Photoshop Smart Objects Mean
Never Having to Say You're Sorry
How many times have you made an edit or applied a filter in Photoshop, only to realize later that your "improvement" destroyed pixels you needed? After you read this how-to, you'll never be in that pickle again.
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Photoshop Fundamentals:
Create a Comic Book Effect
In this tutorial, you’ll give a regular color photo a comic book effect by using the Threshold adjustment layer to convert it to a high-contrast, black-and-white image and generate an outline. You’ll also use a variety of tools, including Burn, Brush and Magic Wand.
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Creating a Layered Threshold Effect in Photoshop
Using the Threshold command in Adobe Photoshop can create a neat one-color effect. A full-color photo can be turned into a black outline. This technique involves creating a different shade of color to four different layers, all increasing levels of threshold.
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Give Your Tables Some Style!
Like paragraph, character, and object styles, table styles gives you the flexibility of defining a consistent look and feel across the tables in your documents.
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How to Cool a Hot Photo
When your photo can't be changed, surround it with cool color.
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Photoshop CS3:
Get Your First Look at the Beta!
While pigs aren't flying and hell hasn't frozen over, Adobe has released a free beta of Photoshop CS3 publicly (kinda), months and months before the final version ships. Read our take on the new features.
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The Best Brochure Fonts
Learn how to choose and use the right typeface for a brochure, flyer, or small booklet.
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Think Outside the Font Box
Some typefaces are only for text and some are only for display, right? Not necessarily. Follow these tips and you'll be able to extend your type library.
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Color Legibility:
Designing With Warm and Cool Colors
When warm and cool colors are juxtaposed on a 2-D surface, be it print-based, interactive, or any other 2-D surface, a 3-D illusion is created. This illusion can also be utilized in a 3-D environment in order to enhance the dimensionality of the surroundings. This dramatically affects the design options for architecture, and for packaging, industrial, landscape, interior, and textile design. The environments in which we live shape this color illusion.
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Duotones and Photographic Reproduction
Single-color halftone reproductions of photographs don’t fully imitate the tonal range of a black-and-white photographic print. Blacks and whites are sacrificed and turned gray in order to hold detail in both the shadows and highlights. Duotone, tritone, and quadtone reproduction allows for up to four printing plates and ink colors to be used to print a black-and-white photograph.
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Master InDesign's Tabs and Tables
We live in a world of lists: the Top Ten this, the 100 greatest that, 50 ways to leave your lover. Tabs and tables are invaluable tools when it comes to working with anything list-like -- from a simple bullet list to a complex financial table.
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The Reality of Resizing:
Changing Image Resolution Without Changing Quality
Possibly one of the most confusing aspects of dealing with digital imagery is resolution-specifically, what it really is and how changing it affects an image. You'd be shocked at the number of brilliant designers who don't know how to change an image from 72 dpi to 300 dpi-without turning it into a pile of pixel mush. That is, until now.
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Setting Up An Efficient Photoshop Workspace
Photoshop has so many different work areas and tools that it can become confusing, or even intimidating, to use Photoshop in a production environment. Fact is, there are only three particular zones or areas that you really need to become familiar with: Tools, Menus, and Palettes. Setting up your workspace for efficient production will create a more pleasing experience, allowing you to focus on the main objective: getting your work done.
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Slanted Communication
Italics can either help designers communicate or get in the way. Using them correctly separates the pro from the amateur, so read this primer if you don't want to look like a design beginner.
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How To Map Artwork
onto 3D Objects with Illustrator
Using Illustrator symbols, you can map artwork onto 3D objects you create. Here's how!
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Eliminating Image Banding in Photoshop
When banding occurs in images, it can be mistaken for posterization, but it’s more complex than that. Banding is caused by the failure of an algorithm during an image conversion, such as switching to a new color mode. If too many near-identical image tones spread out farther than its computational area, the algorithm can fail, and the conversion may produce tonal edges called bands. To eliminate banding, use the Add Noise filter to add pixel variation to adjacent tones.
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Photoshop How-To: Very Special Special Effects
Photoshop's Displace filter moves around the pixels of one layer to make it look as if they're following the curves or texture of the layer below. The image on the bottom layer is called a "displacement map." In this tutorial, I'll teach you in plain English what you need to know about displacement maps so you can take advantage of the stunning effects that can be created only by using these maps.
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Reduce PDF File Size
Distributing documents as Adobe® PDF files can reduce the problems that may occur when you exchange large presentation or page-layout files. In many cases, you can make your Adobe PDF file even more compact without compromising the document's integrity. The PDF Optimizer in Adobe Acrobat® 7.0 Professional gives you easy access to several options that can help you reduce the file’s size, including compression options that are comparable to the ones available when you create an original Adobe PDF file by using Adobe Acrobat.
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Filter Basics in Photoshop
Let’s take a look at some key strategies to using filters in general—then you can explore the wonderful world of filters on your own.
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Photoshop Fundamentals: Customizing Brushes
It’s time for a little brush-up on Photoshop customizing. Photoshop allows you to create your own brush if you feel the set of default brushes lacks a certain style. Possibly the most common type of customizing is to modify brush size. In the Brush palette, you can specify Size, Angle, and Roundness of Jitter under Shape Dynamics. The term ‘jitter’ indicates an effect with no specific pattern to add randomness.
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Magnetic Lasso Tool Selection
Techniques in Photoshop
Does it seem like the Magnetic Lasso tool loses its way around the simplest selection? Surprisingly, just setting an anchor point or varying the tool size can get this tool on track again. Once you understand the value of the tool’s options and use a few keyboard shortcuts, the Magnetic Lasso will actually become a real time-saver.
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Making Wraps Sing
One of the most important things about any layout program is how it handles the interaction of text and graphics.
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Illustrator How-To:
Create Collages with Blending Modes
When you create a digital collage, you don't always have to do it in Photoshop. All you need is a program that supports transparency, blending modes, and masks. Adobe Illustrator fills that bill -- in fact, when text and vector graphics are important parts of your composition, Illustrator can be a better choice.
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Paper Tips: Uncoated Speaks Softer
If you've been using only coated paper for your designs, you've been missing out on a whole world of choices. Take another look at uncoated paper.
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Quick Tips for Acrobat 7
Acrobat isn't as complex as some other Adobe apps ([cough] Photoshop [cough]) but you've got to admit that Acrobat is getting deeper with every version! That's why we've compiled a bevy of quick tips to give you back control.
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Commercial Printing with Microsoft Publisher
Yes, it's possible to produce press-ready files from Microsoft Publisher. We'll help you sidestep the snags.
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Creating Image Composites
in Photoshop with Smart Objects
When making a composite, anything you can do to edit nondestructively keeps you out of trouble when making changes later. What layer masks do for editing, Smart Objects do for transformations.
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Sharpen Photos Smartly
What's the best time to sharpen your photos? And what's the best tool -- Camera Raw, Photoshop's Smart Sharpen, or something else? We answer these questions and more.
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Photoshop Tips: Burning Questions Answered
Learn how to export layers to individual files, create an image with a transparent background, and remove red eye painlessly.
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Controlling Type with Nested Styles
In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to use nested styles to generate some of the most popular text formatting looks used in many magazines and books on the market today.
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Getting the Most Out of Your Paintbrush Tool
Illustrator’s Art Brush is truly a multiple use tool. Sure you can choose from calligraphic or hand-drawn brush effects, but don’t stop there. Found under Window>Brush Libraries (or from the Brushes palette’s flyout menu) are Arrows, Artistic, Decorative, and Border brush styles, too. Illustrator also lets you create your own brush and save it with the other brush presets. But even though the Art Brush looks like a brush and acts like a brush, beneath those bristly edges hides a one-stroke image tool.
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InDesign How-to: Fill Type with Artwork
Last week, we showed you how to fill text with images in QuarkXPress. This week, it's InDesign's turn.
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Fill Type with Artwork in QuarkXPress
How would you fill type with artwork or imagery? Would you do it in Photoshop or Illustrator? If the artwork-filled type is going to end up in a QuarkXPress layout, why worry about transparency, clipping path, or image preview issues? Instead, you can fill the type
directly within XPress.
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Photoshop Fundamentals:
Discover Gradient Layer Masks
The gradient layer mask is one of my secret weapons. This is one of the most popular techniques used by graphic design pros, and is often seen in movie poster design. Even beginners can create professional results by mastering this process.
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Getting Started with Actions
Mention actions to many Photoshop users and they either don’t know what an action is, think actions are only useful for major projects, or they tried making one and had a “bad experience.” We’ll attempt to dispel any fears as we look at creating an action.
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Working With Transparency
Everybody’s doing it (or wants to). So what are you waiting for? The water’s fine—c’mon in. Although InDesign is the only page-layout app to support transparency to date, transparency is not a new concept. You’ve been working with transparency since Photoshop 3. The only difference is that when it came to print, you flattened that transparency BEFORE bringing it into your page-layout app. While this flattened workflow of the past still works, it’s not the most convenient use of your time.
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When Vector Meets Photo
Mixing vector and photo is one of the hottest trends in the illustration industry today. We’ve seen this effect used in national ad campaigns from Anheuser-Busch to Hawaiian Tropic. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to create this effect in Illustrator.
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I See iPod People
If you're crazy about those iPod ads and want to make one yourself, it's actually pretty easy. The first thing you'll need is an image of someone that you can extract from the background without too much work.
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Image Editing With
Photoshop CS2's Spot Healing Brush
When your image has a major flaw that can’t be masked or cropped, the new Spot Healing Brush tool in Photoshop CS2 will paint away entire foreground elements and replace them with interpolated background data—all with just a few swipes of the brush.
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Brochures That Get Noticed
You don't need metallic inks or tricky die-cuts to create a brochure everyone wants to pick up. Just offset the folds and work a little design magic. It's easy -- we even give you templates!
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Synchronizing Color
Across Adobe CS2 Applications with Bridge
When Color Settings are different in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator, these applications will have disjointed and often confusing color behavior. Choosing the right settings and synchronizing across all Adobe CS2 applications is important in managing your sanity and getting consistent results.
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Adobe's "Digital Negative" File Format
Adobe Systems, Inc. is on a crusade. The company wants to unify the concept of the "Raw" file format. Taking the lead (and for now, at least, going it alone), Adobe has rolled out a brand new version of Raw, one it hopes will be adopted by all camera manufacturers. Here's a look at the new "digital negative," the .dng file format.
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Transition Environments in Photoshop
Robert Carter shows how to use a gradient and the Lighting Effects filter to move smoothly between two images.
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Make Type and Photos Play Nice
When text and images are battling for the same space, you don't have to give up one or the other. Here are practical techniques for bringing the two together.
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Removing Things in Perspective
Before Photoshop CS2’s introduction of the Vanishing Point filter, cloning away things in perspective was one of the hardest removal tasks of all. Luckily, this incredibly cool filter not only simplifies removing things in perspective, it actually makes it fun. In fact, this is one of those filters that’s so amazing, you can wind up spending hours cloning away things that have no business being cloned away.
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Brand-New Tool in CS2
The new LiveTrace feature in Adobe Illustrator CS2 is an incredible timesaver for illustrators -- and a gift for those of us whose drawing skills are sub par. Here's how to quickly and effectively convert a photographic image into a stylized vector drawing.
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Creating Silhouette Illustrations in Photoshop
Silhouette illustration is a trend in today’s design community that has become very popular. This form of illustration is focused on using and extracting the most basic forms of an object and turning them into art. It can be seen everywhere from Web graphics, Flash movies, and magazine ads, to full-blown TV ads. Although simple, silhouette illustration can reduce an object to its most simplistic form and still convey an emotion, style, and energy with little actual color and definition.
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Using the Lens Correction Filter
in Photoshop CS2
The Lens Correction filter in Photoshop CS2 is truly amazing, being able to repair all kinds of distortions. Not only can it remedy the bulging created by a wide-angle lens and the weird distortion created by taking a photo too close to a subject – such as the bulging nose of a friend – but it can also straighten images taken at angles and make them appear as if they were shot straight on.
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Design How-to: A Better Newsletter
Before & After magazine is renowned for its practical yet beautiful advice on laying out pages. This excerpt from the book "Before & After Page Design" is no exception. Here's all you need to know -- from the basics to the refined detail -- to design successful newsletters.
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Using Photoshop to Create a 3D Look
The following tutorial can be completed by anyone who is familiar with Photoshop. You don't have to be an artist and only Photoshop's basic tools have been used. No tablet or digital pen is required.
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Make a Logo Flow in Illustrator
When does 1 + 1 + 1 -1 = 1 great image? When you use the Subtract from shape area command in Illustrator CS's Pathfinder Palette. It all adds up in this how-to drawn from a real-life logo design.
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Design How-to: Endless Pattern Possibilities
Just one simple step-and-repeat technique is all you need to create striking background patterns perfect for the covers of books, annual reports, brochures -- you name it.
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Color Picker Versatility
The vast majority of the time, the vast majority of us use Photoshop's Color Picker in the default configuration. Perhaps we use Custom Colors to select a spot color, but when using the Color Picker itself, we ignore the eight optional modes. (What? You didn't know that the Color Picker has different modes?)
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Confused Over Brightness and Whiteness?
Ever wonder why your printed pieces are not popping like you planned? Maybe you're choosing the wrong paper brightness or whiteness. Did you know there's a difference?
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Create a Color Scheme Using
Grayscale Tonal Ranges in Photoshop
Grayscale images, desaturated process color images, over-saturated RGB images…they never seem to mix well in a project. One way to tie a group of disparate images together is to create an overall color scheme by applying specific colors to different points on a Grayscale tonal range. It sounds complicated, but it’s easier than you think!
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Illustrator How to Wow!
Going Negative with the Opacity Mask
When does negative become a positive? When you apply Illustrator's opacity mask. In this exclusive preview from the new and revised "Adobe Illustrator CS WOW! Book," to be published by Peachpit Press, see how to add an antique effect to type using this hidden feature.
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Lens Blur with Alpha Channels
It's an effect every photographer appreciates from time to time: showing a sharply focused subject against a blurry, out-of-focus background. Instead of playing with aperture settings, you can achieve similar results using Photoshop CS's Lens Blur filter. Here's how.
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Mysteries of Unsharp Mask
What's one of the very last things we do to an image before sending it to print or to the web? We sharpen it. What tool do we use? The Unsharp Mask filter, of course. Anybody know why? I didn't, until I did a little investigating in the world of sharpening. In fact, I learned that the filter is named for a technique employed by professional astronomers for years to enhance fine detail and image structure that would otherwise be hidden by a standard processing method. How cool is that?!
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Design a Calendar for Every Occasion
Electronic organizers are a great way to manage your calendars—when what interests you is data. But to tell a story, present a product or stir a memory, you’ll want a good, old-fashioned paper calendar—the kind with the beautiful picture and an appealing design. A good calendar will be kept and used. It’s a great way to bring people together—get your group on the same page, so to speak.
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Using Metadata in the File Browser
Wouldn’t it be nice to describe a photo just once in a way that can easily be shared and understood? Using metadata in Adobe® Photoshop® CS, you can do just that. Metadata communicates information about your images, such as the date they were taken or the resolution of the images. You can also add metadata to include information that helps you organize and find your photos. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to work with metadata, including adding and editing metadata, how to create a metadata template to copyright your photos, and how metadata is used in the File Browser.
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InDesign CS Tips: Creating Layout Standards
Few things are as tedious as numbering pages by hand. That's why page-layout applications have master pages -- only one of the ways in which you can standardize the look of your documents in InDesign. Here's what you need to know about master pages, templates, and libraries.
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Format Type with Character and Paragraph Styles
For more than a decade, Adobe® Illustrator® has set the standard for typographical excellence. Now, Illustrator CS introduces character and paragraph styles to help you ensure consistent text formatting. Whether you’re formatting entire paragraphs or shorter type segments, character and paragraph styles save you time by letting you to apply formatting attributes with a single click. Follow along and learn how to put character and paragraph styles to work for you.
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Designing Text to Flow Around Objects
Wrapping text around objects—from basic shapes or frames to images with clipping paths—can give any publication a unique look and feel. In this tutorial, you’ll learn several ways to work with text wrap in Adobe InDesign® to achieve the look you want.
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Design a Name
Here's how to create a good look out of nothing – just a name on a shape – but there's a secret.
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Get the Most Out of OpenType Fonts
Adobe® Illustrator® CS ships with 83 OpenType fonts (in 24 font families). These OpenType fonts include expanded character sets that allow you to substitute one version of a letter form for another. Depending on the font, alternate characters can include ligatures, fractions, titling characters, swashes, ornaments, ordinals, contextual and stylistic alternatives, superior and inferior characters, and old-style figures. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to view and apply several kinds of alternate characters.
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InDesign How-To:Applying Paragraph Formatting
You'd expect InDesign's paragraph-formatting features to give you precise control over text alignment, indents, tabs, line-spacing, and so on. But InDesign CS ups the ante by providing expert features like nested styles and multi-line composition.
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Mastering Clipping Groups in Photoshop
Clipping groups are an underused and interesting effect, although just the words "clipping groups" sends fear down the spines of novice and intermediate Photoshop users alike. The concept is really not as hard as it sounds.
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Softproofing PDFs with Acrobat's Preflight Tools
Even as PDF is becoming a preferred format for final delivery of print-ready files, many creative professionals experience the technical glitches that can arise in this relatively unfamiliar workflow. That's why Adobe built preflight tools into Acrobat 6 Professional. Here's how to spot common errors.
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Photoshop Tips:
Increasing Image Resolution to Make Large Prints
Making images is easy. Printing them at the right size at the right resolution is tricky. If you don't have access to a multi-megapixel camera, is it still possible to make large prints that don't suffer from the degradation caused by increasing image size? Yes, it is.
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Making Two Ends Meet
When half the image is blown out and the other half falls in deep shadow, typical correction methods don't work. Photoshop CS's Shadow/Highlight command helps, but for maximum flexibility, try a blur and a blend.
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InDesign CS Tips: Working with Pages
Creating a document in Adobe InDesign isn't that dissimilar from doing so in other page-layout applications. But InDesign differs somewhat in how you add, remove, rearrange, and number pages.
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Explaining "Image Resolution" & View>Print Size
Here's a different way to consider the term "image resolution." It's nothing more than an instruction to a printing device about how large to replicate each pixel.
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Illustrator CS - 3D Effects and Wireframes
A Wireframe effect outlines the contours of an object but leaves each surface transparent. Since the tech boom in the late 1990’s, Wireframe effects have been extremely popular and synonymous with technology. However, creating these effects usually involved the use of a 3D modeling program. It was possible to fake this effect in Illustrator but, as with many “faked” effects, the results are usually unpredictable and not top quality. Illustrator CS has changed all of that with 3D effects though. You can now reduce any 3D object you create to a wireframed object. In this exercise, you will learn, not only how to accomplish this, but a highly used technique for incorporating wireframe objects with other artwork
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Using Illustrator CS's 3D Tool
This week, we're going to use Illustrator CS's 3D tools to create a beach ball. This is one of my favoriate new features in Illustrator CS and is worth the upgrade price by itself.
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InDesign How-To: Creating Tables
Tables are one of the most powerful features in Adobe InDesign CS, allowing you to make complex, sophisticated-looking tables quickly and easily. And you don't have to be an Excel wiz to do it! Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner show you how.
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A Quick Color Quiz
With 16.7 million unique colors to choose from on your monitor, it's likely that you've overlooked the primary colors that in combination are responsible for all these colors. Let's take a trip back to school and review the basic colors from which all others are derived.
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Photoshop How-To: Weaving Layer Content
Artwork that's on separate layers doesn't have to appear as a simple stack. Here's how to weave layered elements together.
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Share and Share Alike
From Photoshop to Illustrator (Part 3)
With the introduction of Adobe Creative Suite, you can easily move artwork from Photoshop into Illustrator -- and continue to edit it in the illustration application. Here's how to transfer Photoshop art into Illustrator along with how to find everything once it's there.
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The Art and Type Tango
You buy them separately, but art and type are two sides of the same coin—and there’s magic in making them work together! Here’s how they relate.
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Design How-To: Mixing Ink Tints
When do two ink colors equal millions? When they're combined into tints. See how you can expand your palette -- and maximize your budget -- by mixing ink tints.
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Adding Contrast with Color Complements
Contrast is one of the most important factors in color quality, and optimizing contrast is one of the first steps in color correction. But first, it's important to distinguish between two kinds of contrast – brightness contrast, such as the overall contrast between the highlights and shadows in an image and color contrast, the sometimes significant difference between adjacent hues, especially complementary hues.
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Advanced Color Correction with Levels
This technique is a contrast/tone and color correction technique all in one. Once you run through this, you will see how just about any image can be improved and you will use this technique many times over.
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Printing Separations in Color
It's easy to see individual channels in color in Photoshop's Channels palette--simply select "Color Channels in Color" in Preferences> Display & Cursors. But what if you want to print the channels in color, say as samples for a screenprinter? That takes a few more steps.
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Ten Ways to Tame a Long Name
Short, perky names are preferable to long, but what if you’re stuck with a whopper? A short name is a designer’s delight. Time. Life. Vogue. A short name has punch; it’s easy to read and easy to say. It’s easy to design, too; a short name can fit any space, any style, and wear any color. A long name, on the other hand, is an octopus. It sprawls. It crowds the space, dominates the graphics, and controls the look of a page. A long name has no natural focal point. It swamps typographic detail. It is a many-tenacled challenge.
Here’s what you can do:
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Moving Custom Bits & Pieces to Photoshop CS
You've recorded a lot of custom Actions in Photoshop 7. You're a fiend for a good layer style and have collected dozens and dozens of them. You make a custom brush for just about every job you do. And you don't want to have to start over now that you've upgraded to Photoshop CS. Not a problem! Most of your Actions and all of your layer styles should work just fine in Photoshop CS. You just need to get them over there.
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Dragging and Dropping into InDesign CS
Using the Place command is the usual means of putting text and graphics into an InDesign layout. Cutting and pasting via the Clipboard is another tried and true method. But did you know that you can drag and drop text and graphics from many popular applications directly into InDesign? Here's how.
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Controlling Layer Blending Modes
Using layer blending modes is a quick and easy way to composite images. Copy one image over the other and change the upper layer's blending mode and/or opacity, and you've got a great image! But you can finesse the appearance of the composite by using multiple blending modes.
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Understanding the Zen of the Pen
Illustrator can be a maddening program to learn, and even those who have mastered the application may struggle with it at times. What's required is entering what author Sharon Steuer calls the "Zen of Illustrator" in which working with Beziers and control points becomes second nature.
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Making Natural Color Schemes for Your Graphics
Sometimes it's difficult to come up with a bright, interesting color scheme for original art which looks "natural". This article will give you a technique for creating your own set (or palette) of natural colors.
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Creative Suite How-To:Collaborating on a Project
with Illustrator, Photoshop, and Version Cue
You're doing layout on PC, your artist is editing images on a Mac, and now you have to coordinate your work. Which file is the current one? What change did you make to that file anyway? In this story, see how Adobe's Version Cue makes sense of the madness.
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InDesign How-To:
Using PageMaker Templates for a Corporate ID
With the PageMaker Plug-in Pack that now ships with InDesign CS, Adobe provided several handy templates for a variety of design solutions. See how to create a corporate identity with a hand from the design firm of Gee+Chung.
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How to Build Artwork in 3D Relief
We used Macromedia FreeHand to create this article, but similar results can be achieved with Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW or another vector-based illustration application.
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A Few Preconceived Notions about Type
Arial? All Caps? Small Margins? John Berry explodes a few common ideas about how to use type.
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Packing Up InDesign Layouts for GoLive Pages
With the Creative Suite, Adobe application integration has never been tighter, especially between InDesign CS and GoLive CS. See how you can turn an InDesign layout into a GoLive Web site in a few steps.
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See-Through! Make Your Type Translucent
Nothing marries words to image more beautifully than transparency, which Adobe’s three big programs can achieve in one click. The transparency function is the same in Illustrator, Photoshop and In-Design — and so simple! Select any image (type, photo, object), change its Opacity, and just like that you can see through it! Atop a dark photo, white is the most neutral color choice, and our favorite, because it doesn’t add anything. Different amounts of opacity yield different amounts of see-through.
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InDesign How-To:
Adding Custom Sizes to the Page Menu
Of course making custom page sizes if nothing new. But here's a handy InDesign CS trick for adding those custom page sizes to your Page menu so you can call it up at anytime.
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Creative Thinking in Photoshop:
Using Layer Comps to Create Variations
Layers in Photoshop let you work with different image elements. Layer Comps in Photoshop CS, on the other hand, let you experiment with different compositions. Sharon Steuer shows how this powerful tool can unleash your creativity.
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Restoring Photos with Photoshop CS: Part 2
Adding Missing Elements
Often in old photographs, large areas have been scratched beyond recognition or are missing completely. Based on the severity of the problem, you'll have to decide the best approach to restoration. In many cases, Photoshop's tools and commands can be combined to remedy these problems, but some parts of photographs might be too damaged to restore. If, for example, the face of a person is missing from an image, I recommend that you avoid trying to paint it back in, because this will prove to be a virtually impossible task to accomplish with any credibility. A better approach might be to composite the face from another photograph or, if that's not possible, fill the area with neutral gray.
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Restoring Photos with Photoshop CS: Part 1
Since the introduction of the box camera by Kodak in the late nineteenth century, photography has become a popular pastime, practiced by countless people. If your attic is anything like mine, there are no doubt hundreds of photographs sitting in envelopes or boxes that haven't been looked at for years. We don't throw these images away because they are valuable to us and are part of our legacy. Many of these images are of relatives who have passed on and are the only living reminder we have of their lives.
Unfortunately, few of us have the time or money to create an environmentally safe archive for the original images, and so, with the passing of time, many of these photographs remain neglected and begin to fade or collect dust, scratches, and abrasions. This series of extracts is about restoring those long-neglected pictures
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A Beautiful Abstract in Two Clicks
In the old days, posters were made by hand and generally silkscreened onto paper or board. To do this efficiently meant that an image could have only a few flat colors, not the unlimited gradients of a photograph. This limitation resulted in a lot of innovative artwork—bold images that were often stylized or abstract, and visually arresting. Photoshop’s Posterize feature is designed to mimic the flat colors of the silkscreened poster. It does this by reducing a photograph’s many gradients to just a few. The key to an excellent result, however, is to first apply a Gaussian Blur, then Posterize the blurred image.
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Best Practices for Page Layouts
Page-layout applications let you perform miracles. But you'll undermine its derring-do if you ignore simple mistakes like using unnamed colors or keeping a cluttered pasteboard. Here's a good reminder about what to do and not to do when making pages.
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Anti-Aliasing and Resampling Artwork - Part 2
In the first part of this series, you took a look at anti-aliasing from the standpoint of how it works and what it can mean to the refinement of your artwork. This month, let's examine exactly how anti-aliasing works (hint: it's interpolation).
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Anti-Aliasing and Resampling Artwork - Part 1
Anti-Aliasing. It's a fair enough topic for beginners and it's not a bad read for those of us who've been around the pixel once or twice.
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Ten Type Tips: Part 2
In the last episode, tips for creating fonts, using fonts, arranging fonts, and holding the door open for fonts when they are carrying large packages, were discussed. Ready for some more?
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Ten Type Tips: Part 1
In two installments, I'm going to arm you with ten indispensable tips about the art of typography, not only to make you an ace designer, but also to help revive the art of typography by spreading some traditional guidelines for type use out to the internet and into the next magazine layout you create.
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Adding Color to Black & White Images
in Photoshop 7
There are quite a few tutorials online dealing with removing color from images to gain crisp black and white versions. I've written a few myself. The thought occurred to me this morning that there really isn't much that I've seen showing how to add realistic color to a black and white image. This takes some time, patience and a bit of savvy, using tool and blending mode combinations, but it can produce some very realistic results. I'll be showing you how to colorize an image in Photoshop 7, but you should be able to replicate the effects in earlier versions or other image editing applications.
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How to Make a Duotone
The invention of the halftone in 1883 was a technical and artistic miracle. Ink, which previously had been applied in solid sheets, could now be printed in tiny dots that the eye perceived as shades of gray. The result was an illusion of dimension that made the printed photograph possible and changed the way the world communicates.

But the modern halftone could use some improvement. Shades of gray are no match for the sheer variety in our natural color spectrum. Contrasts of hue, saturation and intensity, for example, do not even exist in black and white. What the halftone could use is greater tonal range.

To achieve this, a duotone is made of two halftones, not just one, and printed in two inks.
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Working with Layers in Photoshop 7, Part 1
To understand Layer Sets, you first need to understand Photoshop layers. Photoshop layers can hold non-transparent designs or photographic elements held in place by transparency all around, so you can see the non-transparent contents of a layer underneath.
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Sharpening, Blurring, and LAB
Digital photography often is excessively noisy. It turns out that this digital noise is often color only. It can best be attacked in the space that separates color from contrast—the same one that's also often best for unsharp masking.
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Hyphenation
The difference between “just okay” typography and professional-level typography is usually in the details – like hyphenation. Often overlooked, proper hyphenation is essential for optimum readability and getting your message across.
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