Photoshop

Unless you’re fortunate enough to live near a Trader Joe’s, affordable greeting cards are hard to come by. If you no longer enjoy paying $6 or more for a greeting card, you can use your Mac to create a unique and personalized card that your loved ones will cherish. In this column, you’ll learn to create a simple yet classy Valentine cards using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (nearly any version of these apps will work). To keep it budget-friendly, we’ll use standard size paper and then fold it.

My book The Skinny on Holiday Photo Gifts is now available on Apple's iBooks Store, as well as in PDF and EPUB format! Click here for sample pages, a detailed description, or to buy the book.

’Tis the season to print your photography, whether it’s a picture you’ll frame, a greeting card, or a calendar, book or other photo-related project you’ll order online. Since it’s challenging (if not impossible) to print some of this stuff at home, it’s best to leave the printing to pros such as Apple (using iPhoto or the Photos app), services such as mpix.com, your local camera store, or even Costco.

XChange posted another 22 of my favorite Photoshop tips, along with helpful illustrations. These are just some of the real-world tips and techniques from my Photoshop video trainings and Photoshop books. Enjoy the tips here. For the past 23 years XChange US and XChange UK have been our go-to sources for information and products that improve efficiency. Whether you work with color, design, multimedia, or print and publishing, they're happy to help you find the ideal product or solution for your particular need.

Make memorable and personalized gifts using your own photos! This step-by-step $5.99 book helps you create myriad gifts such as Pillows, Tote bags, Purses, Magnets & stickers, Canvas prints, Skins for laptops and portable devices, Postage stamps, Mugs, Keychains, Playing cards, Tree ornaments, Dry-erase calendars, Notepads, and Wine and beer bottle labels. You’ll also learn how to create spectacular cards and personalized calendars in Apple’s Photos for Mac and iPhoto. Then, you’ll learn step-by-step instructions for creating unique, do-it-yourself projects such as photo napkin rings, photo gift tags and wooden photo cubes. Along the way, you’ll also learn many valuable tips for improving the overall look of your projects, including: adjusting the color of your photos so they harmonize together, how to save your files for successful printing, the best ways to add text to photos, how to remove color from parts of your photo, and unusually impressive card designs.

XChange posted another 22 of my favorite Photoshop tips, along with helpful illustrations. These are just some of the real-world tips and techniques from my Photoshop video trainings and Photoshop books. Enjoy the tips here. For the past 23 years XChange US and XChange UK have been our go-to sources for information and products that improve efficiency. Whether you work with color, design, multimedia, or print and publishing, they're happy to help you find the ideal product or solution for your particular need.

Sitting quietly in the Tools panel of the popular image editors Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Pixelmator, is the Gradient tool, a wonderfully useful painting tool that lets you create a soft, gradual transition from one color to another (or several). But besides using the tool to add color to your designs, you can use it inside a layer mask (referred to as a gradient mask). By setting the two colors of the gradient to black and white—to conceal and reveal, respectively—the tool lets you fade layer content in interesting ways.

XChange posted another 22 of my favorite Photoshop tips, along with helpful illustrations. These are just some of the real-world tips and techniques from my Photoshop video trainings and Photoshop books. Enjoy the tips here. For the past 23 years XChange US and XChange UK have been our go-to sources for information and products that improve efficiency. Whether you work with color, design, multimedia, or print and publishing, they're happy to help you find the ideal product or solution for your particular need.

When it comes to removing objects in your pictures, nothing (yet) beats the power of Adobe Photoshop CC. If you’ve got plenty of background pixels surrounding the thing you want to zap, you can quickly send it packin’ with the Fill command’s Content-Aware option. But what if you need to use another area of your photo for the fix instead of surrounding pixels? That’s where the Patch tool shines. In this column, you’ll learn how to use both options safely, without destroying your original image.