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Photoshop top ten tutorials


Photoshop tutorials is the most important topic for a beginner. He has to get a thorough knowledge through words. Like what to do, what shouldn’t etc. For that he have to go through these topic before starting. After that practice makes him perfect. With practice and a bit of imagination, there’s no limit to the imagery that we can create with Photoshop. The skills and shortcuts learned from here, will help you a firm grasp of what makes Photoshop tick. Some of the main tutorials are listed below.

1. KeyBoard shortcuts

These shortcuts are the first one to be learned and should get familiar. Use them for your favorite homemade actions as well. Learn then for any tool on regular basis for any work. The only thing better than all of the time you will save is that you can stay focused on your art and not the toolbars. Some important ones are: CTRL + Backspace is to duplicate your current layer, J for airbrush, M for marquee, [] to cycle brushes, CTRL+D to deselect, Alt or CTRL+Backspace to fill with the forground or background color.

2. Tileable Images

This is invaluable for 3D and webwork, making an image tileable is very easy. The things to o is make your image and run Filter > Other > Offset. Pick a good 50 about half of the image size in the horizontal and vertical offset. After this just check Wrap Around, which is very important. After the image offsets, clean up any seams which is visible with a Rubber stamp tool [ S ] / Smudge Tool [R] combination. After all this the final product will be a seamless image.

3. The Cut all under selection action

This one’s for those of you who develop software or create web graphics, but it can also be useful otherwise. Some of the commands are listed below.

a) Making layer [Shift+CTRL+N], (b) Merge Visible [Shift+CTRL+E], (c) Copy [CTRL+C]d) Delete Current layer

These actions are assigned by apllying Shift+f2. Now all you need to do is select anything in a document and run your action. Everything visible to you under the selection is copied, regardless of the current layer you’re working with, or how the layers are grouped. This is a MAJOR timesaver when copying anything repetitively from Photoshop into other applications.

4. Select everything in a layer

This one is one of the important one in photoshop and very useful. For selecting everything from a layer simply CTRL click on the layer.

5. Making Brushes

The basic function of Photoshop is to create our own Bushes. Create a new document of the size you want your brush to be. Now, using grayscale , draw your brush . Select the area, and in the brushes palette click on the small arrow pointing to the right in the upper right corner. After that select Define Brush and your selection is now a usable brush for any of the tools.

6. Lens flare Control

Although normally overused, lens flares can add to an image. To get the maximum output of your flares, create your flare [Filter > Render > Lens Flare] in all black layer. Then set the layer type to Screen, and now only the flare will be visible, giving you a perfectly cut flare layer. One of the drawback of this that it wont appear over white.

7. Lighting effects Filter

If we require to add cool lighting based effects, this filter can be good for texture. Just make an interesting grayscale texture or design, select it all, and save it as an alpha channel. Now, with the layer you want the texture applied to selected, go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects. In the dialog under Texture Channel, select your alpha channel and add some lights for varied and interesting results.

8. Stars

We need a good star field and photoshop has a good way for creating it. Fill a layer with black, and add some noise with Filter > Noise > Add noise . Assign a value of 120 with the Monochromatic box. Now add a series of brightness/contrast adjustments [image > Adjust > Brightness/Contrast]. For beginners, Use around -60 and a contrast of around +80. now click OK and do another Brightness/Contrast adjustment. This time -100 Brightness and a Contrast of +70 will look pretty good. Another great thing about this star field is that you can make the layer type Screen , and you have a perfect star field with no black background showing through. You can then make any kind of sky you need for under the stars.

9. Copying to the same place in another document

If you need to copy a layer into the same position but on a different document , for example an exit button in the same location for all screens in a program, just open the documents side by side and hold SHIFT while dragging the contents of the layer. The layer data will be in the exact same location on the new document.

10. Duplicating Portions of a Layer

By selecting Move Tool [V] we can hold Alt and drag to duplicate whatever we are dragging for a quick timesaver. This one is also equally important as a back up.

This post was written by:

shaun - who has written 33 posts on Wslaat Portal.


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