the adobe photoshop question thread

im not sure why this cant just be made into an action. what happens when you try?

zing

the problem is that action recording doesn't seem to register individual brushstrokes, so i can't just hit record and draw the pixels in. is there a way to import a pre-existing layer into a new file? maybe i could do that.

lol dg non-zing

maybe something w/paths?

oooh i don't know what paths are. i will investigate.

i actually just tried fucking around w/it for a minute and couldnt figure it out :(

well it wasn't really a zing but i just wanted an excuse to use the word of teh moment :(

yeah not to be pedantic but it was pretty clear that dude knew how to batch and was just having problems w/this particular task

yeah paths look needlessly complicated for what i want to do

xpost

oh ok sorry for trying to be helpful

no biggie dg but when you fuck w/the zing you get the zing (see zing thread - oh my)

try this:

- open all of the 100x75 images
- then create a new 100x75 image with the white corners as a layer above the background, save this
- under Actions click Create New Action
- click Select All on the white corners layer (which should already be your active file/layer)
- Copy
- select the LAST of the opened 100x75 images (if they're being displayed Cascade style this is the one you see on top of the 'pile')
- Paste (assuming all the images are RGB, but what format?)
- Click Stop on the recorded action
- Undo the Paste
- go to File, Automate, Batch
- select the action to be performed (it should come up as default already)
- select Source as Opened files if it's not already
- select Destination as Folder and choose where to save the modified images
- click OK

i just set this up, ran it and it worked - the important thing is that it has a 'previous document' to paste the layer into. when it reaches the last one it will say 'no previous document' but you can just click Continue and it will finish.

nice 1

AWES

thanks steve -- i had to make a few little tweaks but that's definitely waaaaay faster

i had to make a few little tweaks

was this because you're working with gifs or jpgs, or was it something else?

this is awful: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/09/photoshop_gets.html

eww

I know right?

http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/4431/pbslogole4.jpg

It's shit. And different from the icon for the app. Also, Adobe, could you try seeing what's possible when it comes to launching in under 10 minutes and having installers that don't destroy everything in their path?

see if getting a mac possible

i can see what they tried to do with the logo i.e. making it look like a simple, verstaile P (for Photoshop!) but it's not particularly pleasing peh.

Does anyone know how to make a graduated blur in Photoshop? Like, without a plugin? My first thought was to make a mask in an alpha channel, but after trying it and actually thinking about it for more than fifteen seconds, it became pretty clear that that won't work.

Quick mask mode -- 'Q', then do the gradient black to white, then 'Q' again, then blur.

How would you crop the background out of this image?

http://erstwhilejewelry.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Erstwhile_Jewelry_Co_Antique_Ring-4960.jpg

Wrapping a circle marquee around it won't really work because it's a bit more egg-shaped. Using the magic wand isn't any big help since the color of the ring and the background are similar. Tolerance too low, and not all the background gets selected. Tolerance too high and you start selecting inside parts of the ring.

I suspect there's some sort of masking trick, but other than getting an eraser and scrubbing around it zoomed in 100x, I've no clue.

I did try to search for this answer. All I kept getting was "How to crop a circle," which, Good Lord, you had to go on the internet for that one?

"content"

"content". Okay, thanks for that...

You're just gonna have to zoom in and select the negative space with the lasso tool.

well who wants to live like that.

thank you though

pen tool is quicker than lasso

quick mask imo

full disclosure: i do this kind of thing all the time, and everyone in the entire world seems to disagree with how i do it, because it's pretty labor intensive/manual.

the contrast is sharp enough that you can do a magnetic lasso around the ring to get you 75% of the way there. but it'll make mistakes. so then switch to the regular old lasso, zoom way the hell in, and clean up the mistakes manually. once you're happy with the selection around the ring, just copy and paste it as a new layer.

fwiw i almost always end up zooming in closely and using the regular lasso at some point. the magnetic lasso and the magic wand will do a lot of work for you, but if you want a really clean edge you usually have to do it yourself, so to speak.

zoom way in -> pen tool -> make selection -> tweak feathering -> quick mask -> erase

and remember (not trying to insult your intelligence here, you probably already know this. but it took me months before i figured it out because i'm terrible about looking up things and asking for help), with the lasso tool, you don't have to get it perfect the first time. you can draw your selection, then switch to the versions of the lasso that add or subtract to your selection until you get it right.

for the longest time i didn't know about the existence of the add/subtract lasso, so i would do these really intense manual lassos around complex objects that took 2-3 minutes to do, and if i made any mistake i'd start over again. over and over.

There really is not substitute for the lasso. Esp. with that image, which has bits particularly near the top that sort of blend together.

vote pen tool - it's the cleanest option at the end of the day

also, adobe just released the source code for photoshop... well, photoshop 1.0 from 1990 anyway:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57569533-93/adobe-releases-source-code-for-1990-version-of-photoshop/

I could silo that with the pen tool in 5 minutes.

Being relatively old-school, and often compositing things into InDesign, I still make paths.

But check out the brand new and totally amazing background eraser.

maybe not enough variety for background eraser, but that thing has saved me the few times I've had the chance to use it.

But that image has sharp edges. No need to feather anything. Just two simple paths drawn with the pen tool and saved as paths. You can then use it to crop the image or load selection or whatever.

Being relatively old-school, and often compositing things into InDesign, I still make paths.

But check out the brand new and totally amazing background eraser.

This is one of the things I love / hate about Photoshop - I've been using it since 1995 or so and have a bunch of established ways of doing things, many of which have been made much easier by tools that I haven't bothered to figure out yet.

a few months ago inbetween jobs (hey that's where I am now too!) I decided to read the photoshop manual start to finish. I'm no pro retoucher and not up on the specific tricks/techniques, but I'm pretty familiar with all the features. And when I upgraded to 6 I read some of the "what's new" stuff.

Fact is, there's some amazing stuff. I mean, I do a lot of light retouching/cleanup work, and the spot healing tool makes the stamp irrelevant 90% of the time. And all the content aware fill stuff.

I just started the InDesign manual as well, thinking I might try to teach InDesign. Will tackle Illustrator soon as well.

But it's REALLY hard to break the habit that the only way to use photoshop images is to create a path and save it as an EPS. All the new stuff is great, like just saving as PSDs to put into InDesign, then you can turn layers on and off from InDesign, and same thing when you save Illustrator files as PDFs instead of AI.

Yeah, pen tool for sure. I spent years using the magnetic lasso; spent maybe an hour learning how to use the pen tool and haven't looked back. Just do what joygoat says (and maybe do a Google search for Making Pen Tool Selection in Photoshop for a quick tutorial if you don't know how to use it)

a few months ago inbetween jobs (hey that's where I am now too!) I decided to read the photoshop manual start to finish. I'm no pro retoucher and not up on the specific tricks/techniques, but I'm pretty familiar with all the features. And when I upgraded to 6 I read some of the "what's new" stuff.

Have been dying to do this for such a long time. I started using Photoshop about six years ago but never had anyone teach me how to use it. Over the years I've gone through enough tutorials to do what I want to do, but I know my life would be so much easier if I just methodically went through the manual once.

pen tool + make selection + quick mask if required. But I stopped actively learning new things at about PS5.5, which means things like Refine Edge come as real surprises. I should read the manual too.

for my uses pixlr and picmonkey have pretty much replaced photoshop

not sure about this city analogy but I liked reading about the development side here:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3959868/photoshop-is-a-city-for-everyone-how-adobe-endlessly-rebuilds-its

I know printmakers, fine art photographers, graphic designers, and photojournalists, amongst others, and I love watching them use photoshop - everyone does totally different things with it and I always learn something I'd never known was there before.

Is that the piece with the quote from the guy at Adobe where he says "we could make it small and efficient but nobody would benefit because everyone has loads of memory now anyway"?

I could have cheerfully killed him then. The speed an old Photoshop runs on a modern PC is incredible. If only you could run old PS on modern macs.

my number one problem is interface inconsistencies between adobe CD products. It's weird because for many versions they've been trying to make them more consistent, but then they'll do something that's totally different. The worst offender lately has been Acrobat however, the recent version is a nightmare. In an effort I think to make it simpler, they came up with this whole convoluted way of hiding all the features and making you look for them and select which ones appear and then there's not enough space. Really annoying.

just read that article. Great. This part at the end especially...

From day one as a Photoshop developer, it's made clear that you're making the app for a crowd, not an individual. They have a rule in the hiring process: if someone claims to be a Photoshop "expert," they terminate the interview. Photoshop is too big for experts. Only a specialist can thrive inside it, and any specialist will rankle at all of the irrelevant stuff tacked on to "their" Photoshop.

Interesting to hear that coming from them. I'm currently looking for work as a production artist, which is what I've done for 15+ years, where the priority of the work has to do with mechanical layout in InDesign, and to a lesser extent utilizing Illustrator to deal with logos and illustrations, and using photoshop in the context of layout, and occasionally for light retouching. What I find interesting is all the jobs that expect/require a production artist to be able to do high-level retouching. In the big firms I've worked in, they wouldn't let a production artist within 10 feet of the high-res artwork. That's for professional retouchers, who sit around in dark rooms with wacom tablets and 4000 dollar monitors. In 15 years I've never met a production artist who's that good a retoucher, because if they were that good a retoucher, that would be their job most likely, since it pays way more. And oh yeah, must know html/css.

Which isn't to say there's nobody out there who can retouch at a high-level fashion quality, layout 50 different size InDesign mechanicals with consistency and cleanliness, and code a website.

I just now learned about a new tool, I don't think it's been around long. The Content Aware Move Tool. Watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D76nJ_qCH9A

If you're one of those people still using CS3 or whatever, this will blow minds.

the whole content aware scheme is magical

you cant help but think of all the times you spent hours doing something that takes seconds now

the sentimental tone of that ps piece was kinda hilarious and appropriate

In 15 years I've never met a production artist who's that good a retoucher, because if they were that good a retoucher, that would be their job most likely, since it pays way more.

this is literally me. except without getting paid so much.

I don't get the new tools for the most part and I feel like there haven't been any truly meaningful changes to PS in 4 or 5 versions. like that content aware thing might be cool but I look at the picture in the video and think why wouldn't you just duplicate the layer, flip horizontal, make a mask and erase everything but the edge? what does the content aware thing do other than copy the selected area and apply a feather to the edges?

some of the younger people I work with use a lot of the gimmicky features like layer comps or smart objects and they seem to just cause problems a lot of the time.

what i would do with the ring image: create a copy of it. make that index color, choosing a small amount of colors to reduce the image to. the idea is to find the amount of colors that will give you a clean difference between the ring and background. it may take a few tries. then copy the index color image into a layer over the original and use it to select the ring area. hope this makes sense.

wk, you're totally crazy.

There have been major changes and countless new tools, many of which are not just bloatware and are extremely helpful.

Content Aware does all kinds of high level processing to emulate the missing/selected area. It is way more advanced than just cloning and feathering.

And layer comps are totally necessary for many people especially in web stuff where there's like a hundred layers. It's a simple way to save different settings to compare. It's not that complicated and it's really useful.

And smart objects are brilliant. For those who don't know about smart objects, say you paste an image of a bird into an image. Then you decide to scale him down to half size. Then you decide to enlarge him back to where he was. Without smart objects, soon as you scale the selection down, photoshop resamples the artwork to that size and resolution. If you try to enlarge, it has to apply resampling/interpolation. However if you made the bird a smart object, it remembers and saves the full resolution that the selection is placed in as, so if you reduce it, then enlarge it again (just not larger than the first state), you don't lose any quality. How is that a gimmick?

I've used photoshop daily for 16 years and have only seen one person use layer comps. So they don't seem like a great thing to use if you're delivering files to other people regularly. It's still kind of a non-standard practice imo. And they seem to encourage poor file organization. Rather than naming your layers and organizing them into logical folders you can get all kinds of weird combinations of layers turned on and off which can be difficult for somebody else to navigate if you have to hand a file off.

Smart objects are nice in theory but they have a lot of problems. They don't antialias properly if you scale and rotate them. Try making a simple rectangle, then duplicate it and turn one of them into a smart layer. Scale them both down and rotate them and look at the edges of the one that's a smart object. Also smart objects don't respect blending modes which makes them kind of useless for a lot of situations. A large file with lots of high res imagery turned into smart layers can also get ridiculously big. That wouldn't be such a big deal if there were a way to manage a library of objects across multiple files or create projects with multiple comps like after effects. But if you're working with multiple psds and you're using say a logo across all of them, the smart object isn't going to do you any good. It's also kind of clumsy that you can't edit a smart object in place, so it's sometimes difficult to view the changes you're making in context. And there's no way to undo a smart layer. You can rasterize them but let's say you have a smart object that consists of several layers, then you scale them down and decide you want the layers back in your main psd without being a smart object. you'll have to open the smart object, drag them back over and redo any transformations. And even opening, changing and saving smart objects can be a hassle and slow things down unnecessarily.

basically smart objects are a great idea poorly executed imo. photoshop should be more like after effects.

smart objects are awesome. even if they're not perfect, the advantages they bring - I don't know what I'd do without them at this point. i could literally type my fingers raw citing examples of how they've saved me time/come in handy. it's one thing i make sure all my ADs know how to use.

and the majority of digital projects I've worked on have required layer comps. they might seem redundant - but if you're making several frames for any sort of online, non-static project they're pretty useful and are quickly becoming the standard for providing digital files. they only thing i don't like (hate actually) is when you have layer comps that will move around layers positions; this will usually become aggravating fast.

what i don't like is content aware stuff. never turns out right. if there's texture it winds up totally weird and often will grab information you don't want. it's fine if you're a regular joe fixing something up for facebook or something - but for any high-end work you just gotta do it yourself.

I'm surprised you don't see layer comps used wk, I've been places where they're used all the time.

Didn't know that about Smart Objects, only recently learned about it and haven't used it much. Seems like a great idea.

oh - and the ring image... just do a clipping path and make your selection from that. (basically what Dan said) (except maybe a 0.5 feather)

Content aware is always worth trying first I find though, sometimes it will give you something almost-perfect with just a little bit of manual cloning or airbrushing to make as good as a much longer all-manual job.

That's all otm wk although it sounds like you have a few workflows down, so you might not be the ultimate target audience for a lot of the improvements / new tools Photoshop has been adding. But, to reiterate what lag∞n said, each new version tends to have new tools that make hours of work melt into minutes of work. And even if content aware editing isn't a go-to tool, gdammit the wow factor is worth it the few times it's right to use. Plus, if you've been using it for 16 years, chances are that there isn't much that's hidden to you; or, you're so comfortable using certain tools that the other improvements just don't do anything for you.

I forget which version added this, but in either CS4 or CS5 they made the clone stamp cursor preview what you'd already option-clicked. That small change has saved me hundreds of aggregate hours / sanity. And for each one of the improvements I accidentally bump into w/o having read the manual, I know there are a billion others deeper beneath the hood that I'm missing.

Regardless, I might give those web-based apps a try for super-simple photo editing, since it's rare that I have to do more than mess w/ colors/brightness-- would be nice to open a photo and not worry about whether I should Brighten, use Levels, use Curves, change Exposure, Dodge/Burn Shadows/Highlights, etc. etc.

The vanishing point stuff, although the interface is a pain and weird, has saved my life using the clone tool a bunch of times.

vanishing point is another example of something that seemed great but was so buggy when I first used it that I just gave up on it. maybe it's fixed now.

I guess I'm old and set in my ways though, and I haven't worked at a big company with a lot of designers for a long time, so it's easy for me to ignore all of the new stuff.

I do use smart objects, but only sparingly and I get kind of annoyed with people who just routinely use them on everything. If you have multiple 3000px wide photos in your comp all scaled down to half of that size, and you know you're never going to need to scale them up any bigger, there's no reason to make them all into smart objects.

Hahaha I have no idea what smart objects are / do, which gives you an idea of how wide the userbase is, even if you're just considering professional users! It's been eye-popping to read comments revolving around that linked Pshop article and hearing how many people still use old, old versions of Photoshop, like Photoshop 7.0. I can't even remember what CS2 looked like now. Think a lot of people are in your boat, wk, kind of the same attitude people take with sprawling-under-the-hood programs like Word or Pro Tools: once you learn a workflow to do something right -- and you get really speedy doing it -- it's tough to bother DLing / learning the newer versions.

I could be totally wrong, but I think that there have been huge improvements with the way Photoshop scales things, especially scaling up ~just a bit~. Like, being able to edit a photo of a flyer taped to a pole -- where the flyer is totally misshapen and distorted -- and then turn it into a normal, intelligible rectangle of paper w/ Free Transform + Warp, w/o the thing looking totally fucked ... amazing stuff.

In my contexts, I rarely have that many elements in photoshop. Most recently at a job it was a high-fashion shot with a fragrance bottle in the lower right corner that needed to blend so it couldn't just be placed in InDesign. I'm also used to dealing with files that are 600-800dpi and up to 2gigs, so the difference in speed on a smaller file isn't something that I notice so much.

and I haven't worked at a big company with a lot of designers for a long time

This is me, basically - for the past six years I was the only person who ever did design / editing stuff and nobody ever saw my PSDs but me. I probably have a lot of old antiquated ways of doing things and have totally missed the boat on a lot of newer stuff.

Like, being able to edit a photo of a flyer taped to a pole -- where the flyer is totally misshapen and distorted -- and then turn it into a normal, intelligible rectangle of paper w/ Free Transform + Warp, w/o the thing looking totally fucked ... amazing stuff.

my problem with smart layers actually stems from the exact opposite of this scenario. I needed to make some documents that were sitting on a table in perspective, but I didn't have the final content for them yet so I wanted to put them together with smart layers so that I could open them up and edit the content inside. but the edges and scaling looked terrible for some reason compared to just distorting the bitmap directly. I think I ended up blurring them slightly and just living with the fact that they looked like shit because in that instance, the functionality of smart layers was necessary but the reality of it is so frustrating.

I did the exam for ACA Photoshop yesterday and failed by 7 points, which is like 3 questions. Did better than i thought i might but still I guiess a pass is a pass and a fail is a fail. Wonder if I'll get another chance to do the exam.

Need some more practise really, quite a bit more.

what's that for?

... but the edges and scaling looked terrible for some reason compared to just distorting the bitmap directly.

you must have something wrong with your preferences, maybe? i'm not sure why you're experiencing this... i never have this problem and deal with smart objects daily for some pretty big projects. what you described is pretty much what smart objects were meant for and why i love 'em - it's too bad you're not getting the results you should be.

hah this thread is a perfect example of everyone uses photoshop differently, its kinda amazing how they just give you all these basic tools then you put them together how you want, its kinda like coding

This thread makes me feel like a Neanderthal

i know how to resize with it.
that's about it.

this piece abt high end retouching from a few years ago is p sick http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_collins?currentPage=all

what's that for?

― wk, Saturday, February 16, 2013 7:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If that was refering to me I just finished a course based around Adobe Dreamweaver for which I got an ACA Dreamweaver. THe opportunity was presented to do a similar Photoshop exam unofficially through the course so I took it. Did better tahn I feared i might but still didn't actually pass.
So doing a lot more practise would hopefully mean I was more prepared to do a retake, though it is more likely to be a different exam since the Adobe exams relate to specific versions of the product. Exam taken was CS5 and Adobe are already on CS6.

I had other things on my mind and was feeling very tense. Screwed up signing in before the exam. So wonder if I'd had less on my mind and felt more calm and rested I might have just got over the pass line. Did notice there was a lot that I was just blank on.
But having another certificate is always useful. Clutter in my flat helps provide insulation, innit?

Now hopefully moving onto a CAD course, starting tomorrow but having some complications despite having been accepted for the course. Just hope they get ironed out tomorrow.