Athenia Design

This is quite a good post from Oddee. It shows some examples of Photoshop mistakes where the user has not looked at the bigger picture. In one example a person has been "photoshopped" out of the picture but their hand has been left in place on the girls shoulder, whilst in another a basketball player seems to have lost his head. It can be easy to get caught up in Photoshop and forget about the overall look of what you are trying to achieve, let these examples be a warning.

I found this cool video showing some really interesting examples of what artists do in their spare time.

I had this picture of some poached pears which I wanted to post on one of my blogs. The only problem was the bowl looked a bit messy. To make it look a bit better I thought I would clean it up a bit in photoshop. This is where the clone stamp tool is really useful. First you need to select a brush size from the brushes menu. Then you need to select the area you want to clone. I chose a clean area of the blue bowl. Next press alt to define the cloning area. The tool will basically copy this area so you can clone it to other areas. Now simply click over the areas you want to clean, in this case the red stains on the bowl. I also cleaned up the left hand side of the bowl where you can see a small chip. On this area I selected a smaller brush and cloned part of the rim and table, before clicking over the area with the chip to correct it. If you like the look of the recipe, it will shortly be appearing on my personal blog.

My husband was doing some work in Photoshop the other day and wanted to accurately measure a point form the centre of the screen. The problem he had was that the ruler is automatically set to measure from the top left hand side of the document where you see the two rulers cross. If you want to measure from a different point, it works exactly the same as Quark. Just click on the point where the two rulers meet and then drag out until you reach the place you want your measurements to start. Then let go and the ruler origin will appear at that point as shown below.

It occurred to me today how useful I find the history palette in Photoshop. The history palette for anyone new to Photoshop, remembers everything you do. If you add a filter, a brush stroke or select something it will remember it. The good thing is if you then decide you want to remove a particular filter because you preferred the document without it, you can. Simply open the history palette and you can click to go back to any previous state and so discarding the recent changes.