Photoshop Brushes

Here are a few Photoshop brushes I’ve created for your use. Click on the image below to download.

Photoshop Brushes

Here are a couple of quick Photoshop splatter brushes for you to use in any way you like. Click on the image below to download.

Photoshop Selections

Part 3

Type

The Type tool contains a flyout showing a dotted ‘T’. With this tool active, when you type text in the dialog box and hit OK, instead of foreground colored text appearing on your image, the text appears as “marching ants”, or as an active selection ready for your command.

Magic Wand

The Magic Wand sees an image as composed of shades of gray (0-255), even though what you see may be in color. When we specify a number in the dialog box, we are really telling the magic wand how many values of grays to select. The higher the Tolerance number, the wider the range of values that will be selected.
To use the wand, just input a number into the Tolerance dialog box and click in the area to be selected. An contiguous area of color with all of the pixels within the Tolerance limit will be selected. If your selection isn’t quite right, you may have to adjust the Tolerance number up or down, or choose Select>Grow or Select>Similar.
Add non-contiguous areas to the selection by Shift-clicking. The Anti-aliased checkbox is used to select Anti-aliased images (blurred edges when viewed close up, a technique to smooth edges).
The Sample Merged checkbox tells Photoshop to use either all visible layers when making a selection, or only the active
layer.

Color Range

Color Range is very close to the magic wand in effect, but learning to use it is a little more tricky. Select>Color Range will bring up the preview window showing a grayscale version of your image. The Fuzziness slider can be thought of like the Tolerance number of the magic wand: it limits the range of colors selected.
But it will also select the color range sampled with the eyedropper, over the entire image, not just contiguous areas, very much like Select>Similar.
Selections created here are based on all visible layers, so unwanted layers need to be made temporarily invisible by turning off their “eye” in the layers palette. White areas in the preview window are selected and gray areas are partially selected.
To add or subtract a range of color in the selection, use either the + or – eyedroppers, or you can click and drag the plain eyedropper using Shift to add, or Option to subtract. Expanding your options even more, you can use the Fuzziness slider to fine-tune your selection, and you also have the choice of making your selection based on specific colors, or by value: Highlights, Midtones or Shadows.

Photoshop Brushes

Presenting eight Photoshop brushes for you to use any way you like. Click on the preview image below to download the zipped .abr file. I hope you find them useful.

Photoshop Brushes

Presenting ten Photoshop brushes for you to use any way you like. Click on the preview image below to download the zipped .abr file. I hope you find them useful.

Photoshop Selections

Part 2

Lasso

The Lasso tool is one of the ways we can make more intricate selections. There are actually 2 lasso tools: the freeform version and the polygon version. The flyout (hold down the mouse key over the tool) will show the version not currently in use.

The freeform lasso traces your selection as you hold the mouse button and drag around the outline of your selection. When the mouse button is released, the selection closes itself  using a direct line from the release point to the start point.

With the polygon lasso, best results are usually achieved with a series of mouse clicks, drawing the overall shape with a clicks and short lines.

Pen

The Pen tool comes with 5 options in the flyout: the basic pen, the selection arrow, add point pen, delete point pen and the convert point tool.

Vaguely similar to the lasso tools, the pen differs by drawing with points or nodes that have handles, creating Bezier curves which can be fine-tuned to create intricate curves later with the other pen tools or move tool as needed.

To draw a Bezier curve with the pen tool, click and drag the resulting handles to position the curve.

Reposition the node or control handles to modify the curve as needed using the Direct Selection tool, or change the curve node to a corner node with the Convert Node tool, by clicking the node once. Add nodes to a path or subtract them by clicking with the plus or minus versions of the pen.

Photoshop Selections

Part 1

Although it may not seem so at first glance, learning to use Photoshop is largely about making selections. Knowing how to choose just the part of the image that you need to work on at any given moment is central to understanding and using Photoshop to your best advantage.

Once you have defined your selection and isolated that portion of the image from the rest, all that is left to do is manipulate that selection to your satisfaction, whether by  cutting and pasting, colorizing, running a  filter or action on it, or whatever you like.

There are many different ways of making selections in Photoshop and since the images you work on will likely vary widely in lighting and contrast, and the portions you will need to select will also vary, having more than one method in your bag of tricks can come in very handy.

Nearly as important as making a selection, is saving it. Once you’ve spent 30 minutes or more defining a selection, you’ll quickly realize that saving your work will avoid a lot of headache when you need it later. Do you really want to  spend 30 minutes or more re-defining your selection, or would you rather just load it? We have more than one method for saving selections too.

Marquee

The most basic selection tools we have available are the square (or rectangular) and circle (or ellipse) marquees, bundled with the single column and single row marquee tools. Just activate the tool of your choice, hold down the mouse button and drag to lasso the area you want. Voilá, a selection we can work with. If you need a perfectly square or round selection, simply hold down the Shift key as you lasso.

These tools can also be ‘feathered’ so that the areas they define have soft edges. (Although your selection can be feathered after it is activated, not every selection tool can be feathered.
To feather an active selection, before you alter it: Select>Feather and set the feather radius.)

But what if your eye/hand coordination isn’t what it used to be, or it’s late, you’ve had one too many cups of java and now your selection is a wee bit off to the left, right, above or below where you need it?
No problem.

Once your selection is active, you can move all of the “marching ants” without moving the underlying image, just by using the marquee move tool.

With the marquee tool selected, place the cursor inside the “marching ants” and it will change to an open arrowhead above a dotted box. Then just hold down the mouse key and move the active selection to your heart’s content, or, use the arrow keys to nudge it into place, one pixel at a time.

What if you need to make a selection based on inches instead of pixels? The Marquee Options palette only allows pixels as a measurement. Again, no problem.

First make sure that your preferences show rulers in inches and that your image window is showing rulers. Then just drag guidelines into place, choose View>Snap To Guides and draw your selection from guide corner to guide corner.

But these basic selection tools alone are insufficient for most complicated, or odd-shaped areas. While holding down the Shift key and drawing overlapping circles or rectangles (or holding Option to subtract from a selection) can combine to create some complex selection shapes,  they are just not versatile enough for bumpy things like Dad, or the outline of your dog. For that type of object, we’ll need to have a bit more precise control.

Channels and Line Art

If you scan your inked cartoon and save it as a TIF, the scanned image is white to the edges, obscuring anything on the layers beneath. We need a method that will let us isolate the cartoon lines and place them on any background we choose. We could change the blending mode of the image layer to Multiply in order to let the lower layers show through the white, but deleting the white altogether allows us maximum freedom to manipulate the cartoon and extend our options for the final image.

Additionally, this workflow allows us to color the outlines of our cartoon to match the adjacent areas of color rather than being limited to just black outlines. I’ve included an example at right, where most of the outlines are a gradient of orange and red. Note the black outlines that I’ve left around the eyes.

Open your high resolution cartoon TIF and go to the Channels palette. You will see a single composite RGB channel and each of the Red, Green and Blue channels broken out into layers. Drag any one of the Red, Green or Blue channels to the new channel icon at the bottom of the palette to create a copy or Alpha Channel.

Switch back to the Layers palette and make a new, empty layer by clicking on the icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Then from the Select menu > Load Selection… . This will bring up a dialog box with a pull-down menu for our Source/Channel. Pull this menu down and select the new channel that you made earlier. In the same dialog box under Operation, make sure that the radio button for New Selection is pressed. Hit OK.

Back in the Layers palette in the new layer, you will see the ‘marching ants’ indicating an active selection. (If the marching ants are marching around the edges of your file window, your cartoon lines are not selected and you’ll need to go to menu Select > Inverse.)

Once you’ve made sure the marching ants indicate the outline of your cartoon, fill the selection with black. Now you should see just the lines of your cartoon with no white fill inside or out, and the checkerboard pattern, indicating transparent areas, should be visible behind the lines.

*If you are going to use color outlines, as shown in the bird’s head example at the beginning of this post, you’ll need to lock the transparency of the line art layer at this point.

Now that we have the line art isolated, we have no use for the black and white scanned layer anymore. Double click that layer to change it’s name to something other than Background which will unlock it and allow you to delete it.

Finishing your cartoon is now just a matter of creating a new layer to hold the color. Background elements can be placed on additional layers as needed and pulled to the bottom of the layers stack in the palette.

Coloring Cartoons with Channels

Another, slightly different method of coloring cartoons involves the use of channels. Channels have many, many uses and one of them is saving selections to avoid having to take the time to recreate them multiple times.

By using channels, I can save myself aggravation if it becomes necessary to go back at a later time to select and rework portions of the cartoon that have already been worked. The channels will help to quickly activate and isolate only the area of the cartoon that I want to change, and leave the rest of the cartoon untouched. If I have an area like a gradient fill, that isn’t as easily isolated after it’s been worked on, with a little prep work I can use channels.

Open the vector cartoon in Illustrator and select each individual white area and fill with a medium gray. (a quick way to select all of the white areas is to select one, then Select>Same> Fill color.)

I choose a light gray, usually 25% or so, that will be easy for Photoshop to distinguish from the black outline. If the gray value is too dark, I would have to fiddle with the tolerance settings of the Magic Wand to get the selection right and end up wasting time. So the right choice now saves time and money.

I save my EPS and open it in Photoshop at the size and resolution I need.

I then open the Channels palette and duplicate a channel to use as the assistant in making selections. I close the channels palette and go back to the layers to color the cartoon as I wrote HERE.

But now, if I need to reselect a certain area for re-coloring or additional work, I can open the channels palette, use the Magic Wand to select the area I want with the tolerance set high enough to select only the light gray.

I Select>Modify>Expand the selection by 1 pixel to insure that selected area will extend beyond the gray and into the solid black lines.

Then I move to the color layer; with the selection still active, I can change the color or rework the area however I want with ease. Keep in mind that if you move the cartoon or the channel once you begin, they will be out of alignment and your results will be less than optimum.

Always remember to save your cartoon as a .PSD file before any other format in order to preserve layers and channels intact!

Coloring Cartoons with Photoshop

The line art has been scanned and cleaned up, you’ve converted it to vectors and knocked out the holes with Illustrator, so now you’re ready to color your cartoon. Fire up Photoshop and open the EPS at the resolution and size you need for your project. Rule of thumb guidelines are 72 or 96 dpi for web use, 200 dpi for newspaper reproduction, 300 dpi or more for magazine printing.

The coloring method I describe here is a fairly straightforward technique, but certainly not the only one. I’ll pass along another, more time consuming, but very useful method in a later post.

Before we start actually coloring, we need to duplicate the line art layer to give us something to color on.

Lock the transparency of the duplicate layer, then fill with white. Now if we try to apply color to areas that are transparent and not part of the cartoon, no color will be applied, making this process a lot simpler. We will be able to use large brushes without concerning ourselves with ‘overspray’ of color into areas outside the image. But don’t grab the paint-brush just yet.

Select the Magic Wand with the Tolerance set to zero, and click in the white-filled cartoon area.

Then Select>Modify>Contract…and contract the selection by 1 or 2 pixels.

Then Select>Inverse and hit Delete. The object is to slightly shrink the area that will hold the color so that lighter colored pixels will not ‘halo’ around the edges when you place the cartoon on a background image. (Figs. 1 & 2)

The last step before coloring is to select the original line art layer and set the blending mode to Multiply. This allows us to see the color as we paint on the duplicate layer, with the ink lines unaffected.

Now grab your virtual paintbrush and pencil, make sure you have the duplicate layer active, and color to your heart’s content. I always start by adding the largest areas of base color first, and/or any complex gradients that might be awkward to confine at a later point.

Usually my last step is to add a layer between the color and line art layers, one for highlights and another for shadows, with the blending modes set to Overlay. Paint with black to add shadows and white to add highlights, but don’t forget to experiment with the layer opacity slider to get the look just right. Since they’re on a separate layers from the base color, you can play around all you like without worry of messing up all your original coloring.

Add backgrounds and additional elements on separate layers to give yourself as much versatility as possible in positioning and editing. Layers are your friend and safety net. By keeping elements on separate layers, you ensure that if you somehow make a mistake, it’s likely that only a small portion of your time and effort will be lost. Developing methods and habits that allow for mistakes to be easily corrected, or client changes to be made quickly will serve you well by saving you time, and a lot of headaches.

Finally, always remember to save your file in a layered PSD format before exporting!