Photoshop

The next iteration of its Creative Suite will not only feature new features, but it will also be rewritten in Cocoa for 64-bit native support. This will give us another good reason to upgrade to Snow Leopard when CS5 comes out. Unfortunately it will only run on Intel machines.

Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone provides users a simple way to view photos with full-screen previews and edit images with gesture-based editing. You can transform your photos with basic editing tools like crop, rotate and flip; as well as adjust color with saturation and tint tools, enhance exposure and vibrancy and convert images to black and white.

You can read more about it here.

While I can't say that there's a huge desire by any designer to do photo editing for client work on their iPhone or iPod Touch, it's nice to see even basic editing arrive on our favorite Apple pocket device!

Download here: http://mobile.photoshop.com/iphone/

Sometimes you may want to look at you artwork at different angles. In fact many designers prefer looking at their designs upside down to find mistakes or ideas for further improvement.

You can do this virtually in Photoshop without affecting the pixel information in your image.

Click and hold the Hand Tool, it will open up an option called Rotate View Tool. Now you can rotate your image to any degree. If you use an Apple laptop you can use the rotate gesture to freely rotate the image around as well.

Adapted from Photoshop CS4: Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks (Wiley Publishing)
By Lynette Kent
Dateline: August 17, 2009
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

You can paste one image onto another and blend the pasted image into the Background layer by changing the blend mode. The layer blending modes control how the colors in the top image combine with the pixels in the underlying image. They do not affect the texture of either image. To make the top image blend into the texture of the base image and make the final image appear more realistic, you can use the Distort filter and a special file called a displacement map.

Adapted from Printing with Adobe Photoshop CS4 (Focal Press)
By Tim Daly
Dateline: August 12, 2009
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Toning

Historically, photographic print toning has used chemical toners like sepia and selenium to make prints with fairly limited colors ranging from brown to purple-reds. With the digital process, however, there are many more color options available together with a near Zone System level of control. For the fainthearted, this digital route is also reversible, so there’s no danger of ruining your perfectly good image file. Subtlety, if you want it, is there in bundles, with no need to produce intimidating Colorvir-like prints, unless hallucinogenic effects are your thing. Digital coloring in CS4 means you can have infinite control over the toning process adding color across the whole image or dropping it in up to ten different tonal sectors. Following is a number of different routes to image toning, starting with the easiest and ending with the more interesting Duotone techniques.

We've discussed techniques for enlarging images before using Photoshop commands. Re-sizer is an action pack that uses a series of such commands as an action pre-packed for you to achieve the best possible result.

Have you ever had a problem like the the picture above in InDesign?

All those red zones are above 300% inkt percentage.

So you need to change those percentages, there are a lot of ways of doing it, with profiles and so on...

I found an interesting way in Photoshop. Here it is...

Check out the video podcast about:

• Your free Photoshop website
• Camera phone support
• New Lightroom features
• CS4 performance improvements — demoing a 2GB image in Photoshop
• More integration between applications
• Amazing Photoshop 3D capabilities
• Intelligent image scaling
• 3D red-green glasses and lenticular support
• Drag and resize brush resize
• Creating custom interface panels
• Wicked fast filters

I noticed so many of us use the trackpad as the primary input device.

I though it would be interesting to check out what trackpad gestures can you use in Photoshop. Here is what I found out:

1. Hold the Alt (Option) key and double finger track to zoom within the document in and out.
2. Hold the Apple (Cmd) key and zoom in and out your entire screen. Useful when you want to show something to a friend across the room.
3. Double tap and hold to start making a selection. Once you're happy with the size just release the trackpad and your selection becomes active after a second.
4. Tap with two fingers results in a CTRL-click or right mouse button click.
5. Double finger tracking allows you to scroll and pan within your document.

Unfortunately none of the cool stuff that works in OSX standard apps, such as the rotation with two finders, switching between active pages with three finger swipe or zooming by pinching works in Photoshop.

Ideally Apple should allow us to customize what we want each gesture to mean and we should be able to add new custom gestures too.

For example we could add a lot of Photoshop menu shortcuts as three finger gestures. Each new gesture would be drawn with three fingers and the shape would remind the first letter of the menu item. For example:

• Down and right: Levels
• Up, circle and bottom right: Refine edges
• S shape: Save
• Circle: Open, etc.
• Three finger horizontal swipe: Change between document
• Three finger double tap: Exposé application windows
• Three finger triple tap: Exposé all windows
• Finally when you would tap repeatedly on the trackpad with three fingers it would bring up a random stimulating screensaver that will help generate new ideas.

When I post tutorials at The Graphic Mac, I look for a few things. First, it must be somewhat simple to achieve the desired effect. I also look for how detailed the tutorial is in describing the steps necessary to achieve the effect. And finally, I try to decide if anyone would actually want or need to achieve those effects for day-to-day work. When I came across this tutorial, I was skeptical as to how detailed it would be, and how easy it would be to repeat the outcome. Well worry not.

Photoshop Roadmap has nailed it with this tutorial titled Realistic Chrome and Glossy Plastic Text Effect. The tutorial is both simple and detailed, requiring no special filters and only a simple download of a small preset file (if you want to avoid any guess work). Most of the heavy lifting is done using Photoshop layer effects such as drop shadow, inner shadow, and bevels. And the effect isn't so "out there" that I couldn't see using it for real design work.