Adobe

Apr 27 2009

Adobe Photoshop Tip– Add a little strength to details without ‘sharpening’

By: Rick Yaeger

This is a quick tip that will help greyscale images survive being printed in newspaper or run through a FAX machine. It utilizes a seldom used standard Photoshop filter called "High Pass".

What High Pass does is it isolates high-contrast image areas at a user specified pixel radius turning much of the image grey and leaving edge details untouched. The desired effect can be attained by adjusting the radius value — a setting of 100 will leave most images unaffected while a setting of 1 will turn an image almost entirely a monotone grey. Somewhere in the middle is a usefull filter waiting to be discovered.

Step 1: Bring your greyscale image into Photoshop and duplicate it on a second layer within the same document.
duplayer Adobe Photoshop Tip Add a little strength to details without sharpening

highpass Adobe Photoshop Tip Add a little strength to details without sharpening

Step 2: Find the High Pass filter under Filter>Other>High Pass… and apply the filter at a setting of 10 pixels.

What you will be left with is an image that may resemble a screen shot from a ’50′s era television broadcast. Don’t worry, it won’t for long.

levels Adobe Photoshop Tip Add a little strength to details without sharpening

Step 3: Go to Image>Adjustments>Levels… and set the input levels to 0, 1.00, 128 and click Okay.

Now your duplicate layer should almost resemble a line art representation of the original.

multiply Adobe Photoshop Tip Add a little strength to details without sharpening

Step 4: Change the layer blending options to "Multiply" from the layers pallette to apply this accentuated detail to the original.

before Adobe Photoshop Tip Add a little strength to details without sharpeningafter Adobe Photoshop Tip Add a little strength to details without sharpening

Step 5: If you would like to compaire this image to the original, you need only click and unclick the layer visibility icon (the eye) next to the duplicated layer in the layers pallette. If you decide you like how this technique strengthens the detail of your image, go ahead and flatten the image and use it in your project.

This technique has also been known to work on color images but not nearly as consistlently successful as on greyscale.

Read other Graphics Tips of the Week

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Apr 27 2009

Experimenting with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Comic Effect Deconstructed)

(from Episode #74 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)

finish 20070912 143158 Experimenting with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Comic Effect Deconstructed)

S.C.A.M.P.E.R.
Photoshop is supposed to be a creative outlet, right? But it has so many features and settings that sometimes we’re so overwhelmed that we become afraid to just play with it. We might have an effect in mind and we search the internet for it. When we find it, sometimes it’s not what we have in mind or often we don’t find it at all and we just give up. “Photoshop can’t do that.� we tell ourselves.

We have to give ourselves the freedom to play and we have to give Photoshop the freedom to do things that it was never expected to do.

For instance, Photoshop has a Photocopy filter, right? Have you ever tried using it for something other than making an image look like it was photocopied? Give it a chance! Most of Photoshop’s filters can be adjusted to the degree where the effect they produce looks nothing like what its label in the Filters menu would have you expect. What is important to note in those situations is not that the particular combination of settings doesn’t look like a photocopied image, but what does it look like? What effect can you use this combination of settings to achieve?

Don’t be held back by the labels on the menus!

This kind of thinking can (and should) be applied to Photoshop tutorials you find online and in books as well. Follow the tutorials as they were written and see how the effect materializes as it was intended by the tutorial’s author. But then, after you’re familiar with what it does, play around with the tutorial a bit and see what else comes out of it.

Here, we’re going to take my Comic Art Effect tutorial and apply Alex Osborne’s S.C.A.M.P.E.R. principle to see what other effects we can make from it.

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S.C.A.M.P.E.R. stands for:
Substitute
Combine
Adapt
Modify
Put to some other use
Eliminate
Rearrange

A brief Breakdown of the Comic Art Effect
This is an effect is based on a Tone layer and a Color layer to approximate the coloring of a vintage comic book illustration and 3 Ink layers to give the effect of “hand drawn� outlines and shading. At the end of the tutorial he recommended adding another color layer to tweak skin tones that may have gone astray, a white layer to brighten teeth and eyes, and a dot screen layer to give the image that course dot pattern associated with old comic books.

substitute 20070912 143459 Experimenting with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Comic Effect Deconstructed)

Substitute
Try Substituting different filters in tutorials. In the case of this tutorial, you might substitute the second and third Ink layers with one where you have copied the original image to a new layer above Ink 1. Set the new layer to “Multiply� with an opacity of 50% and then apply Filter>Sketch>Graphic Pen using the settings 15, 43, Left Diagonal. It gives a much softer illustrative effect.

combine 20070912 143624 Experimenting with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Comic Effect Deconstructed)

Combine
If you have Adobe Photoshop CS3 as part of a Creative Suite bundle, you probably have Adobe Illustrator CS3 as well. Why not combine its abilities with Photoshop to create effects that could not be achieved using either application on their own? He had saved a copy of my finished Photoshop Comic Effect where I turned off all of the Ink layers and saved it as a flattened TIF. He then opened that TIF in Illustrator and used Live Trace to simplify the colors to look a bit like and Andy Warhol pop-art painting.

Adapt
If you look on MacMerc.com, you’ll find that this tutorial has been Adapted for use as a Photoshop Action. It has also been adapted for Adobe Elements. If you don’t happen to own Adobe Photoshop, that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying a free open-source creative outlet—namely, Gimpshop! I unfortunately haven’t adapted this tutorial for use with Gimpshop but that’s only because I have Photoshop. I welcome and encourage any of you Gimpshop experts out there to take a crack at the Comic Art Effect and and let me know how it goes. I’d love to link to your tutorials!!

modify 20070912 143813 Experimenting with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Comic Effect Deconstructed)

Modify
Photoshop has long offered non-destructive ways of modifying an image; affording safe experimentation where any mistakes or undesired results are entirely reversible. Once you’ve finished a tutorial, don’t be afraid to go over it again and change the filter settings. Use Smart Filters, if you can, and then you can go back again and again and try new effects and settings. Layer Masks and Adjustment Layers also allow for experimentation.
I have added an Adjustment Layer to my file to cycle the color of my image through the rainbow to create a psychedelic result.

Put it to some other use
Who says Photoshop has to just be for static images? Go to video! After all, video is just a string of still images strung together and displayed in quick succession. Look at what one person has done using the Comic Art Effect tutorial (click to view video above).

eliminate 20070912 143959 Experimenting with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Comic Effect Deconstructed)

Eliminate
For “Eliminate,� try turning off all but the Ink layers. For many photos I’ve tried this effect on, turning off everything but the Ink layers creates and pretty cool looking illustrative effect. This was the inspiration for my Frank Miller Sin City Effect.

Rearrange
While my experiments with rearranging or reversing the Layers and steps of this tutorial didn’t return any pleasing results, the technique of Layer shuffling often does produce new and interesting effects that you can call your own.

Conclusion
So, bottom line, I hope you’ll be encouraged to play a bit with Photoshop and apply the S.C.A.M.P.E.R. principle. The only way to feel comfortable using any software is to become familiar with it and an excellent way to do that is to explore and experiment.
Have fun!!

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Apr 27 2009

QuarkXPress- No Wow! to be had

By: Rick Yaeger

Looking across the spines of the books on the shelf in the Mac section at my local bookstore I see numerous volumes on various graphics applications. There’s Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand and Procreate Painter among others. Thanks mainly to Peachpit Press, I also see one particular word that seems be a favorite in the titles of these books ó “Wow!” ….Photoshop has a Wow! Book, Illustrator has a Wow! Book, Painter has a Wow! Book…there seems to be a lot of reason to be Wow’d these days.

We all want to be Wow’d and it just stands to reason that we might also like to Wow others ó if we didn’t, Peachpit wouldn’t keep making these books. Recently I have started offering my own graphics techniques here at MacMerc in our Graphics Tip of the Week section. I had hoped to offer a tutorial every week that would Wow our readers to some degree. Rather than limit myself to one application, I decided to just take the ideas as they came regardless of which application they utilized ó let the creative spirit flow. It soon became apparent that certain applications, like Photoshop and Illustrator, lent themselves to Wowing people, while others did not. QuarkXPress is without the ability to Wow ó it may try but it doesn’t have it in it.

“So what!?” you say “QuarkXPress is just a layout program. It’s not supposed to be exciting. It is there to do the job of laying out and it does it just fine.” Quite true. Perhaps QuarkXPress is secure enough that it feels no reason to draw attention to itself with all the flashiness that Illustrator or Photoshop use. It’s just not that needy.

But this is the graphics industry after all. An industry whose very nature is to be flashy and call attention to something in some way and that is exactly why Freehand and Canvas, among others, have been equipped with the ability to Wow. They also do the job of laying out and no Mac forum is complete without a thread consisting of various diehard users of various diehard applications extolling the virtues of their app of choice over the shortcomings of the industry standard, QuarkXPress.

With Quark, the Wow does not come standard. Many Wow-inspiring features that come standard in most competing applications, are either unavailable for QuarkXPress users or can only be utilized with the help of third party XTensions that, while they are quite well made and useful, really should not come as an extra cost to consumers who have already paid for Quark’s hefty $800 price tag.

Another issue that is often brought up is that QuarkXPress is not conducive to creative expression, that its interface is clunky, non-intuitive and “old” ñ it sucks the Wow right out of you. Many have pointed to InDesign and its familiar, standard Adobe interface as the “Quark killer” and have predicted a coup d’Ètat that will unseat XPress on the throne of industry standards and replace it with the day’s favorite.

Quark has long been criticized for being slow to release updates and lackluster when it does. For instance, it wasn’t until the late 90′s that Quark introduced the ability to enter type on a curve in version 4.0 and now, years after that addition to the program, many users have returned to Illustrator to achieve that same affect the same way they did in version 3. One has to wonder if the sparse new features of QuarkXPress 5.0 will soon lose what little novelty they have and be similarly ignored.

Users have felt disregarded when they contacted Quark with feature requests and betrayed when Quark not only disregarded their ideas but took the page layout application in directions few had need for. A prime example of this is QuarkXPress 5′s ability to translate documents built for print into HTML ó basically allowing a Wowless print piece to become a Wowless web site. The addition of this feature has caused more than a few diehard QuarkXPress users to shake their head in confusion. “Why do I want this and why should I have to pay for it?”

Ultimately, Quark’s own lack of customer appreciation and customer service and its failure to innovate, much less keep up, may have put the company and its flagship product in the “catch-up” position against Adobe’s upstart, InDesign. We may be shocked to find that Adobe InDesign isn’t as much the “QuarkXPress killer” it was touted as being, since it may be revealed in the last few pages of this murder mystery that Quark itself is holding the smoking gun over the bleeding XPress and muttering in disbelief, “I didn’t see THAT coming…wow!”

Are You Wow’d by QuarkXPress? …vote here

And don’t forget to speak out in the Forums

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