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.

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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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Apr 27 2009

Adobe Photoshop Tip– The Ubiquitous Aqua Text Tutorial

aquafinal Adobe Photoshop Tip The Ubiquitous Aqua Text Tutorial

By: Rick Yaeger

We here at MacMerc have taken a lot of flack for certain articles that contain detailed explainations of activities we do not condone. The graphics tip before you may very well be added to their number. What I am about to explain, in great detail, is exactly how you can produce text similar to the large X on the box MacOS X comes in. I’m going to explain it, I’m even going to offer you the Photoshop Layer Style used to achieve it, but make no mistake, I do not condone the use of this tutorial. Aqua is everywhere and it’s being mimicked with varying degrees of success using third-party plug-ins and countless Layer Style Settings. It’s wrong and it has to stop.

aquastyles Adobe Photoshop Tip The Ubiquitous Aqua Text TutorialSo why detail a graphic technique I don’t condone? For a few simple reasons:

  1. I intend to dispel the myth that a single Layer Style can produce this effect properly.
  2. As long as everyone is going to be using aqua type effects, they might as well do them well. And…
  3. I’ve been negligent in writing my graphics tips of late and this seemed like an easy way to get one in. I admit it, I’ve been bad.

One more warning before I continue, this tutorial is for Aqua type not Aqua buttons. If you want to make your own Aqua buttons there are plenty of great tutorials out there, but this is not one of them.

This tutorial is quite adaptable and might even produce fairly acceptable Aquafied logo effects. But, as you will see, the secret of the Aqua effect is in the highlighting and the highlighting used on Aqua type will not work as well for buttons as other techniques.

Anyway, enough warnings ó here we go.

Step 1: Type your type

aquajusttext Adobe Photoshop Tip The Ubiquitous Aqua Text Tutorial

I don’t think there is a Mac forum in existence that has not had this question posed: “What font does Apple use?” The answer is Apple Garamond, it is evidently a font that Apple wants to keep to itself but if you know where to look, it’s not that hard to find. If using the authentic Apple font violates conditions of your parole, almost any flavor of Garamond Light Condensed will do. Load the font and launch Photoshop 7.

Start a new Photoshop document. I’m using a 7″ by 2″ 300ppi RGB file and all my instructions from here on out will assume you are working on a similar format.

I’ve typed “MacMerc.com” at 93pt in ITC Garamond Light Condensed. The color of the text doesn’t matter ó the Layer Style is going to override it anyway.

Step 2: Download and Apply the MacMerc Style

You are going to need to download and decompress this Layer Style to continue. Once you have it, open Photoshop’s Style palette and, using the menu in its top right hand corner, select “Load Styles…” and direct Photoshop to the style we’ve given you. It should now be added to you Style palette. With you text layer selected apply the “MacMerc Aqua!” style. If you think it looks pretty unimpressive so far, I agree.

UPDATE: If you are not using Adobe Photoshop 7, you will not be able to use the provided Layer Style. For users of older Photoshop versions, I have created this Photoshop file. All you need to do is download the file, open it in Photoshop, open your Styles palette and choose “Create New Style” by clicking on the middle icon at the bottom of the palette or by clicking in an empty area of the palette when the cursor turns into a paint bucket.

Photoshop 5.5 users can also use this file by opening it and chosing Effects>Copy Effects from under the Layer menu and choosing Effect>Paste Effects from the same menu to apply the effect to the desired layer.

Thanks to Iain Farrell for his help in making this tutorial more accessible.

Step 3: The Highlight of the effect

Create a new layer above the text layer and name it “Highlight”. Open the Layers palette if it isn’t already and confirm that the Highlight layer is selected while you Command-click the text layer. This makes a selection on the Highlight layer the exact shape and possition of the text on the layer below it. In the menu bar, go Select>Modify>Contract… and enter a value of 3. Fill this selection with white.

Next, with your selection still active and the Selection tool active (any one, the rectange, the circle ó it doesn’t matter), view your document at 100% and press the Down Arrow key on your keyboard 20 times. Go back to the menu bar and choose Select>Modify>Expand… and enter 10. Now go Select>Feather… and enter a value of 5 and then delete the contents of this selection on the Highlight layer.

You should now have a pretty passable Aqua text effect, but still not an impressive one. Please continue.

aquaunimpressive Adobe Photoshop Tip The Ubiquitous Aqua Text Tutorial

Step 4: It’s all in the details

Creat a new layer between the text layer and the Highlight layer. Name it “Edge Glow – Bottom”. With this new layer selected, Command-click the type layer again and contract the selection by 3 pixles and fill it with white as you did to the Hightlight layer in Step 3.

Again, as in Step 3, we are going to nudge the selection. But this time we are going to nudge it up and we will only be going up 1 pixel (view your document at 100% and hit the Up arrow once with a Selection tool active). Now delete the contents of the selection.

Set the Blending Mode for Edge Glow – Bottom to “Overlay,” deselect and go Filter>Blur>Blur (I know, Gaussian Blur is the professionals “Blur of Choice” but plain old blur works just fine here).

Your Aqua type should be looking pretty sexy now, but we’re not down yet. We’re going to go that extra pixel to do this type up right.

aquadetails Adobe Photoshop Tip The Ubiquitous Aqua Text TutorialStep 5: Details upon details

Creat one final layer above Edge Glow – Bottom and name it “Edge Glow – Top”. With this new layer selected, Command-click the type layer again and contract the selection by 3 pixles and fill it with white as you did to the Hightlight layer in Step 3. (Ever have deja vu?)

Again, as in Step 3 and 4, we are going to nudge the selection. This time nudge it down 1 pixel (view your document at 100% and hit the Down arrow once with a Selection tool active). Now delete the contents of the selection.

Set the Blending Mode for Edge Glow – Top to “Overlay” and that is it!

It’s interesting to note that if you select the text layer and apply almost any of Photoshop’s preset Styles, this technique still maintains its Aqua look. The Layer Style is only a small part of what makes it work.

aquafinal Adobe Photoshop Tip The Ubiquitous Aqua Text Tutorial

Step 6: “Wait I thought I was finished”

The final step is to close the document without saving, trash that Layer Style you downloaded and never, ever use this tutorial. Go have a long shower and cleanse yourself of any grime of unoriginality that might have tempted you to actually use this effect for anything other than a joke. Shame on you! Shame!!!!

aquadontsave Adobe Photoshop Tip The Ubiquitous Aqua Text Tutorial

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