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Learning Photoshop the proper way -Part6

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leecH Germany385 Posts February 06 2012 22:55 GMT #1 hello, if you are in a hurry just scroll down to: the better Magic Wand Tool. id really appreciate if you read the rest and my previous blogs though ♥ also forgive me for my english. its not my native language and im tired. really im nearly nodding out also for some reason i wrote this in a .txt and it messed up the formatting just had a 11 hour workday so i cant possibly focus on playing starcraft.. so lets do some PHOTOOSHOOOP shall we? well.. i know you think "i just watch adobe TV screw this guy" but even though im still pretty young let me please help you avoid things i had to deal on my way to the ok paid job i have now.. agh this is the 2 beers talinkg... lots of people are lazy when they start photoshop they kinda want to be good at it but they just wont read my blog and.. . ugh.. again. give me another chance: good principles or "we dont cheese": a mistake alot of people do is searching for easy ways. a magic button that turns your pic into gold. i did so myself. thats one reason i started to write this blog. the beauty of this programm is not pushing 1-2 buttons, blend some stolen images from the internet into it and use some brushes you find on deviantart and call it yours. i know this is what alot of people do i know some may say "but a DJ does nothing different than mixing music others did". and yes you are right. but there is a difference between a producer and the local DJ using his fancy macbook and pushes 5 buttons. ugh...... i dont mean to be a douche!!! i dont want to hate on anything. i just try to make a point and lack a better comparison. i hope you will understand as you read along! design is a collaborative process aswell is programming and so on.. im not against it. you need to share!! and there is nothing wrong to get inspired by the work of others and build upon it. thats why we see companies like facebook sharing "hip hop". thats why we have GITHUB (i just won you programmers over did i?) but in coding you cant jump ahead. but with pictures its easy to jump ahead and get lost. for you to grow you need to stand on your own feets first! get your own material you can call your own. try to convice that one guy to lend you his semipro camera. and convince that pretty girl who seems kind of ok to let you make some pictures of her. tell her you just want to get into photography and photoshop. of course you can also ask people on the internet. there are alot of people willing to let you use their pictures as long as you are learning and not selling them. dont let feedback kill you. you are not a medivac. (i think that is hillarious) the next step is to get feedback. you need people to see your stuff. when i started i showed my stuff to people. some thought it was ok some thought i was gay for some reasons and others loved it. i was confused. did i not have any talent or did i lack artsy friends? well.. the problem was i did not knew anyone who had a fucking clue what i was doing. i could have just as easily stolen random stuff and call it mine without all the hard work and people most likely would have given me better feedback. so: when you are looking for feedback you are looking for a certain thing. i am doing a webdesign these days and i was unsure about one thing. i asked the freelancer programmer next to me what he thought of the hole thing but all i really cared about was this one thing. did he mention it or not? saying this i also have to say that feedback gets really productive when you work with professionals. if someone says "that looks awful" and he can explain why it looks like shit it most likely is shit. for example the freelancer i was just talking about does nothing else then code in PHP and has seen and worked with alot of designers. i myself dont call myself a designer. i mostly do 3D and photoshop. so i listen to this guy alot and let him give me alot of adivce about problems that can occur for coding and state of the art coding that can be put into a design. so yeah.. thats the difference between random feedback and teamwork. so back to the hole idea why i started telling you all this. there is this filter dropdown menu. let me start off by saying its 90% bullshit. but there are some gems in it. filters you soon will start to hotkey so you dont have to bother going threw the menu every time. let me point out one i personally really really like. the better Magic Wand Tool you really dont want to use the Magic Wand Tool ever. but sometimes you need to select a range of colors. whenever you have to select a range of "clean" colors you should use the Color Range tool! by clean color i mean: RGB: if i have a lot of blue with nearly no red or green in it. Or in CMYK: if i have alot of magenta with almost no yellow, black or cyan. or the same amout of every color in the space you work in BUT its on very high contrast to the surrounding. lets say RGB red: 200bits, green188bits, blue210bits but the background is pure black!!! so.. if you want to select a range of colors what would you rather use? a) the Color Range Selection b) the Magic Wand as we now understand the logic behind adobe we go to: Selection -> Color Range... the three dots kind of make me smile everytime. anway: So how does this beast work? its simple. open it. you now selected a color range with your eyedropper icon. you can define the range by either change the fuzziness or pressing ALT or SHIFT (we use hotkeys because we are cool). when you "OK" you have your selection. If you read my last blogentry you know how much power you now posess. you not only can select a range of colours you can also define the mask using other tools. or make cross selections with paths. basicly everything. happy you read my last blogentry ? :> whats all this work for? this: (yes i used more than Color Range. Read my previous entries ♥) hard work pays off time to go to bed -leech /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Check out the previous parts here: http://www.teamliquid.net/blog/photoshop http://www.teamliquid.net/blog/photoshop/rss ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

EdSlyB Portugal1621 Posts February 06 2012 23:38 GMT #2 Nice! Good to see you update more often ^^ Nowadays I rarely (never?) use photoshop. Most of edit can be done with Paint.net ^^ But in my school years I used to do wallpapers, backgrounds and some splash images for domestic and school uses. But I learned everything by myself and from experimenting with tools and filters. So, like you said, I'm one of those guys with the lack proper bases. But each of your blogs makes me go "Damn I really need to run Photoshop and do some magic!". Maybe one day I'll do it ^^ Keep the good work! =)

Kennigit Canada19447 Posts February 06 2012 23:47 GMT #3 Great stuff! Yeah, learning about color range selection and feathering were invaluable tools to figure out.

FreudianTrip Switzerland1983 Posts February 07 2012 00:24 GMT #4 I'm such a lazy designer. As soon as my uni basically banned me from using Photoshop (Typography was more important to them and Type in Photoshop is kinda awful) so I've never learnt a lot of these more in depth techniques. Hopefully I can get my computer to work in time for a brief I have that needs these techniques I'll have a read of the others.

Phtes United States370 Posts February 07 2012 00:35 GMT #5 With the powerful pixel finding that was added with CS5 I've found that for any selection like this the Quick Selection Tool is amazing. The changes they made to it really improved it and its even better than color range to me when coupled with Masking. It also does wonders on hair now :O

Froadac United States6733 Posts February 07 2012 03:14 GMT #6 Really nice guide. Funny thing is that I learned most if not all of what I do from digital lithograph restoration. Hence, my work tends to be sort of meh when applied to real life people and the such. I ought to read the other parts of this blog.

fishuu United States369 Posts February 07 2012 05:37 GMT #7 I need to learn more of this stuff, thank you for this! Off to check out your other parts.

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