Kens Photoshop Blog

These keep dropping of the frontpage so I stickied them here:
Masking and removing backgrounds in photoshop
Masking with calculations in photoshop
Combining 2 or more masks in photoshop
Enhancing shape with dodge and burn
Photoshop Color Correction By The Numbers
Sharpening images in photoshop with full control
Removing chromatic aberration from photos in photoshop
Using LAB and impossible colors to fix blown images
Control photoshop with mouse gestures

Here’s a little quickie that many people don’t think about.

If you like to use your current brush and erase with it, it’s annoying to have to switch to the eraser and then pick the same brush from the brushes palette, or create duplicate of all your brushes set to erase.

Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to constantly open the photoshop color picker or use that dinky small color slider palette or *shudder* swatches?

Well now you can just use this awesome flash panel colorpicker for photoshop made by Anastasiy.

It just floats anywhere you want like any other photoshop panel and can be rezised so you get a huge colorpicker. Works pretty much like the standard colorpicker.

photoshop colorpicker

Download photoshop colorpicker

Hey hey, more Autohotkey goodness for CS3 users, brush resize on the fly, CS4 style!

First download a free copy of Autohotkey

This new tabs business in CS4 is driving me insane, horrible interface disicion.

Tabs suck unless you’r some old lady working on pictures of your cat. If you frequently need to have multiple images open, references, matte creation, compositing etc.. you open new images all the time and drag contents from one into other windows.

Ever wanted to create hotkeys in photoshop but you couldn’t because photoshop didn’t allow that hotkey combination? Or wanted to use the TAB key for something else?

There’s a free program that allows you to use keys such as TAB, numlock, scrolllock, printscreen or the break key and map it to something usefull. That program is called AutohotKey. You can download it for free and unleash all that power here: Download Autohotkey

Here’s a little trick I came up with that’s so simple I smacked my forehead when it occurred to me..

Go to your mouse control panel and turn on mouse trails. Adjust the trail length to the maximum.

Now to back to your drawing program and without actually pressing the draw button (With a pen just hover above the canvas) and use the mouse trails to previsualize your strokes.

For example to draw an elipse just practice it and look at the trails, as soon as you have the major and minor axis’s down, gently press to draw.

Need to draw a perfect line to connect 2 points? Draw your fantom line in the air and press to draw when you have visualized it using the mouse trail.

My hit percentage went way up using this technique. It’s not cheating in my opinion because you do the same with pen and paper, it’s just that with a tablet your are disconnected from your drawing surface because you draw on the table/tablet instead of directly on the screen so you can’t do this as well. With mouse trails turned on you can.

Tired of the hardcoded shortcut keys in photoshop? Want to change the TAB key into something else? And what the hell is up with not being able to bind stuff to single letter shortcuts?

No matter. Go download the program Autohotkeys, it’s free and awesome.
Autohotkey allows you to trap keys before a program gets control and send some other keycode intirely and throw away the trapped keycode.

I can draw straight lines and ellipsis quite well on paper. When I got my wacom tablet I practiced a lot but could never get straight lines and good ellipsis using the wacom tablet.

Until one day a light-bulb went of… That plastic surface on the tablet that you rest your palm on is not paper. Paper is nice and slippery and absorbs the moisture from your hands. When your hands get just a little bit sweaty the plastic surface on the tablet will cause increased and random friction and that is what messes up your nice precise lines ellipsis and circles so they look all wrinkly and horrible.

Go out and buy a stack of those thin cotton gloves for ladies, silk is even better if you can afford them. Cut of the fingers and never mind looking like MJ hehe. You can try out the difference right now by getting a piece of paper and resting your palm on it, then slide around on the tablet surface. It will be quite easy to feel the difference.

Now your palm will slide with no friction on the tablet plastic and you can draw straight lines WAY better. For me it was like night and day so try it out.

If you want to draw in perspective in photoshop you need to draw perspective grid lines to establish your view. You can draw your own lines sure, but what if you want to tweak the view after you’r done drawing all those lines? Then you have to start all over.. what a drag!

If you have ever wanted to learn how to draw things in perspective the tutorial by Scott Robertson Basic Perspective Form Drawing is a goldmine.

Scott starts out gentle by teaching by example how to draw guides for 1,2 and 3 point perspectives. Then building on that to draw simple boxes and planes. Moving on we learn how to draw ellipses in perspective. With these basics learned, Scott shows how to extrapolate shapes in perspective, translating simple shapes using some very cool tricks.

The tutorial then goes on to drawing complex shapes such as car bodies, organic shapes, and planes in perspective using the techniques demonstrated in earlier lessons.

If you come away from this DVD having gone through and learned all these techniques for drawing in perfect perspective, you can do some amazing stuff with ease. This tutorial is an absolute goldmine that is not to be missed if you want to learn how to draw complex technical shapes.

The techniques are all shown from a top view of Scott drawing freehand on paper; but can easily be translated to programs such as illustrator or Photoshop. In fact, many of these techniques will be easier to execute on a computer, where you don’t have to have perfect freehand line-drawing skill.

You can find the DVD at the Gnomon site here It’s available as a direct download and is only 39 dollars; and the video quality is great – unlike a few other tutorials I purchased at gnomon where the quality was to low to properly see what was going on.

For 39 dollars its a bargain.

I used painter for a little while to check it out and see if I liked it better than photoshop for artistic stuff. The brush engine is quite nice but I can recreate everything with photoshops brush engine, vastly superior blending modes and layer styles and painter was just to slow and clunky for my taste and the lack of photoshops masking abillities is a total showstopper.

I did however LOVE the way you can bind keys so you can resize the brushes and rotate the canvas with the mouse/pen; something that’s impossible to setup in photoshop.

In Photoshop you can create a path with the pen tool and then go to the paths palette and select Stroke Path to hit the path with whatever tool is selected.

By default this just strokes the path with a shitty little 1 pixel harsh pen.

This has been driving me up the wall since many versions of photoshop.

You have a layer selected, now you create a new layer and do something to it and undo that. Photoshop will undo what you did AND SELECT THE PREVIOUS LAYER

Draw…
Nah no good, undo.
(Photoshop undos and selects previous layer)
Click back to the layer I was working on.
Try again..
Nah no good, undo..
(Photoshop undos and selects previous layer)
Click back to the layer I was working on.

Start drawing again… Only to find out I forgot to reselect the layer I was working on so now Im drawing on the wrong layer

FSFSFSFSFSGHSKFJK:HUF GARRRR! FOR FUCKS SAKE (Throws things around)

This is seriously the only thing in Photoshop that PISSES ME OFF!

This is another tutorial in my masking series. If this is the first time you are here you will need to start out reading and learning my Masking and removing backgrounds in photoshop tutorial first and then come back here as this tutorial will be building on what you learned there.

Sometimes there are images that are either to low quality or with backgrounds so busy that a one shot channel mask just will not work, and that’s when we pull out the big guns..

This tutorial is a continuation of the Masking and removing backgrounds in photoshop tutorial and builds on what you learned there. If you didn’t complete and internalized the techniques from there, please go and do that now or you won’t be able to follow along.

In the Masking and removing backgrounds in photoshop tutorial we learned how do grab a mask from the channels palette, and how to enhance it with curves, dodge and burn.

Sometimes you can get a jump start on a perfect mask, using the calculations command and masking with calculations.

This is going to be a long one so get comfy and go grab a cuppa first, we are going to learn how to mask and remove backgrounds in photoshop the right way.

First, lets look at some of techniques that many people use, that are usually the wrong way. I say usually, because there will be times when you have to work with low quality images with jpeg artifacts and just unfortunate backgrounds that makes the right way impossible. Once you learn how photos that will be masked in post production are made the right way, you will learn when to apply the different techniques.

If you are doing product photography where things are not usually moving your masking job just got a hell of a lot easier: Difference masks.

Make sure nothing in the scene with your subject moves, this goes for changing lights, moving flags or gobos etc.., the scene must be static. Shoot on a stand and use a remote to trigger the camera so you don’t get any movements at all.

If you know how to channel mask and how to create a mask from the R,G or B channels and enhancing it with curves and dodge/burn, perhaps even using calculations to mix channels combined with a blending mode, then you are ready for this one. If not, please read the following tutorials first:

Masking and removing backgrounds in photoshop
Masking with calculations in photoshop

LAB masking

When I show people something in photoshop, the thing they are most amazed by is not whatever technique I show them. It’s that I don’t use a keyboard to control photoshop, I use my wacom pen to issue mouse gestures almost exclusively, only touching the keyboard for the most obscure and rarely used commands.

Peaked your interest? Think about your hands never leaving the photo to press shortcuts, never going to menus or toolbars, mouse gestures control everything.

Want to try it?

Hmm never thought I’d say this, but I don’t like the latest versions of Photoshop, CS4.

Lets start out positive and list the few things I do like:

Rotate canvas. This has been on my wishlist for ages.
Spring loaded tools. The ability to switch to another tool while holding the tool shortcut down, and then when you release, you are back to the previous tool is awesome, well done.

That’s about it, now for what I don’t like:

Many images on the net, especially photos will not display as intended using the photos color profile (If any) in non-color managed browsers.

Firefox 3 has support for color management, but it’s turned off by default and the only way to turn it on is to use about:config

Bloom is a popular effect, used a lot in computer games to cover up boring areas. The effect is a simulation of bright light flooding a camera lens creating blurred washed out areas. Used well, bloom can be a very powerful effect, especially for landscape or interior photos

So here’s the first entry in my new category: Shitty Pay Plugins – OnOne FocalPoint.

This plugin is supposed to simulate lens blur. I wonder if they have ever seen real lens blur because this ain’t it.

To simulate lense blur (I’m not saying that other word, lalala not even thinking it) there has to be aparture blade shaped highlights placed where the speculars in the photo are. FocalPoint does nothing like that, even the Photoshop built in Lens blur filter does a better job at that.

Basically what the plugin does is apply something that looks like gausian blur smeared over the image making it look like a bad photoshop job. You can move and resize a masked feathered area around and that’s about it, 159 samolians please.. Not.

What I also can’t grasp, is that I decided to try the plugin after reading many reviews from photographer communities, all overly positive and raving about it, and the reviewers photos with FP applied looked like ass, picure someone drawing a blurred cicle mask then applying gausian blur to the photo, yay PRO.. wtf?

If you can draw an eliptical mask on a smart object layer in Photoshop you have what this plugin can do. On top of being expensive and being bad at what it does, focalpoint also needs license manager services installed like it was a 2K$ CAD program or something.

Use a standard serial, drop the price to 49$ and maybe it’s worth it for doing the occasional vignette, 159$? Hell no.

I’ve read an awfull lot of books about photoshop, and watched an awfull lot of training series over the years, and most have been awfull, but there’s a few that will always stand out as exelent and must haves.

I love shortcuts, you could say I was fanatical about them. The only thing I use my Mouse/pen for in Photoshop for is editing, everything else is keyboard shortcuts and I know them all like the back of my hand.

Not everyone likes to use shortcuts, in fact some hate them, tis ok, everyone’s different.

But there’s a few shortcuts that are just flat out stupid not to learn.

Smart collections is an awesome feature of Lightroom that I use the heck out of to help me stay organized. There are so many things you can do with smart collections so if you haven’t digged into them yet you are missing out bigtime.

Here’s one for the newbies.. How to create rounded corners, hey we all started somewhere.

New photoshop users are stumped by this, there’s no way to create rounded shapes, where’s the rounded corners tool? Well, there is none, this is photoshop not Corel Draw.

I do a lot of organizing into folders in Lightroom because I sometimes need to view images outside of Lightroom so having a nice hierachy is an advantage.

If you want to do the same but are wondering how here’s how to change foldernames and add folders and subfolders in Lightroom:

By default Lightroom will show you images in subfolders even when you have selected the top folder in a hierachy. This wreaks havoc if you like me, like to import a bunch of photos from a flashcard, then organize them into subfolders. I do this because I sometimes want to browse images outside Lightroom, then having a nice hierachy comes in handy.

When Lightroom then shows all images in subfolders it becomes impossible to know what photos has allready been moved when locating them from the top folder, which shows you all the photos in the subfolders.. arghhh.

Finally found a way around this, it’s a bit hidden and I personally think this should be done from Lightrooms preferences dialog somewhere, not hidden in some submenu. Anyways…

Go to File/Library filters, then uncheck “Include photos from subfolders”

Tadaaaa!

While you can get a long way in proper positioning of your lights to minimize highlights, sometimes it’s just much faster to retouch them in post. What would you rather do? Spend ages messing with stands and gobos and moving lights around, or, spend 5 minutes in photoshop to tame them down? Sometimes it’s just about impossible to not reflect your lights in the product, for example when it’s round or very curvy.

Still using image/canvas size to resize your images?

The canvas size dialog is fine if you know the exact dimensions, but what if you want to recompose an image and want to visualize your resizing?

Enter the photoshop crop tool.

First make sure you change the background layer to a normal layer, just hold down the ALT key and doubleclick the layer, voila.

Now hit C to get your crop tool out and drag over the whole image. Click on the “Clear” to clear all dimension restrictions.

Now simply drag the corners of your image to get the size you want and hit enter when done. Your original image is left untouched, photoshop just adds move pixels around the original so no pixel is harmed.

Here’s another couple things I find irritating as I get more and more into using Lightroom:

The film strip.

It’s great for navigating in the various modules, but why the hell does it not understand selections properly? Try to select a couple photos and hit delete, it will only ask if you want to delete the first selected photo, not all the selected photos. Same with just about anything else you’d do to some selected images in the filmstrip.

Why can’t I set delete to not nag me if I’m realy realy sure every damn time? And why is “remove from catalog” the default? When I delete something I want to delete it, not just make it invisible so it still rapes my harddrive space.

Collections.

Collections would be super, but since I allways select my keepers first, then move them into a collection to work on developing them to my liking collections are pretty useless. Why? Because they follow you in all modules EXCEPT develop. WTF?

Viewing Folders

Why does Lightroom show me all photos in subfolders below the currently selected folder?

You import a bunch of images into Lightroom, say in a folder named “Product Photos” Now you create some subfolders to put various categories of images into. For this example, say I have some perfume bottles I shot and some Deoderant cans. I grab the perfume bottle images and drag them into the subfolder named “Perfume”. Now I go back to the top folder and the perfume bottles are still there because Lightroom shows me everything in subfolders below. How do I know if I Missed dragging a couple perfume bottle shots into the correct subfolder?

Also, can we PLEASE have filters be sticky to the folder they were applied to?

All these folder viewing problems is because Lightroom tries to hard to cater to unorganized people that just wants to have everything in the original underlying folder stucture be a mess they don’t worry about, and then “tag” photos and put them into collections.

Mouse hovering

Please don’t change the displayed path of the currently selected image when I hover over another thumbnail, causing me to think I selected the wrong image. Example: I have selected photo1-edit.psd which is the one displayed, but I accidentally move my mouse over the image next to it in the filmstrip, causing the mouseover to show the current photos path as photo1.cr2 so I think I’m working on the wrong one, it’s bloody annoying.

Keywords, collections and filters.

Why can’t I use these things all together, but only one or the other? Many times I want to show for example all images in the currently selected folder with the keyword “skies”, but not the rejected ones, and only the one in the currently selected folder or collection, but Lightroom insists on just showing me everything with that keyword since you can’t drill down with keywords, folders and filters all at once. I don’t need to see all the images with the keyword “skies”, only the keepers and not the rejected ones.

Let’s get one thing straight. Lightroom does NOT backup your photos when you do the scheduled backups, only the Lightroom database, thumbnails, develop changes and so on. You have to backup your photos yourself.

The easiest way to backup your photos in Adobe Lightroom is to use the Export function.

You may have come across photos that looks allmost like a 3D rendering, model and fasion photos, or product photos that look so smooth as to be allmost CG generated.

This is done by skillfull retouchers using dodge and burn in Photoshop. Basically you have to learn about light and shadow and how they shape an image. For example wrinkles in skin, if you zoom all the way in to a single wrinkle you will notice that it’s nothing but shadow and light. Dodge the shadow part and burn the light part of the wrinkle and it will dissapear like magic, but it’s just manipulation of shadow and light.

This technique requires the photoshop plugin Nik Color EFX Pro, a bit spendy but this plugin is massive and contains a closely guarded secret tool that can create images that looks insanely sharp with no haloing or other artifacts.

So you’r working in Lightroom, and when you export to photoshop you get a bad color cast? (Or the other way around, open photoshop psd in lightroom=cast)

Here’s a new one that’s gonna come in handy, you can mirror the photoshop clone tool.

When doing drawing intensive work in photoshop it would be great if you could rotate the canvas to get a less awkvard drawing orientation. Unfortunately Photoshop CS3 doesn’t have this feature.

But we can fake rotating canvas pretty well with a little trick.

When you crop in Lightrooms Develop module, normally you get a grid layout. But the much more usefull Rule of Thirds, Golden Ratio, Golden Triangle, and Golden Spiral are just a keyboard click away.

To flick through the Crop Overlay modes, first hit the crop button in the develop module. Then hit the O key on your keyboard to flick through the modes.

You can also hit Shft+O the change the orientation of the various modes to fit the orientation of your image.

Happy cropping.

In Photoshop there’s many ways to dodge and burn, layer copies set to lighten and darken, gray layer set to overlay, dodge and burn directly on a copy of the original etc..

However, when you are working on large images, for example medium format RAWs every layer you jump eats HUGE amounts of ram, when you start with a 45MB original you realy want to keep the number of layers down to a minimum.

Sometimes for unknown reasons my Wacom Intuos tablet driver dies and says I need to reboot my system. Well that sucks so here’s another way to get it up and running again.

Go to control panel and select administrative tools, then services. Somewhere in the list of services is the TabletWacom service. Double click on that item and select stop, ignore any errors. Then restart the service and voila, the tablet driver works again without needing to reboot.

I wish bodily harm on the creators of these sites that appends “review” on all thier crappy product page titles and spams google with it. Everytime I do some reasearch before buying something I have to wade through endless amounts of pages making it a pain in the ass to find some honest non-bought reviews from real people.

It only hurts them, I have crafted a simple google shortcut that filters out any site with the words “customer” “shop” “shopping” “store” etc… in the URL and use that exclusively now, so I never ever see these sites.

Here’s the search string to enter in google:

keywords here -cheap -price -buy -prices -shop -shopping -compare -inurl:shop -inurl:shopping -inurl:customer -inurl:compare -inurl:shipping -inurl:store

This cleans the search results allmost completely of crappy shopping sites that sticks fake keywords in thier product pages. If you use Opera you can add this as a default search in the seaching dropdown by going to preferences and entering this string:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&rls=en&hs=1Xh&q=%s -cheap -price -buy -prices -shop -shopping -compare -inurl:shop -inurl:shopping -inurl:customer -inurl:compare -inurl:shipping&btnG=Search

You can also enter this string into the address bar of your browser

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&rls=en&hs=1Xh&q=keywords -cheap -price -buy -prices -shop -shopping -compare -inurl:shop -inurl:shopping -inurl:customer -inurl:compare -inurl:shipping&btnG=Search

Drag the page as a bookmark and use it when you search, just replace keywords with whatever you search for and leave the rest alone.

It’s just redicoulous that I have to go to these lengths to avoid the garbage.

You have probably seen this effect on sports shots, wrestling, boxing etc.. it gives a gritty bronze glow to the skin, almost makes people look like video game characters.

This is done by perfect control over what’s called Local Contrast.

The new Lightroom 2.0 is a wonderfull Photo Manager but there’s just a few things that breaks the deal for me.

The real showstopper is how slow it is. I don’t buy into Adobe fanboys story about it being so complex and just accept it. I have acdsee pro 2.5 and it blows the pants of Lightroom and can do just about the same things.

If you do not white balance the photos you take, there’s a very good chance that your photos will have an unnatural color cast. Most cameras has auto white balance but rarely will it get it right and the worst part is that if you shoot with auto white balance every photo you take will have slightly different casts.

Ever had annoying colored edges that you wanted to get rid of? For example after doing channel masking there’s often a colored edge around transparent items like hair where the background lighting shines through. Another common annoyance is cromatic abberation where you have blue/yellow/magenta edges caused by the rgb channels not lining up correctly.

So you tried the pen tool and whenever you change directions it goes haywire on you and creates a stupid curve or loops around creating a circle and argggh, fuck it.

There’s a trick to the pen tool you see.

In RGB, which is the color space that your monitor is also running in, the lightest any color channel can be is 255, when all 3 channels R G and B is at 255 we get white, and that’s as far as you can go.

In LAB however we have luminance (The L channel) split from the color channels (A and B) and LAB is device independant so you can have an image with an L value of 100 (Max) AND have positive values in the A and B channels which in RGB would mean values above 255. This is not possible to show on a RGB device such as your monitor, but photoshop tries anyway to map these impossible colors to something that looks alright, and that’s a great thing.

There’s a filter for fixing camera shake in photoshop (Smart sharpen) but there’s a better way.. emboss. Sounds crazy but it works great.