Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category:
Photoshop Tricks for Beginners
Selecting Colors From An Image Quickly Press I to activate the Eyedropper Tool and then click on any color in your image to turn that color into the foreground color. Press the ALT Key and click on any color in your image to turn that color into the background color.
Change Brush Tip Sizes Quickly If you wish to change your brush tip size you can, with any brush selected, press the Right Bracket Key “]” in order to increase the size of the brush tip, or you can press the Left Bracket Key “[” to decrease the size of the brush tip.
The Move Tool & the Arrow Keys Getting in the habit of activating the Move Tool through the keyboard is a timesaver; you can do this using the shortcut, “V”. Once you have the Move Tool activated you can use the keyboard arrow keys to push a layer or selection in 1 pixel increments. You can speed things up by pressing the Shift key along with the arrow key to nudge in 10 pixel increments.
Hide Your Palettes To hide all your visible palettes you can press the tab key. You can bring them all back again by once again pressing the Tab key. To hide all visible palettes with the exception of the toolbar press Shift+Tab.
Zooming In & Zooming Out You can zoom in on your image by pressing CTRL and the plus sign “+” (Mac: Command and the “+” sign). Conversely you can zoom out by pressing CTRL and the minus sign “-” (Mac: Command and the “-”sign).
Navigating In Magnified Images If you have lost your bearings when zooming in on a large image you can jump quickly to specific views using the following shortcuts: To set the view to the top left hand corner of your image press the Home Key. Press the End Key to set the view to the bottom right hand corner of your image. To move the view one full screen down press the Page Down Key. Press CTRL+Page Down (Mac: Command +Page Down) to move the screen view one full screen to the right. Press CTRL+Page Up (Mac: Command +Page Up) to move the screen view one full screen to the left.
Selecting Just the Pixels in a Layer One easy way to highlight an object that is contained on a transparent layer is to press the Control Key (Mac: Command key) and then click on the layer that contains the object in the Layers Palette. Doing it this way ensures that only the visible pixels will be highlighted.
Tile Images For Better Visibility When you open many files at once Photoshop has them cascade, and the overlapping files can make it difficult to select individual ones. To get around this choose Window> Arrange> Tile and all of your open files will rearrange themselves to be visible all at once. When you’re ready to close them all don’t spend time closing them individually, instead use the Close All shortcut Command+Alt+W (PC: Control+Option+W).
Getting Rid Of the Welcome Screen - And Bringing It Back When you first open Photoshop CS you will probably see a Welcome Screen that has links to Tutorials, Tips and Tricks, and a set of Color Management Help Files. At some point you might want to stop this screen from coming up. You should see a check box at the bottom of the screen that you can click to hide the screen at startup. Later on, if you change your mind and decide that you want to have it show up again, you can temporarily bring the screen back by clicking under the Help menu and choosing Welcome Screen.
Cycle through All of Your Open Documents At some point you may want to find one of your open documents that are hidden on your toolbar. You can easily press Control-Tab repeatedly (MAC and PC) to cycle through all of your open documents and switch between them.
The Best Graphic Designer You’ve Never Heard Of
Ever found out about someone or something that you know is going to be huge but you find it just ahead of the rest of the us? Well I know of one and he’s just waiting for the world to notice. I know with such absolute certainty that he is going to be the designer of such cutting edge art that I need to tell the world about him, I feel that if you are someone who appreciates art and can handle people pushing the limits of art that you will be in awe of his work. My opinion is that the great artists always create art that is unapologetic and uncompromising. This great artist is Kaalum Ross aka. Rob Church.
When I first discovered his work I was blow away by the depth of symbolism in his work as I am very interested in symbols because they keep coming up in the greatest works in history. Take Michelangelo or Da Vinci and their great works. They’re just full of symbols and they truly are the unconscious power that gets us in our guts. Rob/Kaalum’s work has this deep meaning and he does it without trying, it’s as if he’s so in touch that he can’t create anything that isn’t deeply powerful. Of course he is also very uncompromising in his critics of various institutions and society’s ideas.
It’s in this honest and unapologetic visions of our world that Rob/Kaalum works hold such great value, this is something we need in the world more now than ever before. Our world is upside down, doctors destroy health, educations completely destroy learning and so on. We need people to wake us up from our deathly slumber in order for us to stop walking to our deaths without ever questioning why we suffer so.
Two themes of Rob/Kaalums works are women and the Christian Church, these two intense hot topics are ones that absolutely need more open discussion and critics. Women of course are still used as sexual symbols more than any other vehicle for subversive advertising. This destroys their important and needed roles other than the sex kitten or vamp, Rob/Kaalum makes sure you question your unconscious attraction to any female image. The other theme (amongst many) that he really gets into is the Christian Church. This is such an important thing to question that it almost is unparalleled in it’s importance.
One needs to only look at the major historical events of the “holy church” and it becomes obvious that it has deep well of blood on it’s hands. If you don’t believe me just look at the Inquisition or the witches hammer or maybe the recent Native residential schools with their 50-60% death rates. Any artist brave enough to thoughtfully expose the dark side of our religious institutions is a splash of cold clear water to our hazy vision of the world.
In the end the basic thing to know is that there is an unknown brilliant artist just on the verge of exposing to the world his great and uncompromising visions and if you want to a part of this then you can contact him at the link below. I already know what going to happen and that I am very lucky to have known him before the world does. So if your looking for some amazing art and are willing to be open to the most honest visions you can get then you need to contact him before the line gets so long that you can’t.