Photoshop

When it comes to changing the color of an object, there’s an easy way and a hard way to get it done. The hard way involves creating a selection, as discussed in the node#169 tutorial. An easier way is to use a blend mode instead. Read on!

As the Great Kelby once taught me, anytime you can add a drop shadow, you should. Heck, if you’re a freelancer, adding a drop shadow means you can tack on an extra $50 to the job! Though when it comes to creating the aforementioned shadows, it’s important to remember that the classiest ones are rarely black—instead they pick up a color from your design. In the next few minutes, you’ll learn how to easily change your drop shadows to any color you want.

Let’s say you’ve been out shooting in the Texas plains and, once you’re parked back at your computer, you come across an oh-so-cute prairie dog mama and baby shot like this:

Fixing your photos, or giving them a shot of creativity, doesn't have to take hours. Below you'll find five of my favorite photo effects that take mere minutes!

Alas, it’s true that there’s no magic fixer-upper that can take an out-of-focus image and make it look like it’s really in focus. That is, except for the Emboss filter. Technically it’s not really fixing the image and making it sharp, it’s merely bringing out the edges that are already there, which makes the photo look sharper than it really is.

You don’t want to do this on professional images that you sell, of course, but if you’ve got one in your personal collection that needs saving, here’s how to do get it done:

Color is such an important part of your image, and happily Photoshop gives us many ways to intensify it so your picture pops right off the page.

In today's tutorial (yet another teaser from the forthcoming Photoshop: The Missing Manual--well, parts of it anyhow), you'll learn three distinct ways for creating more vibrant color in your image. And as a bonus, the first two methods also work in Photoshop Elements. Read on!

You’ve probably learned the hard way that sharpening an image that contains noise or grain means that the noise and grain gets sharpened too. Instead of making the photo look better, it ends up looking ten times worse than it did. Bummer!

Welcome to part "I have no frackin' idea" of the "Photoshop: The Missing Manual" teaser series. In the super wee hours of the morn I finished up yet another chapter on Photoshopping people (yay!). Culled from its depths is a real treat which I'm happy to say works exactly the same in Photoshop Elements as well. Whee!

Layer styles are great for adding finishing touches to your designs and they can really make text and graphical elements pop off your page. They’re also extremely flexible—they change as your layer content changes, they’re fully editable, savable, and so on. Since they appear on their own layer, they’re nondestructive and when you edit the content of your layer, the style updates automatically.

Welcome to part 3 of the Photoshop: The Missing Maual Teaser series. Since I've been going back and forth with my editor getting the typography chapter in tip-top shape, I have yet another text tutorial for you. Unfortunately there's no equivalent in Elements, so this one is for Photoshop only.

There are a multitude of special effects that can be created with type that has been converted into a vector shape or path. Though the text becomes uneditable, the former type layer is morphed into a living, breathing, and resizable, distortable piece of art or editable path.