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NathanPresley

NathanPresley

Well-known member
Photoshop is an amazing program with a endless amount of possibilities.
many people have created there own great techniques.

as artist we are all looking to find new ways to express our art and let's
just be honest to make stuff look cool.

"Please post one your favorite techniques or methods that you use in Photoshop"
 
I'll start

I don't know the name for this, so we will just call it

"The High Pass Effect"

1. duplicate the picture
2. select top picture
3. go up and click on "filter"
4. go down the filters to "other"
5. select "high pass"
(it will be gray/weird)
6. slide the # bar to around "10"
( go to the thing that holds your layers)
(if you look to the top left area right under the word layers you will see a thing that
says "normal")
7. click on that and scroll down to the "hard light" (select)

try it on "soft light" too

this give your picture a "sharper more animated look"

(keep messing with this. you'll learn to love it)
 
HERE'S A EXAMPLE OF "The High Pass Effect"

highpasseffect.jpg
 
hmm, let me invent a couple tonight. :) Everything I do has to do with getting the perfect photo out of not so good photos. I'm as of lately, going through 25,000 photos on 1 of my hard drives and doing lots of this fixing. Wish I had been working in Raw files for the past 10 years.
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I was just trying to explain it to myself?!
I like to use threshold and set 2 targets for color levels using curves.
1.control j to copy background
2.open adjustment layer and choose threshold
3.adjust the slider all the way right to find only smallest areas of white left
4.goto the eyedropper tool and select the color sampler and select a white are in your adjustment layer
5. do the same thing but adjust the threshold slider to the left finding the smallest bit of black
6.After you have a selecting point for the blackest black and the whitest white then drag the threshold to the trash can button
7.then open curves and select the eyedropper tool for black and click the black target already on the photo and do the same with the white eyedropper on the white target.

Usually that is really close but I always play around with the selection areas just to find the best look and sometimes adjust the curves line.
 
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heres my method, hardly orignal but i love it.

Play with levels, and brightness and contrast settings. Over do it, go darker than you would normally want but not really really crazy (though that can work sometimes) then when you have a nice saturated picture flatten the layers (if you have to) and duplicate the image. The top one use a blur, gaussian blur but put the gaussian blur wayyyy up so you can not distinguish the image clearly. Then slide the opacity of the top layer down to give it a nice glow which cuts out the crazy saturation etc...

Put a layer mask on the top layer and remove the effect from any areas you want really sharp.

I'll try and post examples later. And when i have more than 5 minutes to type something i'll post another idea i play with.
 
I always liked the little "Select Highlights" by degrees hotkey trick.

Open any picture in photoshop

Hold down ctrl+alt+ ( 1,2,3 )
Each number you pic selects different degrees of your highlights
Ctrl+Alt+1 is the pics up the most Highlights
Ctrl+Alt+3 picks up the least. ` and 3 are similar in how much they pick up.
So do one, and a selection apears.
Copy, and then Paste, creating a new layer, and then make a new layer, fill it with black, and pull it under your "highlights" layer you pasted to. You'll see what I mean.

I'ts neat, and it's a nice way to add glows to sparkles in glass or water, candles or firelight, that kinda thing. You just blur to the amount you want, creating the halos. you can set to screen or linear dodge, but since it's only highlihts that have been copied, you sometimes can leave as is.



Here's an example:

Original, Highlights selected (Ctrl+Alt+2) on black background, Highlights with blur of 5 back on original

tree.jpg
 
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Man, I've been living in photoshop since version two... it came on floppies...

Not really a "technique", but the best advice I can give: get a wacom tablet! And a kensington track ball. The kensington rules... c'mon, you're moving your FINGERTIPS instead of your forearm... you can shoot across two monitors with one flick (they sense acceleration, and it's adjustable). And you don't need a "clean" spot on your desk for a mouse to operate in. You'll never go back.

I'm a masking freak:

Learn to use the pen tool for selections... with a pen, you can fly through points, and subtly 'drag' the pen to get curved points. You can make accurate paths with amazing speed.

Whenever you turn a pen-path into a selection, hop into quickmask and give it a .5 pixel gaussian blur... really makes it more "real".

When you have a tough selection to make (say, leaves in front of sky) look at each channel; often one color channel will have large areas "already alpha'd"... it may be dark vs. light grays instead of black & white, but dupe the channel and use levels or curves. I've made tough selections of things like hair by building them with chunks from each channel, some paths, and some hand-painting.

When you float or paste an object into a scene, and you want to kill fringes of color, try this.... select the floated object (command-click on its layer) and click the layer mask button. Gaussian blur the layer mask only (depending on file size, anywhere from .6 to a couple pixels). Then, use levels or curves to fine-tune the mask size; the blurred edges on the mask are just varying levels of gray... adjusting those levels will close or open the mask, while leaving the edges as soft as you'd like.

When you paint a repair into a scene, try adding a little noise if it looks too clean. Kai power tools used to include "Hue protected Noise", the greatest OS9 photoshop filter ever to disappear for OSx.

If you have to add a realistic shadow under an object, paint the shadow in quick mask with fairly hard edges; then use motion blur to start softening. Many shadows have several subtle but distinct edges... motion blur can give this look, depending on the angle set. Then soften things a bit with gaussian blur.

When you need a groovy abstract background, copy a tiny piece of hair, sky, grass, whatever from another photo and enlarge the crap out of it. Twist it, warp it, use the Wave filter, blur it, curve it, hue-saturation it. Choose a chunk of that and enlarge even more. Blur the daylights out of it to kill the pixelation. I once did an ad that was all over town, in print and billboards... the grungy funky background was my daughter's hair and part of her ear (well, it was once, and it was fun to point out to her).
 
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