Photoshop Quickies

Like this?

Exactly. Apparently, you are beyond this thread.

Wicked pissah. Two things I've always been stymied by:

Matching the interaction of light between bits. Let's say I cut your head off, sitting in direct sunlight, and want to place it in a room full of indirect light. You can jew around with brightness and contrast and if I'm feeling special magicky maybe the curves thing, but it looks hacky.

Matching color. Let's say I want to take your face and put it on a black man's body. Again, I can come close to the color by manually cavemanning around with color settings and such, but it's always meep. What I want is something like the Clone tool, only... more better, like a color warp version of the Clone tool.

I've seen tutorials on this kind of thing but they always assume I know what the fuk I'm doing and I think you have a good measure of my stupidity. Also, I trust you to map around Mac meepspeak (fruit key lol).

That's right. I just made this a support thread. Welcome!

Yeah, some of that meep can be pretty difficult to get right, but it's pretty easy once you understand the colors you are working with. Also, there are a ton of ways to get to the same result, just got to learn one. I'll go down your list of questions on how I would solve them. Maybe someone else will disagree and have a better way, which will make for some good discussion.

Lighting Brightness and Contrast First of all, brightness and contrast sucks. This is designed for cleaning up edging in bitmapped images. It doesn't deal with enough of a pixel range to adjust each transition of grey from white to black.

Levels Levels are kick meep because you can change the high's, mids and lows for any color space. If you're in RGB, you can adjust it as a whole, or by individual channel, which is quite powerfull. If your dealing with a face that is too red for the body, go into levels and adjust your red channel.

Curves Curves are one of the most powerfull tonal adjustments in the entire program. Think of curves as software that implements levels, contrast, brightness and color balance all in one. It's basically re-mapping brightness values. If you open curves, think of it as a ramp, going from dark to light, left to right. As you adjust the curved line, it changes the tonal value of every pixel with those values. Depending on which way you drag your curve, it will change the tonal value to either dark or light, but only the designated tone range. Use it. Practice it.

Matching Color There is a million ways to do this. If you're using Color Balance, then you need to stop. If you're using Hue/Saturation, again, stop. If you're using Auto Color, then you really need to find another hobby. You'll never get precise results from any of these, seriously. The best thing to use to match a head with a body is Selective Color and Curves. Selective Color breaks down your color space into CMYK, RGB and greyscale all in one pane. You can adjust all three at once. If your face is too red for the body, slide the magenta below 0. Adjust your yellow to make it warmer, or cooler, depending on the tones in the body. If magenta is not working, adjust your RBG red space. To lighten or darken, use your greyscale bars or simply use Curves.

You mentioned putting a black guys head on a white dudes body, or vice/versa. Selective Color is one way of doing this, but there is another way that I have used in the past.

Try outlining the white dude's head and making a new layer. Fill the head with brown and simply use your Overlay effect (in layer effects). This works pretty good if you need it quickly.

Lastly, Channels and masking. I don't have enough room to explain how this works in it's entirety. But mess with your Channels, they will change the way you use Photoshop forever.

CUSACK!!

Good journal idea dent. Now we can drain the vast knowledge of choppin from your tiny brain. While I am in no way a PS expert I have alot of fun with it. After moving the cutout/meep to your main pic, use the Free Transform and or the tools under Transform to position the cutout/meep in the proper place.

I should have started this in the forum, oops.

Fastlane: You have insane ImageReady skills that you should share. Assuming that you do your animated gifs in ImageReady...

I use PS to make the frames and use Jasc Animation Shop 3 to put the frames together. Adobe PS beats the meep out of Jasc PSP. Jasc was bought out by hte Corel Corporation and I have dl some Corel programs to play with some time. I'll do a tut, in a bit, on nocals knob polishing animation.

I know ragoo and others have some PS secrets to share.

big hint:

play with your layer transparencies to get the perfect cut--meaning if you have a border around a subject and want to see how much you need to cut out you can simply set the opacity of the layer down to 20% or so and see through it, that way you can cut out what you want.

the eyedropper tool will give you a match for blending colors, but you are right about that discussion being a pain in the meep.

Here is a video tutorial on how nocal polishes nob. There are cleaner ways to do this but this is fast and easy. Download is 54.95 MB.

http://rapidshare.de/files/17599122/CamCapture3fa4416_Screen.avi