Photoshop

Thanks to a reader's email, I thought we'd embark on a little journey to the past. In this week's tutorial, I'm going to show you a multitude of ways you can use Photoshop to completely destroy a photo, making it look like it was taken 50 years ago.

NOTE: A Texas-sized thank you to Marcus Conge for helping me with this tutorial!

What's the easiest way to emphasize a particular bit of your image? Make it black and white with just a bit 'o color. Though it may sound complicated, it's much easier than you imagine. All it takes is a color image, a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, and the History Brush.

Of course, there are a gazillion ways to go about doing the same thing in Photoshop, though I hope the method I’m about to show you proves to be the most user friendly and non-destructive :)

How many times has it happened to you? You find the perfect image for that newsletter, web site, brochure or what have you, and DANG, if only it were a little bit bigger! Arg. If the graphic had been created in Illustrator (an .eps, see NOTE below), enlarging it sans quality loss would be a snap. Alas, our beloved image is made of fragile little pixels (meaning it's a .jpg, .tif, or .gif) meaning we must use pixel-based image manipulation software such as Photoshop or Elements.

We’re all aware of how important it is to create thumbnails of larger images so that our web pages load nice and fast. This is especially important of photo galleries. What we may not be aware of, however, is that just a little tender loving care can really make those thumbnails enticing, and encourage visitors to take the extra step of clicking to get the larger version. I’m going to share with you three ways to create better, classier thumbnails.

Sure it sounds straightforward enough, this whole business of using Save for Web in Photoshop to compress your beautiful artwork. No problemo, just JPEG that bad boy for all the Internet to see and you'll be set. But wait! In order to get a small file size you're going to have to sacrifice valuable pixel data resulting in quality loss. If you're not careful, your beloved art can get trashed in wretched ways during the compression process when Photoshop starts tossing out pixels here and there.

Canvas size got you down? Feeling cramped and closed-in? Just follow these steps and you may never trek up to the Image menu and Canvas Size dialog box again.

It only takes a few seconds to crop your images, so as to better focus on the subject matter and eliminate unwanted bits (besides, it's fun to chop things up!). Focus on the subject matter, and get in as close as you can. This not only makes the image look better, but it reduces the file size as well, and everybody appreciates that ;)

Cropping to a specific size

Are you tired of hard edges? Do you long for a softer world? Perhaps this softening technique is just what you need. It's super easy to do in both Photoshop and Elements. It's also extremely flexible; you can use any shaped selection you want. We're going to be smart and do this with a layer mask so we can have big fun tweaking it :)

Another way to create cool edges for your images is by using Filters. We’re going to use Brushstrokes > Spatter in this example; but, for a truly fun evening, I advocate experimenting with all Filters... especially the artistic ones! We're also going to use layer masking so that we don't harm the image, and so that our drop shadow ends up as funky as our edges :)