Little Photoshop » Layers

Creating Borders with Filters and Masks

Stuart Little — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:50:08 +0000

In this screencast I show you how to create image borders with layers, masks and filters for the effect. This is a bit of long one, so get the popcorn out and I am really sorry its not in 3D… Avatar’s a cool movie isn’t it? Anyway I digress, I show you 2 ways to work with a border and these are a little different to my usual border and edges that I do for the foto edge fx.In the one sense this is an easy technique, but on the other, it is quite tricky although not advanced. So no excuses give it a go! and surprise yourself with some different filter based borders. Don’t forget that if you come up with a different option or two, then share it on our Flickr discussion group.

Example

Creating a Floating Print with Photoshop

Stuart Little — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:59:03 +0000

I thought saying as we are heading towards the holiday season I thought it was time to do some techniques that you can have a play with whilst enjoying the Christmas break. Today I am going to show you how to create a floating border effect that is both non-destructive and very flexible to use with your photos.Examples

The adjustment layer can be anything you choose… I went for the Black & White Adjustment layer, but you can go for one that suits your own image and the great thing is by creating a group, you can move the whole effect onto another image.

Is Paint Bucket the Forgotten Photoshop Tool?

Stuart Little — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:41:37 +0000

Adobe Photoshop CS4 has so many tools that a lot of them get tucked away and forgotten. The Paint Bucket is one such tool and it now resides inside the button for the Gradient Tool. So the point of this screencast was to resurrect the poor old paint bucket and give it a bit of a new lease of life by combining it with a few of my favourite techniques.After

The good thing about using the paint bucket tool is that it combines the Magic Wand with the Fill Pattern command all in one tool. Thus, speeding things up somewhat!

Before

Finally…

If I was aiming for more photo-realism, I would have maybe used the liquify tool to move some of the texture about to sculpt it more towards the shape of the models body. But saying as this is a down and dirty technique, we will leave that for another day. >

Improved Teeth Whitening Technique

Stuart Little — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:05:01 +0000

I am always looking for ways to improve existing techniques and this weekend I was working on a wedding I shot earlier in the year and I realised that I needed to improve my teeth whitening technique to get a better looking smile. So I have borrowed one of the images from the Big Picture and in this screencast I show you how to refine the teeth whitening technique.

As well as retouching the teeth for the screecast I also retouched the Skin, Eyes, Hair and Lips to what I call a commercial level. Not quite “plastic fantastic” but subtle enough to make it work for the shot. I then used the Softar Filter Effect action from the other week to give a nice healthy glow.