functions to deal with all of the types of damage you may encounter in renewing your old photos.
The Caledonian Digital website is user friendly and offers extensive information relating to the services provided, as well as providing recent articles on various aspects of digital photography, and links to sources of hardware, software, and reference material for photo restoration enthusiasts.For additional information on the launch of Caledonian Digital’s new hassle free photo restoration and enhancement service contact Charlie Templeton or visit http://www.caledoniandigital.co.uk.
News photographers routinely process images using Adobe Photoshop software. But there has been a basic premise in the world of photojournalism that what was allowed in making prints in the pre-digital days of darkrooms is all that is acceptable today. Back in the days of the darkroom, we used very basic tools to develop prints. In black and white printing, the contrast of a picture was controlled by a paper’s grade. The higher the number of the paper, the higher the contrast. In the wire agency darkooms I’ve worked in, we typically used grades 3,4 and 5. We allowed “dodge and burn” to lighten or darken areas. A dodge tool was made by taping a small piece of cardboard the size of a quarter onto a paper clip. A burn tool was a piece of cardboard the size of an 810 sheet of paper with a hole in the center.